Sociology Midterm Document

WEEK ONE

Chapter One: The Interdisciplinary Field of Food Studies

Food studies represents a new interdisciplinary approach in the social sciences and
humanities, forming linkages and interconnections between food related topics.
- This encourages a system perspective, which involves looking at social reality as
a sum of interrelated parts
- The term food studies can be difficult to define
o Academics have widely used it in recent years as an umbrella term to
cover the study of food from a social sciences and humanities perspective
From Disciplines to Interdisciplinary
- Professionalization offer coherence in the training of their members
o Also been criticized for their rigidity and lack of openness to insights from
other disciplines
- The rise of cultural studies and postmodernism offered one of the most
consistent criticisms of the earlier prevailing structuralist and modernist
approaches in social and natural science of the twentieth century
- Area and regional studies emerged and created new spaces for scholarship,
borrowing analytical and methodological insights from diverse disciplinary
traditions to develop their own perspectives
- Food studies as an emerging field of c=focus can be best described as an
interdisciplinary area of studies
Food Studies in Canada
- Founded in 2005 the Canadian association for Food Studies (CAFS) has been
the leading national organization aiming to advance interdisciplinary scholarship
and research in food studies
- The major objective of CAFS is the promotion of critical, interdisciplinary
scholarship in the broad area of food systems: food policy, production,
distribution and consumption
What does being Critical mean?
- In everyday usage, being critical carries a negative connotation that s associated
with a tendency to seek out the shortcomings and limitations of others
- In social science research, being critical involves four components
o First it questions whether the arguments of a study are based on evidence
rather than on biases
 Critical perspectives therefore require reassessment and re-
evaluation as new evidence, theories, and methods become
available
 Being critical means questioning the empiricist orientation that only
provides a description of what is happening but does not provide an
analysis of why something is happening
 o A second component of being critical involves questioning the basic
values that lie behind the dominant ideologies and discourses that inform
scholarly thinking
 Being critical in this instance involves a self-reflexive process of
interrogating the key assumptions of society, its institutions, ad
everyday realities
o A third component of being critical involves questioning issues of power
 Critical perspectives in food studies examine power dynamics that
shape the food system by identifying connections between socio-
political structures and daily food practices
o The fourth component of being critical means considering possibilities for
social change
 Food studies exemplifies an activist orientation in is desired to
explore solutions for transforming the food system and society at
large
 The collaborative approach to scholarship is called participatory
action research (PAR)
 PAR questions the validity of a top-down approach to knowledge
dissemination and demands a research process for the people with
the people
- Studies of food that incorporate some or all of these four components can be
understood as critical food studies – they examine evidence, unearth values,
question power, and encourage social change
- The emergence of critical food studies indicates that the interdiscipline of food
studies is not only maturing but also remaining relevant as it addresses real
problems that people face everyday
Mapping the Critical Food Studies Landscape
- Both that nature of problems in the food system and the critical perspectives
examining them tend to be complex and multifaceted
- Political economy
o Influenced by the Marxist critique of capitalism, political economy
examines how historical processes or systems shape institutions in ways
the reproduce patterns of social imbalance and conflict in society
o Focusing primarily on class inequalities, political economic analyses of
food have provided insights on how the expansion of capitalist relations of
production destroys rural livelihoods, creates poverty and hunger, and
contributes to ill health and obesity
o Political-economic research considers how social change takes place over
time rather than ascribing to the belief that universal laws can apply to all
historical periods
o Similarly, rural depeasantization – or the movement of people, including
smallholder producers, from rural areas to urban areas in the developing
world – and the subsequent new and emerging peasantries, have also
had a tremendous impact on the way food is produced in the global south
 o Post-colonial approaches in food studies look to the historical and politico-
economic structures of countries that have previously experienced
colonialism or imperialism
o Governance is inseparably linked with the political-economical structures
found in society
o A growing critical idea in food studies bridging political economy and
governance has been food sovereignty, an alternative mode of food
governance
