Toward Adequate Food Systems: Collaboration and “Nonsovereign” Food Futures

Abstract

Since at least the end of World War II, there have been efforts on a global scale to reduce food insecurity through neoliberal, industrial, and technocratic solutions often led by multinational organizations and corporations. These programs have been critiqued for causing environmental degradation, undermining local economies and food production systems, and failing to account for historically and culturally relevant local food preferences. Food sovereignty has been introduced as an alternative approach to food security; it is focused on historically and culturally relevant food needs and returning to more sustainable local food production that is better suited to the environment. Based on over a decade of fieldwork in both Santiago de Cuba and Los Angeles, in this article I detail the ways in which these solutions to food insecurity fall short of what is necessary to ameliorate the failures of our food systems. I analyze the tensions between the needs for a food system that supplies sufficient quantities versus food systems that adequately address local needs for historically and culturally appropriate foods that are produced and distributed in ways that are environmentally sustainable and support local economies. Drawing on the Los Angeles Food Policy Council's Good Food Purchasing Program as a case study, I offer the possibility of a "nonsovereign cooperative approach" to establishing, recreating, or maintaining adequate food systems that serve various needs of local people within the contemporary global food system.