A long, long time ago, in a world where ‘free trade’ market fundamentalism was not the only economic religion, I helped start a journal called Food Policy—economics, planning and politics of food and agriculture. Well, actually, not that long ago, in the mid 1970s. It just seems a world away. The journal’s sub-title betrays the fact that it was a different world. Governments had a role in planning for food and agriculture—what Fridell calls ‘the social regulation of agri-food commodities’. Issues to do with the most fundamental aspect of human well-being—the ability of everyone to eat a safe, secure, sufficient, nutritious diet—were not seen as something left to the mythical abstraction of ‘The Market’, but a matter of politics and power that shaped political economies and market structures.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Tansey, G., (2025), "Alternative Trade: Legacies for the Future by Gavin Fridell", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v1i2.48)

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1. alternative trade

Original publication: Tansey, Geoff. "Alternative Trade: Legacies for the Future by Gavin Fridell." Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation, vol. 1, no. 2, 2014, pp. 7-8. DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v1i2.48. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation. Copyright © the author(s). Work published in CFS/RCÉA prior to and including Vol. 8, No. 3 (2021) is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY license. Work published in Vol. 8, No. 4 (2021) and after is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license. For details, see creativecommons.org/licenses/.