 Food sovereignty exists in direct opposition to the current neo-
liberal governance of the food system that centers on the market as
the locus of control, placing governing power in the hands of big
economic players
 Food sovereignty on the other hand, creates policies and
governance structures based on local and democratic decision-
making power
- Social and Cultural Perspectives
o Examines the intersections between food, society, and culture
o Feminists perspectives provide essential voices to the field, through
analyses of food as “a source of both power and oppression for women”
o Anthropology houses a lineage of scholarship that recognizes food as a
significant aspect of cultural formation
o Scholars also identify food as a key vehicle through which ethnic identity is
performed and engagements with critical race theory illuminate the ways
in which power relations are negotiated through food experiences
o Employing the concept of institutional racism, which points to systemic
inequality that disenfranchises people of colour in institutional contexts,
food justice scholars and activists recognize wats in which racial and
socioeconomic discrimination operates in the creation of food deserts,
areas in which residents have limited access to healthy, affordable food
o Entertainment indicates that ways in which food and experiences have
become conflated in contemporary consumer culture reveals the
integration of food into a variety of media experiences, and indicates that
these spaces are ripe for critical interrogation
- Environmental Approaches
o Many of the environmental problems are being exacerbated by the food
system itself
o A large portion of the environmental discussion in food studies is
grounded in the concept of sustainability, although other topics not directly
related to it are still popular in the literature, such as biodiversity,
genetically modified organisms, food waste and fisheries and natural
resource management
o Political ecology is a common approach taken when looking at
environmental issues and food because it connects environmental
concerns with the broader political landscape of the way industrial food
production is organized, showing that these matters are not apolitical
 o Alternative food networks are small food systems that directly oppose the
conventional industrial global food system and are argued to be more
environmentally friendly and sustainable
- Health Approaches
o Health leaders only recently began to draw linkages between health, food,
and agricultural policy
o They argue that the ecological and nutritional consequences of such food
system gave a tremendous impact on public health
o Popkin coined the term nutrition transition
 He observes dietary changes based on high consumption of
saturated fats, sugar, and refined foods – often called the western
diet – moving into the developing world and subsequently
increasing rates of non-communicable diseases
o Scrinis devised the term nutritionism to describe a dominant reductionist
nutrition paradigm that has been co-opted by the food industry into a
nutrition approach that sees food and diets reduced to their various
nutrient components and their biological functionality addressed in terms
of diseases
o Food security indicates a situation in which all people, at all times, have
physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious
food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and
healthy life
o Food insecurity occurs when people do not have adequate physical, social
or economic access to food
Conclusion
- Food studies is an interdisciplinary field of multi-level systems analysis that
privileges applied work

Chapter 2: Changing Food Systems from Top to Bottom

Food regimes combines commodity studies with world systems analysis to identify long
periods of stability and change in agri-food systems
Social context for the Study of Food Systems
- The first world food crisis was declared in 1972-1973 when the prices of the most
important traded food crops of the time – soy, maize, and especially wheat –
doubled or tripled
- This change interrupted a long period of low and declining prices, in which even
poor people could afford to eat and third world countries happily became
dependent in food imports while they fostered the growth of cities and industries
o Corporations especially those in international trade, that profited
- The first world food summit was held in Rome in 1974 in response to the crisis,
launching national and international movements for food security
- The right to food had been agreed to by governments in 1948 in article 25 of the
Universal Declaration of Human Right, but had not been top of mind as long as
hunger seemed on a steady decline
 - The goal of food security, however, provided focus for social movements
advocating social welfare, equality, and justice, including a new set of social
movements and institutions focused specifically on hunger
- It was complemented by the famer-led goal of food sovereignty in response to
the trade agreements of the 1990s
Promoting Food Security
- The united nations world food programme (WFP) was founded in 1974 to
promote the new idea of food security through multilateral food aid
o Used in emergencies
- In the 1980s, Canada’s first food banks were created
