The good, the bad, and the ugly of COP26: A conversation with two food sovereignty activists

2025-03-19 22:13:03 | Report | Contributor(s): Jessie MacInnis, Roz Corbett, Annette Desmarais | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i3.586

The 26th UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) COP (Conference of Parties) took place in Glasgow, Scotland in November 2021 amidst intersecting global crises. The rising number and intensity of unprecedented extreme weather events in many countries, increased knowledge about...

Momentum is building for a school food program for Canada

2025-03-19 22:13:03 | Essay | Contributor(s): Debbie Field, Carolyn Webb | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i3.618

We’re at a tipping point towards our goal of ensuring that all children and youth can access healthy food at school. With momentum building for a Canada-wide school food program, and with many provinces and territories making their own investments and developing programs, we have a collective...

Review of First we eat: Food sovereignty north of 60

2025-03-19 22:13:02 | Review | Contributor(s): Catherine Littlefield, Patricia Ballamingie | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i1.575

Suzanne Crocker’s 2020 film First we eat documents her and her family’s efforts to spend an entire year eating only food that can be grown, gathered, and hunted around Dawson City, Yukon, in the traditional territory of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in. Living 300 km south of the Arctic Circle, Crocker’s...

Hunger: How food shaped the course of the First World War

2025-03-19 22:13:02 | Review | Contributor(s): Laurie Wadsworth | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i1.579

Blom’s thesis for the book involved the impact food supply had on the outcome of WWI. Information presented focused on food security of civilians and armed forces across nations. Detailed coverage of food production, distribution, storage and consumption is a strength of the book. Blom...

Band-aid solutions: Small business owners’ perspectives on a sugar-sweetened beverage tax in Manitoba

2025-03-19 22:13:02 | Article | Contributor(s): Fareeha Quayyum, Andrea Bombak, Emma Robinson, Kelsey Mann, Krista Beck, Jeff LaPlante, Michael Champagne, Myra Tait, Riel Dubois, Natalie Riediger | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i1.554

This qualitative study explores perceptions of sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) taxation among small business owners/managers (n=7) in Manitoba, Canada through thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews. Most participants believed the tax would be ineffective; they predicted the majority of...

A livelihood to feel good about: Enacting values around animals, land, and food outside of the agricultural core

2025-03-19 22:13:01 | Article | Contributor(s): Elizabeh Finnis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i1.599

This paper presents and reflects on findings from ethnographic research conducted with small-scale farmers in the Parry Sound district, Ontario, Canada. The research highlights understandings of what it means to be a “good farmer” and explores how farmers enact their personal values and morals...

Barriers and supports to traditional food access in Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia)

2025-03-19 22:13:01 | Article | Contributor(s): Amy Grann, Liesel Carlsson, Kayla Mansfield-Brown | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i1.571

Canada is a signatory nation on international covenants, conventions, and declarations supporting the human right to food, but has not granted constitutional protection thereof. Failure to uphold the right to food contributes to unacceptably high levels of food insecurity that vary...

Characterizing the development and dissemination of dietary messaging in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, Northwest Territories

2025-03-19 22:13:01 | Article | Contributor(s): Julia Gyapay, Sonja Ostertag, Sonia Wesche, Brian Laird, Kelly Skinner | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i1.569

Public health communication about diet in Inuit communities must balance the benefits and risks associated with both country and store-bought food choices and processes to support Inuit well-being. An understanding of how dietary messages—public health communication addressing the health and...

“Eating is a hustle”: The complex realities of food in federal prison

2025-03-19 22:13:00 | Article | Contributor(s): Amanda Wilson, Julie Courchesne, Ghassan Zahran | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i1.607

Juxtaposing insights from the academic literature with those drawn from lived experience, this Perspective article explores the role of food in federal prisons in Canada. Highlighting its multiple meanings and uses, we underscore the complexity of food in prison as well as its fundamental...

“Dismantling the structures and sites that create unequal access to food:” : Paul Taylor and Elaine Power in conversation about food justice

2025-03-19 22:13:00 | Essay | Contributor(s): Paul Taylor, Elaine Power | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i1.567

In the summer of 2019, Elaine Power, Professor in the School of Kinesiology & Health Studies at Queen’s University, interviewed Paul Taylor for a research project on community food programs. Paul, a Black man, is the Executive Director of FoodShare Toronto and an anti-poverty activist. In...

