Food Justice, Hunger and the City

Abstract

We are amidst a long‐overdue increase of interest in issues related food, cities and inequality within geography. While there has certainly been significant scholarship done on the issue, this area seems to be on the verge of defining many other sub‐disciplinary trajectories as opposed to the opposite which has historically been the case. In this short review essay, we hope to signal the utility of the concepts of community food security, food sovereignty and urban agriculture for conceptually linking food, justice, and cities.

Food security in welfare capitalism: Comparing social entitlements to food in Australia and Norway

“…Rising food and fuel prices, coupled with static or falling incomes have reduced food affordability by 20% for the lowest income households (Dowler and LambieMumford, 2015). In writing about food justice and hunger in the US, Heynen et al (2012) draw attention to how the modern industrial agriculture complex produces empty calories cheaply, whereas the most nutritious food has become the most expensive and less accessible.…”

“…This paper contributes to an emerging literature that examines food security in economically developed nations, for example: Dowler and Lambie-Mumford (2015) and Kirwan and Maye (2013) on the United Kingdom (UK); Heynen et al (2012) and Anderson (2013) on the United States (US); and Miewald and McCann (2014) on Canada. Given indications that food insecurity is also experienced by people in relatively wealthy nations this paper focuses on the formal status of public responsibilities for food and welfare in two economically developed nation states, Australia and Norway.…”

“The right to food is nature too”: food justice and everyday environmental expertise in the Salvadoran permaculture movement

“…Indeed, it is increasingly patent that the industrialisation of food production across the last century, alongside rapid deforestation and intensive use of fossil fuels, has compromised the very infrastructures that agriculture relies upon: soil, water, and genetic biodiversity. Scholarship connecting hunger with the politics of environmental degradation thus clusters around terms which promise a reevaluation of the hegemony of markets within food production systems, including food justice, but also community food security, and food sovereignty (Heynen et al 2012, Desmarais 2007. This work makes clear that food production has always relied on forms of labour and expertise that, however disavowed, offer vital understandings of soil health and how to recover it.…”

Methodological Challenges in Urban Food Systems Research: Case Study of Local Food Institutions in South Africa

“…Although many food scholars have critiqued the concept of food insecurity as a depoliticized and individualized measurement and preferred lenses such as food sovereignty or food justice which critically examines and centers the power dynamics of food systems [6,7], I have utilized the concept of food security to denote when food is available, accessible, nutritious, and culturally acceptable to people in different local settings [1,8,9]. In this context, the concept of food security has been fruitful in highlighting the spatial inequality intrinsic to South Africa's urban food system [1,8].…”