Governing plant‐centred eating at the urban scale in the UK: The Sustainable Food Cities network and the reframing of dietary biopower

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increase in actions to address a key feature of food in the Anthropocene: the over-production and consumption of animal-based foods or "animalisation" of diets. However, it is unclear whether such efforts can be understood as a coherent institutional level response that will challenge hegemonic dietary biopower, a regime of governance that normalises and reproduces animalbased food consumption. Building on scholarship that explores food governance initiatives in urban contexts and dietary biopower across a range of empirical cases, this paper explores whether, how, and with what consequences governance actors within urban food partnerships (UFPs) of the UK Sustainable Food Cities (SFC) network are working to reframe dietary biopower so that humans are disciplined to eat less animal-based food and instead to adopt a more plant-centred diet. Document analysis and semi-structured interviews with SFC representatives suggest the breadth and depth of current UFP actions do not add up to a sustained challenge to hegemonic, animal-based dietary biopower. Rather, they reveal a plant-centred dietary biopolitical project in the making, while specific cases suggest that this project is more accurately conceptualised as arrested due to the pursuit of food system actions that are counter to and in tension with the promotion of plant-centred eating. We suggest that a more coherent reframing of dietary biopower would entail urban food governance actors engaging consistently and robustly with the debates surrounding animal-based foods, as well as identifying and enacting synergies between plant-centred eating, food poverty, and local economic development agendas.

Searching for the “politics of the possible” in flexitarianism

“…This challenge can be understood as part of a politics of the possible because it is evidence of the struggles over flexitarianism's knowledge claims and practices. Such struggles can be productive, they can represent 'possibilities' because they signal but also can stimulate further discussion and debate about the role of diet, and particularly the balance of animal and plant based foods, within food systems change (Morris et al 2021b).…”

“…This is an objective that is already being promoted in the UK by the Eating Better campaign, which brings together 60 civil society organisations to promote "less but better" meat production and consumption. A 'Flexitarian Society' or similar NGO, if established, should promote ethical omnivorism as part of its activities while public catering services should also ensure that their animal based foods are animal welfare accredited (Morris et al 2021b;Lang et al 2021). Additional public policy support is likely to be needed here that goes beyond consumption oriented initiatives to promote flexitarianism e.g.…”

“…We do this by attending to the neoliberal characteristics of flexitarianism and flexitarian subject-making but exploring as well how it may also be more than this i.e. when, where and how flexitarianism escapes the neoliberal sensibilities of market rationales and individualised food politics to offer instead a different, more empowering, progressive and collective form of intervention in efforts to move beyond animal-based food systems (Taylor 2010;Morris et al 2021b). In doing so we flesh out Harris's somewhat skeletal, preliminary reading of (alternative) dietary subject-making in terms of the politics of the possible.…”

Food geographies ‘in’, ‘of’ and ‘for’ the Anthropocene: Introducing the issue and main themes

“…The five papers in the Theme Issue are all equally critical of a singular universalising geographical perspective of the Anthropocene when applied to historical and contemporary discourses and empirical cases. They examine respectively: geographies of soy production to theorise a third planetary food regime (Beacham, 2022); the material‐technologic, political‐economic and sociocultural nexus of relations that gave rise to the modern broiler chicken within the Anthropocene (Coles, 2022); cellular dairy technologies in British Columbia, Canada (Newman et al, 2022); urban food partnership initiatives in the UK working to ‘reframe dietary power,’ that is, develop initiatives to eat less meat and adopt plant‐based diets to address the challenge of (de)animalisation (Morris et al, 2022); and an historical account of the food geographies of Western Avadh, in the upper Gangetic plains of northern India (Nagavarapu & Kumar, 2022).…”