Innovations in campus food systems alternatives

Institutional food systems as a means of effecting food systems change locally are perhaps more important now than ever. We’re collecting stories about campus food systems innovations and promising practices in the Canadian context, and examining how these innovations are integrated into food systems program curricula.

Mapping for change: Environmental inequality and resilience in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough

With Stephanie Rutherford, Trent University, and in collaboration with various community partners, we’re building a baseline of information focused on environmental injustice, and resistance to it, in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough. For more information, see https://www.mapping4change.org/

From crisis to continuity: A community response to local food systems challenges in, and beyond, the days of Covid-19

This community-based, participatory action research project provides research and analysis support to emergent community-identified priorities in the midst of the global pandemic. The project balances the necessity for immediate and longer-term planning through a two-pronged approach focused on understanding and supporting (a) how food systems actors in Peterborough (and elsewhere) are organizing to meet the emergent needs of the crisis, while (b) strategizing to transition to a more sustainable and resilient food system at the local level in the aftermath of Covid-19.

Toward a Canadian food commons

Scholars and advocates alike have recently returned to an old idea – the commons – as an antidote to the multiple and compounding social and ecological crises of the contemporary food system. Defined broadly as material and non-material goods jointly maintained for community wellbeing, the commons stand as a paradigmatic counterpoint to a contemporary food system premised on exorbitant profit, enclosure, and excludability. The project explores the prevalence of food commoning as an explicit tactical approach and normative commitment within food justice organizations across Canada.

Toward a food secure city region food system

This project focuses on two interrelated issues – the social and ecological unsustainability of local food systems, and food insecurity. I draw on an emerging conceptual and methodological intervention, City Region Food Systems (CRFS), to explore how food security vulnerabilities are produced and (potentially) ameliorated by city-region processes, policies, procurements and programs. The CRFS approach represents a sophisticated
evolution of a trajectory of food systems scholarship focused on the many social and ecological benefits resulting from more localized/regionalized food systems. Yet this body of work rests uneasily alongside scholarship demonstrating the extra-local processes, policies and systems that frustrate food security (for example housing tenure and income). This community-based action research project seeks to address these seemingly intractable issues within the specific context of Peterborough, Ontario.