- FoodShare was created in 1985 by Toronto mayor Art Eggleton as an alternative
to food bank charity, and has fostered innumerable individual and organizational
initiatives
- Food secure Canada was created in 1006, the culmination of almost a decade’s
efforts to bring together food security initiatives across the country
- All parties except for the conservatives had a food policy (conservative won in
2011)
Promoting Healthy Food
- Not only quantity but quality of food became important in the 1970s
Commodity Studies
- In the pioneering work Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern
History (1985), anthropologist Sidney Mintz shed new light on capitalism and
colonialism
o Mintz showed how the African slave trade and New World sugar
plantations underpinned industrial capitalism in England by making
possible new foods for emerging working classes, such as jams, which
were rich in calories but poor in nutrition
- In the same decade, sociologist William Friedland and his colleagues produced a
trailblazing book called Manufacturing Green Gold: Capital, Labor, and
Technology in the Lettuce Industry
o They showed how systems of large-scale crop production in California
were fully industrial in their labour relations, finances, and distribution
systems
- The work opened up two important directions
o First sociology of agriculture broadened beyond family farms to study all
the determinants of agriculture, including inputs, such as machinery and
chemical, and sales, which were coordinated on a continental scale
o In the second direction, researchers began to reinterpret the history of the
capitalist world system through a food lens, focusing on the worldwide
wheat, meat, and dairy trade of the 1800s made possible by European
settlement of (mainly) British colonies in North America, Australia, New
Zealand, and South America
Food Regimes: Understanding Global Change
 - Commodity studies show how specific changes in food systems happen globally
and historically; by tracking commodities along supply chains we get a picture of
regional specialization, class relations in production and consumption, and
interstate power, but only as these shapes each specific food
- Putting them together is an approach to the study of food systems called food
regimes, defined as a rule governed structure of production and consumption of
food on a world scale
- Food regime analysis combines the bottom up approach of commodity studies
with the top down approach of world systems theory
- In world systems theory it is argued that capitalism is not something that
emerges in any one country and the spreads to others
- Capitalism emerged on a world scaler in the years after 1500, because of the
relationships among industrial wage labour in England, slavery in Caribbean,
servitude in eastern Europe, and sharecropping in Italy; each region and each
commodity complex (sugar, cotton, textiles, iron, wheat) existed only because of
the relations among them, including the differences in the power of states
- Food regimes built on world systems theory tend to make two major contributions
o First following the great theorist Karl Polanyi, researchers show through
food regime analysis how markets are shaped by historically specific rules
governing power, money trade, labour, and more
o Food regimes are relatively stable periods in which all actors, whether
they’ll like it or not, can predict the outcome of their actions with
reasonable accuracy
o Second, food regime analysis shows that periods of crisis last as long as
periods of stability do
The Current Transition
- Food safety and agricultural trade have been major sources of international and
class conflict, including a transnational organization of small farmers leading a
new food sovereignty movement
- The long crisis has led to many changes in the food system since the 1980s
o First new corporate sectors have become powerful
o Second, new commodities have become important in international trade,
creating new relations between North and South
 Instead of growing food crops for domestic consumption, farmers
began to shift to export commodities ranging from mangoes to
shrimp to cut flowers, and consumers began to buy imported
processed foods rather than fresh local products
o Third, completely new problems have arisen that cannot be solved by
existing divisions of government
Toward a New Food Regime
- An area of conflict is certification systems and standards
- Certification systems began outside governments, to promote qualities beyond
those traditionally regulated by governments such as the permitted levels of
contaminants in food or water
 - The earliest certifications were for organics, created by social justice
organizations to help farmers in the global out get better prices for products such
as coffee and cocoa
- Food regimes is a perspective that focuses attention on food as a lens, to see
ways to address many social problems at once, from promoting health to
managing ecosystems and to move toward a wise agri-food system as the
foundation for a sustainable and just society
Thinking about Food System Change
- In addition, we need to think about how economic actors, social movements
organizations, and public agencies are linked through communities of food
practice
- What is Changing?