Ethnic food practices, health, and cultural racism: Diabetes risk discourse among racialized immigrants in Canada

2025-03-19 22:13:00 | Essay | Contributor(s): Eric Ng | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i1.548

Type 2 diabetes is more prevalent among racialized immigrant groups in Canada compared to the general population. Hence, “ethnicity” is identified as a risk factor for diabetes, focusing on ethnic differences in health behaviours. By linking ethnic differences and diabetes risk, ethnic food...

‘Paki go home’: The story of racism in the Gerrard India Bazaar

2025-03-19 22:13:00 | Essay | Contributor(s): Aqeel Ihsan | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i1.556

For South Asian Canadians who migrated to Toronto in the 1970s, the only place for them to purchase and consume South Asian foodstuffs would have been in the area referred to as ‘Little India’, which later developed into what is referred to today as the Gerrard India Bazaar (GIB). Little India...

Deconstructing ‘Canadian Cuisine’: Towards decolonial food futurities on Turtle Island

2025-03-19 22:13:00 | Essay | Contributor(s): Hana Mustapha, Sharai Masanganise | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i1.563

As scholars and community activists, to secure a just food system, we must first acknowledge our complicity in hierarchal power structures that shape structural inequities by questioning the underlying socio-political currents and interrogating the dominant relationships within our food...

Confronting Anti-Black, Anti-Indigenous, and Anti-Asian Racisms in Food Systems in Canada

2025-03-19 22:12:59 | Essay | Contributor(s): Leticia Ama Deawuo, Michael Classens | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i1.631

The impetus for this themed section came out of the broader reckoning that touched off in the summer of 2020 in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. The Canadian Association for Food Studies board, like so many organizations struggling to respond to such brazen violence, released a...

Slow cooked: An unexpected life in food politics

2025-03-19 22:12:59 | Review | Contributor(s): Jennifer Sumner | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i2.640

This lively autobiography details Marion Nestle’s life-long engagement with food, particularly the tumultuous politics that inevitably accompany this central aspect of human life. As the founder of the interdiscipline of food studies, she describes her early life in academia, her work with the...

A world without soil: The past, present, and precarious future of the earth beneath our feet

2025-03-19 22:12:59 | Review | Contributor(s): Richard S. Bloomfield | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i2.644

Jo Handelsman’s text A world without soil: The past, present, and precarious future of the earth beneath our feet outlines the threats to global soil health from a scientific perspective and provides an empirical foundation for many in the social sciences or humanities who advocate for more...

The CFS Choux Questionnaire: Lisa Heldke, food philosopher

2025-03-19 22:12:59 | Interview | Contributor(s): Lisa Heldke | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i2.650

A riff on the well-riffed Proust Questionnaire, the Canadian Food Studies Choux Questionnaire is meant to elicit a tasty and perhaps surprising experience, framed within a seemingly humble exterior. (And yes, some questions have a bit more craquelin than others.) Straightforward on their own,...

Racism, traditional food access, and industrial development across Ontario: Perspectives from the fields of environmental law and environmental studies

2025-03-19 22:12:59 | Essay | Contributor(s): Kristen Lowitt, Jane Cooper, Kerrie Blaise | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i1.562

Racism and industrial development across lands and waters in the province of Ontario have played a significant role in decreased access to traditional food for Indigenous peoples. Traditional food access is important for health reasons, as well as cultural and spiritual wellness, and its loss...

Field Notes from RAIR: Putting Relational Accountability into Practice

2025-03-19 22:12:59 | Essay | Contributor(s): Lauren Wood Kepkiewicz, Danielle Boissoneau, Terran Giacomini, Ayla Fenton, Adrianne Lickers Xavier, Sarah Rotz | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i1.565

In this field notes section we explore our work as a collective of Indigenous and settler academics, food providers, and community-based organizers, including how we came together over several plates of nachos and a shared vision of deepening our relationships to land rooted in...

Food system resilience during COVID-19: The role of local producers in rural Canada

2025-03-19 22:12:58 | Article | Contributor(s): Kelli Weinkauf, Tracy Everitt | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i2.594

Over the last 70 years, Canadian agriculture has shifted from many small farms that supplied local residents, to fewer large farms designed to maximize production, reduce cost, and target international markets. At present, small local food chains exist as a small fraction of the Canadian food...