How to enhance the good health and well-being of Canadians: Effective food and meal-based guidelines and policies that fit the facts and face the future

2025-03-19 22:13:12 | Essay | Autor(es): Jean-Claude Moubarac, Jane Y. Polsky, Milena Nardocci, Geoffrey Cannon | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.500

Diet-related diseases and disorders in Canada are a national public health emergency, now and as projected. One main reason is that the national food supply has become increasingly dominated by ultra-processed food and drink products, mostly snacks, that displace dietary patterns based on...

Food policy councils and the food-city nexus: The History of the Toronto Food Policy Council

2025-03-19 22:13:12 | Essay | Autor(es): Lori Stahlbrand, Wayne Roberts | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.505

This field report links food and city policies by tracing the history of the Toronto Food Policy Council and offers our experience-based suggestions regarding the concept of critical food guidance, which we associate with capacity-building and providing opportunities for civic engagement on a...

Critical food guidance from the slow food movement: The relationship barometer

2025-03-19 22:13:12 | Essay | Autor(es): Brooke Fader, Michèle Mesmain, Ellen Desjardins | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.509

The Slow Food movement embeds food guidance that encourages interaction with local food production and appreciation of local cuisine. It advocates critical thinking and actions that support the preservation of traditional food practices, as well as environmental considerations around food...

Religious food guidance

2025-03-19 22:13:11 | Essay | Autor(es): Michel Desjardins | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.514

This article reviews some of the ways in which food intersects with religion and argues that people’s religious food habits prepare them to critically engage the food they eat. Religious food guidance is presented through five categories: permanent food restrictions, temporary food...

A food charter as a critical food guidance tool in a rural area: The case of Bruce and Grey Counties in Southwestern Ontario

2025-03-19 22:13:10 | Essay | Autor(es): Donald Cole, Laura Needham, Philly Markowitz | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.497

Food charters have been one means of mobilizing critical food guidance relevant discussions among stakeholders and policy makers in rural areas.  As actors in the rural food system of Grey and Bruce counties, we describe the counties' charter development led by the Food Security Action...

Critical food guidance

2025-03-19 22:13:10 | Essay | Autor(es): Ellen Desjardins, Jennifer Sumner | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.588

In this themed section, we argue that beyond health-related dietary goals for society, food guidance must also reflect the expanding public awareness and uncertainty about the complexities and vulnerabilities of the current food system. Increasingly influential issues include environmental...

Critical perspectives on food guidance

2025-03-19 22:13:10 | Essay | Autor(es): Jennifer Sumner, Ellen Desjardins | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i1.592

Critical food guidance began as an inspiration, blossomed into a concept and then became a focal point for thinking about food system change. It will continue to evolve as we grapple with the complexities of the industrial food system and work toward alternative approaches. As a step in the...

Review of Eat local, taste global: how ethnocultural food reaches our tables

2025-03-19 22:13:09 | Review | Autor(es): Regan Zink | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.590

Eat Local, Taste Global: How Ethnocultural Food Reaches our Tables, by Glen C. Filson and Bamidele Adekunle, addresses the demand, availability, and production of ethnocultural vegetables in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). The book is centered around the three largest ethnic...

Unwrapping school lunch: Examining the social dynamics and caring relationships that play out during school lunch

2025-03-19 22:13:09 | Article | Autor(es): Jennifer L Black, Rachel Mazac, Amber Heckelman, Sinikka Elliott | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.544

Students are important stakeholders in school food programs. Yet children’s daily experiences and voices are often overlooked in advocacy around school food. In Canada, where the federal government recently expressed interest in creating a National School Food Program, nearly no research has...

Breadlines, victory gardens, or human rights?: Examining food insecurity discourses in Canada

2025-03-19 22:13:09 | Essay | Autor(es): Audrey Tung, Reuben Rose-Redwood, Denise Cloutier | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.530

Long before the exacerbating effects of COVID-19, household food insecurity (HFI) has been a persistent yet hidden problem in wealthy nations such as Canada, where it has been perpetuated in part through dominant discourses and practices. In this critique of HFI-related frameworks, we suggest...