o Food system change is at once a social movement and a set of practice
activities to transform the food sector of the economy
o Initiatives include certifications for fair trade and organic products, and
new networks of production and distribution, such as food co-ops, farmers
markets, and community supported agriculture (CSA)
 The CSA is an innovation that came of age during the 1990s, in
which customers buy a farmers crops in advance of the growing
season and receive produce throughout the season
 CSAs help farmers invest and plant without borrowing from a bank
and allow customers to share risks and benefit of agriculture
o New distribution systems create closer connections – food networks near
home for both farmer and eater – and combine social (market) with natural
(crops, animals, weather) factors
o Social movements recreating the infrastructure of a regional food
economy thus provide opportunities for entrepreneur’s form farm to table
- How does Change Happen?
o Change always involves tensions
o One tension in the food movement exists between alleviating injustices in
the current food system and building a new food system
o Another tension exists between farm renewal and meeting the needs of an
increasingly urban and diverse population of eaters
o Much of the revival of local food production has relied on temporary
migrant workers
o Another one is indigenous people, who have been displaced and
marginalized since the first food regime, have by far the deepest
knowledge of how to live in each ecosystem of Canada
- Communities of Food Practice
o Economic and social movement initiatives for food citizenship are linked in
communities of food practice
o These consist of networks of individuals and organizations – public,
private, and non-profit – engaged in creating a regional, integrated,
inclusive agri-food economy
 o A community of food practice is most successful when it is anchored by
creative, values-based organizations
o Food change organizations tend to be fluid and to encourage individual
creativity, including assisting individuals to move through and beyond
them, leaving behind (and taking with them) experiences and projects that
foster the movement as a whole
o These individuals in turn help the organizations to evolve quickly and
encourage others to emulate successful experiments
o Communities of food practice supposed creative solutions to a food
regime in crisis
o The most important insight of the concept community of food practice is
that by training ourselves to see the links among many diverse initiatives
and individuals and organizations, we can discover deep changes
underway in the food system
Module Notes
What Makes Food Sociologically Interesting?
- We often think of our food choices as something we decide on individually and
consciously
- But food habits are also shaped by other things, often beyond our direct and
conscious control
o This becomes clearer if we consider how people eat in different
geographic areas, in different social groups, and in different time periods
- Sociologists emphasize that eating does not simply fill a biological need: it carries
diverse social and cultural meanings
- Our food habits and our food system are influenced by a complex set of social
relations, processes, structures, and institutions
- Food scholars also emphasize that the food system is structures by relations of
power, which lead to inequalities – both within and across nations – and
contribute to both a direct impact on individuals in societies as well as broader
impacts on the environment and non-human world
Food, Culture and Identity: The Micro Level 1
- The 18th century French epicure Brillat-Savarin famously said, “Tell me what you
eat, and I will tell you who you are.”
- Our assumptions show that social discourses (ideas that circulate in our society
about particular issues) shape the identities we ascribe to people – and that
which they ascribe to themselves-based on personal food choices
Food, Culture and Identity: The Micro Level 2
- As you probably noticed from the activity on the last page, food does not simply
sustain our physical bodies; food has social, emotional, spiritual, and political
meaning. It is integral to our interactions and connections within family and
community as “a symbol, a product, a ritual object, an identity badge, an object of
guilt, [and] a political tool”
- Roles of food:
 o A symbol: A sit-down meal, especially in the evening, can symbolize and
create feelings of “family.” Holiday foods are essential markers of holiday
meals and celebrations.
o A product: In 21st-century Canada, where people grow food themselves
much less than before, food is almost always a product or a commodity—
something we buy from a store or restaurant. It is not something we can
normally access for free, such as tap water. (Think about why—after all,
we need both food and water to survive.)
o A ritual object: Food can be a symbol during religious ceremonies or
rituals. For example, horseradish is a symbol of the suffering of Israelite
slaves in Egypt in the Jewish Passover Seder meal (see Figure 1.1). Food
can also be involved in more everyday rituals, such as the giving of a gift
to the hostess (e.g., a bottle of wine, chocolates) when one is invited to his
or her home.
o An identity badge: An upper middle-class Torontonian might eat foods
from various ethno-cultural backgrounds to indicate (perhaps
unconsciously) that she is “knowledgeable” or “hip.” A teenager might eat
fast food to fit in with his peers.
o An object of emotions: We might feel guilty after eating what we think
are unhealthy or fattening foods. We might also seek comfort or nostalgia
in foods we ate as kids. Boredom, loneliness, and a myriad of other
emotions may trigger a desire for certain foods.
o A political tool: eating organic or local food or boycotting certain products
may be a way people hope to improve the food system. Activists might
stage hunger strikes
Food and Political Economic Relations: The Macro Level
- Sociologists are also interested in the “macro” level of the food system. They
consider the influence of agri-food policies, national political economic systems,
and international relations and trade on food habits and cultures.
