Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It is time for “regenerative food systems” to radicalize or get out of the way, to step aside and allow human-scale, disruptive, actually diverse and localized collectives to emerge and feed the world, one community by one community at a time.
To quit the existing model, we need to have bigger ambitions, collectively. We need more of us.
Whether the term used is food insecurity or food inequity, the result is simple enough: hunger.
No food justice or environmental justice without social justice means nature, land and sustainable, healthy food systems must be accessible to all, regardless of heritage, background or neighbourhood.
Food saving apps like “Karma” and “Too Good To Go” promise to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while providing affordable take-out meals – but what does the commodification of food saving really entail?
I needed to speak to people whose ancestors had experienced the slaughter of their bison herds, the enslavement of their entire family, the brutal exploitation of migratory farm work, or incarceration at the hands of their own government while their crops were left to rot.
The Dallas Food Justice Coalition provides a simple but powerful model. By bringing together community advocates from different areas of food justice, they’ve begun cultivating a grassroots solution to our broken food system that focuses on empowering and educating the community rather than simply providing aid.
With a deliberate emphasis on BPOC and also LGBTQ+ communities, the Land Skills Fair took seriously the inseparable connection between ecological diversity and political, social and cultural diversity.
As groups mobilize, organize, and demand genuine participation, this false legitimacy driven by actors like the Gates Foundation begins to crumble.
If a local food movement is about consumer empowerment, isolating from the complexity of global forces of injustice, increasing buying choices, or unchecked nostalgia and romanticization, then it is just another space where whiteness is prioritized and reproduced, and it cannot, in good faith, be conflated with ethicality or justice.
FLAME is made up of young people who believe that the way we produce food and eat it can be a solution to creating a better world.
Good food for everyone is a matter of social justice and if you’re not angry about the current inequalities then maybe you should be.