Transformation or the next meal? : Global-local tensions in food justice work

2025-03-19 22:13:09 | Essay | Autor(es): Elizabeth Vibert, Bikrum Singh Gill, Matt Murphy, Astrid Pérez Piñán, Claudia Puerta Silva | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.531

This article presents conversations across difference that took place among community partners and researchers at a week-long workshop in T’Sou-ke First Nation territory in 2019. The workshop launched the Four Stories About Food Sovereignty research network and project, which brings together...

Striving toward a peasant identity: The influence of the global peasant movement on three women farmers in Canada

2025-03-19 22:13:08 | Essay | Autor(es): Roseann Lydia Kerr, Erin Richan, Coral Sproule, Ayla Fenton | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.535

As diverse actors work through disparate food movements seeking to tackle the causes and effects of the global food crisis, Holt-Giménez and Shattuck (2011) call for strategic alliances between progressive and radical trends in the food movement to transform our current food system. This paper...

‘Biotechnologizing’ or ‘democratizing’? Unraveling the diversity of resistance to GMOs in Guatemala

2025-03-19 22:13:07 | Essay | Autor(es): Carrie Seay Fleming | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.528

Until 2019, Guatemala upheld a de-facto moratorium on GMOs. The ban has been attributed to broad-based social resistance and the unlikely alliances galvanized by the issue. Recent legislation, however, has been met with little resistance. In this paper, I show how the tensions between anti-GM...

Enacting just food futures through the state: evidence from Brazil

2025-03-19 22:13:07 | Essay | Autor(es): Ricardo Barbosa, Estevan Coca | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.540

The state is an important, if sometimes overlooked, terrain of struggle for food activists. To explore the ways and extent to which just food futures can be enacted through the state, we present the experience of Brazil. We argue that activists should seek to advance food policies that have...

Introspecting food movements in Canada: Unpacking tensions towards justice and sustainability

2025-03-19 22:13:07 | Essay | Autor(es): Amanda Wilson, Charles Z Levkoe | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.524

Over the past decades there has been a notable growth in community-based food systems projects and successes. Despite these advancements, food insecurity, precarious food work, ecological degradation, and corporate conglomeration in the food sector all continue to increase, compounded by the...

Food activism and negotiating the gendered dynamics of public cultures of care

2025-03-19 22:13:07 | Essay | Autor(es): Teresa Lloro, Frecia González | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.537

A growing and significant research literature utilizes feminist frameworks to study relationships with food from a variety of vantage points. In this article, we are especially interested in feminist food sovereignty, feminist political ecology, and feminist theories of care, both because...

Sharing the struggle for fairness: Exploring possibilities for solidarity & just labour in organic agriculture

2025-03-19 22:13:07 | Essay | Autor(es): Susanna Klassen, Fuerza Migrante, Hannah Wittman | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.536

Despite the organic movement’s early connections to labour advocacy and commitment to the principle of “Fairness”, the evolution of the organic sector has generated questions about the strength of its links to food justice in certified organic farming. Scholar-activists have, in particular,...

The community food centre: Using relational spaces to transform deep stories and shift public will

2025-03-19 22:13:06 | Essay | Autor(es): Syma Habib | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.538

COVID-19 has revealed deep inequities in our food system. As goodwill and charity from this crisis disappears, and emergency supports begin to dwindle, we can anticipate increased food insecurity amongst Canadians. Rising food prices and unemployment will drive a lack of access to fresh...

Reformist, progressive, radical: The case for an inclusive alliance

2025-03-19 22:13:06 | Essay | Autor(es): Janet Elizabeth Poppendieck | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.534

Scholars of food regimes and food movements have argued that the capacity of the contemporary food movement to achieve significant change is dependent upon the nature of the alliances formed by the progressive, food justice component of the broader array of food change organizations. They have...

Rotten asparagus and just-in-time workers: Canadian agricultural industry framing of farm labour and food security during the COVID-19 pandemic

2025-03-19 22:13:06 | Essay | Autor(es): Anelyse Margaret Weiler, Evelyn Encalada Grez | https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v9i2.521

In early stages of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the Canadian farming industry expressed panic that travel restrictions could disrupt the arrival of migrant farmworkers from the Majority World. In this Perspective essay, we consider how farm industry lobbying successfully framed delays to...