Agrifood systems literacy: Insights from two high schools’ programs in Ontario

2025-03-19 22:13:17 | Article | Contributor(s): Alicia Martin, Marie-Josée Massicotte | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v8i4.461

Following the increased industrialization and globalization of the prevailing agrifood system, researchers and practitioners have highlighted the detrimental impacts of this model on human health, food security, and the environment. As such, experts and citizens are calling for an increased...

Community orchards and Hyde’s theory of the gift

2025-03-19 22:03:29 | Article | Contributor(s): Jennie K Barron | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v6i3.358

Food scholars and advocates just have long asserted that commodification is one of the fundamental injustices of our dominant, industrial food system, as it stands in direct opposition to the notion of food as a human right. The informal social economy, with its concerns for solidarity,...

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...

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 Counts: Food systems report cards, food sovereignty and the politics of indicators

2025-03-19 22:03:35 | Article | Contributor(s): Charles Z. Levkoe, Alison Blay-Palmer | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v5i3.277

The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems recognized that "current systems will be held in place insofar as these systems continue to be measured in terms of what industrial agriculture is designed to deliver, at the expense of many other outcomes that really matter in...

FS - Food sovereignty

2025-03-19 22:03:52 | Article | Contributor(s): Jennifer Clapp, Annette Desmarais, Matias Margulis | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.125

Citizens in many countries are increasingly wary of the global industrial neoliberal food system. A number of food scares, growing awareness of human rights abuses in the countryside, a global food crisis, and climate change have all prompted many to form alternative food movements that are...

FS - From protest to policy: The challenges of institutionalizing food sovereignty

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Article | Contributor(s): Hannah Wittman | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.99

In response to the failure of current approaches to alleviate the linked challenges of global food insecurity and environmental degradation—many of which involve voluntary measures to improve agricultural efficiency and increase yield—grassroots actors have called for the re-regulation and...

FS - Repeasantization, agroecology and the tactics of food sovereignty

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Article | Contributor(s): Blain Snipstal | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.132

From the dawn of the 21stcentury, we have seen and experienced at the global and local levels several severe world food crises, the advancement of global land grabbing and land speculation phenomena, the further entrenchment of the agribusiness model of agriculture and land/resource...

FS - SYNTHESIS - The hefty challenges of food sovereignty’s adulthood

2025-03-19 22:03:53 | Article | Contributor(s): Andrés García Trujillo | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.111

The three articles in this section reflect a broader shift that is taking place in the debate on food sovereignty. After almost two decades since its inception, the term—which is also a “counter-narrative”, a “mobilizing tactic”, and a “political agenda” (Desmarais, this issue)—has gained...

FS - The gift of food sovereignty

2025-03-19 22:03:52 | Article | Contributor(s): Annette Desmarais | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.115

In April 1996 representatives of peasants, small and medium-scale farmers, rural women, indigenous representatives, and farm workers from the global North and global South travelled to Tlaxcala, Mexico to participate in the Second International Conference of La Vía Campesina. For members of La...

Generations of gardeners regenerating the soil of sovereignty in Moose Cree First Nation: An account of community and research collaboration

2025-03-19 22:12:56 | Article | Contributor(s): Michael Robidoux, Keira A. Loukes, Emalee A. Vandermale, Tegan J. Keil, Janice Cindy Gaudet | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i3.637

The challenges northern remote communities in Canada face acquiring regular access to affordable and healthy food have been well documented. Our Indigenous Health Research Group, made up of an informal network of researchers from universities across Canada, has partnered with northern...

Globalization and food sovereignty: Global and local change in the new politics of food by Peter Andrée, Jeffrey Ayres, Michael J. Bosia, and Marie-Josée Massicotte (Eds.)

2025-03-19 22:03:57 | Review | Contributor(s): Patrick Clark, Chantal Clément, Amanda DiVito Wilson | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i1.75

“To demand a space of food sovereignty is to demand specific arrangements to govern territory and space” (Patel, 2009, p. 667). However, the further we move into a globalized system of food and agricultural production, the more these specific arrangements come into conflict with current global...

Looking back, looking forward: A field report on the Earth to Tables Legacies multimedia educational package

2025-03-19 22:13:17 | Report | Contributor(s): Alexandra Gelis, Deborah Barndt | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v8i4.465

The Earth to Tables Legacies Project emerged in 2015, growing out of personal relationships, but also built on a long trajectory of participatory research, multimedia arts production and popular education. We created an intergenerational and intercultural exchange of food activists working for...

Planning for food sovereignty in Canada? A comparative case study of two rural communities

2025-03-19 22:03:47 | Article | Contributor(s): Virginie Lavallée-Picard | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.73

In Canada, most local-governance level food system planning research has been conducted in larger, often urban communities. However, producers in small rural communities conduct the majority of Canada’s agricultural activities. Using case-study research, this paper documents how the rural...

PRF - SYNTHESIS - The right to food: Reflecting on the past and future possibilities

2025-03-19 22:03:50 | Article | Contributor(s): Nadia Lambek | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.112

As scholars and activists met in Waterloo, Canada in September 2014 to discuss progress and obstacles in adopting the right to food, similar discussions were being held by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and among civil society organizations (CSOs),...

PRF - The right to food: Many developments, more challenges

2025-03-19 22:03:50 | Article | Contributor(s): Priscilla Claeys | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.100

The right to food (RTF)1has enjoyed growing recognition in the last decade. It has achieved legitimacy and visibility in international governance debates, where it is increasingly perceived as a useful “policy guide” (DeSchutter, 2009). The realization of the right to food is recognized as a...

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...

Reframing food as a commons in Canada: Learning from customary and contemporary Indigenous food initiatives that reflect a normative shift

2025-03-19 22:13:13 | Essay | Contributor(s): Jodi Koberinski, Jose Luis Vivero-Pol, Joseph LeBlanc | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.504

This paper interrogates the role of the dominant narrative of “food-as-commodity” in framing food systems policy in Canada. Human values shape policies, usually privileging those policies that are aligned with dominant values and neglecting others that confront dominant values. In that sense,...

SFSGEC - Peasant agriculture, seeds, and biodiversity

2025-03-19 22:03:55 | Article | Contributor(s): Faris Ahmed | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.106

Farmers and food providers have created and maintained the knowledge and biodiversity that is the basis for the planet’s food supply for thousands of years. Yet seeds and biodiversity have been at the margins of the mainstream discourses on food security. New thinking and global events are...

Sovereignty of and through food: A decolonial feminist political ecology of Indigenous food sovereignty in Treaty 9

2025-03-19 22:12:50 | Article | Contributor(s): Keira A. Loukes | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i2.660

“Food sovereignty,” a term conceived by peasant agriculturalists in South America, has become ubiquitous worldwide in academic and activist circles advocating for greater local control over local food. Its use has been adopted by various actors in North America, most notably by...