- The case of corn in North America demonstrates the complex relationships
between these macro-level structures and what and how we eat every day.
- During the early 20th century, depression and war resulted in food shortages in
North America. As a result, governments put into place subsidies for farmers.
The more of a crop a farmer produced, the more financial support he or she
would receive.
- This resulted in an abundance of certain grains, most notably corn. Because
there was a corn surplus, and because governments were subsidizing corn
production, corn prices fell. Meat producers began to see corn as a cheap
source of cattle feed.
- Since corn was cheap, beef became cheaper to produce. Some food activists
suggest that this has contributed greatly to the meatification of our diets. (Per
capita global meat consumption has more than doubled since the 1950s.
- Another result of this is the growth of the alternative/health food industry. Grass-
fed beef, which used to be the norm, is now typically available in specialty stores
at a premium price.
 - Macro level issues, such as politics, economics, and international relations and
trade are often called the structural factors influencing our diets
- They are beyond the direct control of individual eaters
- It’s important to remember that the influences of these structural factors can also
go in different direction

- Chapter 2 of the textbook describes two key macro approaches that scholars

take to the food system: commodity-chain studies and food-regime analysis.
You might think of the description above on corn (a commodity) as a snippet of a
commodity-chain analysis. Food regime analysis focuses on
the hegemonic (dominant) political and economic arrangements that shape food
systems. For example, how do trade relations between nations such as China
and the US impact the food we have in our grocery stores in Canada?
Food Studies: A New Academic Discipline
 - Food Studies is a relatively new academic discipline. As you read in Chapter 1 of
the textbook, it is only in the past few decades that academic journals,
associations and programs dedicated to the study of food have emerged. Before
that, food production was a focus, in fields like agricultural economics or food
science. But food consumption, and the relations between consumption and
production, were largely ignored by scholars. When they weren't ignored, they
were relegated to what were considered to be “women's fields” like home
economics
Why did Scholars Ignore Food in the Past?
- The public/private, production/consumption divide
o Until the 1960s, when feminists began to challenge the status quo,
academia was largely centered on the public realm and on issues which
were considered to be economically or scientifically “important.” Academic
researchers considered issues such as the molecular structure of sugar or
how to improve crop yields. Consumption issues, such as what people ate
and why they did so, were considered to be “private” issues of the home
(“feminine concerns”), and therefore “unimportant.”
- Mind-body dualism
o In earlier philosophies of education, there was the idea that academic
institutions existed to feed the mind. In this way of thinking, the mind is
seen as separate from, and superior to, the body. Bodily concerns, like
eating or sex, are seen as "debasing" or "primitive"—not proper subjects
of academic inquiry. In addition, “mind” concerns, such as academic
theory, and “body” concerns, such as eating, are supposed to be kept
separate. You might notice that this idea persists to some degree today.
Think, for example, of how eating is typically banned during university
classes
Why is Food Studies Gaining Prominence Now?
- Feminist activists and scholars, especially in the 1960s and 70s, began to
challenge the public/private, consumption/production divide. They showed that
activities in the home were not only important to people's well-being, but they
also had larger economic value. For example, they argued that if women didn't
do unpaid work in the home, such as grocery shopping and cooking, (male)
workers wouldn't be able to be productive in the workforce (i.e., they would spend
too much time cooking for themselves or go hungry) (Luxton, 1980). These
scholars and others also began to question the idea that the mind and body are,
in fact, separate.
- On top of this, the 1960s saw a burgeoning of interest in the effects of new
technologies (e.g., pesticides) on our health and the environment (Carson, 1962).
At the same time, consumer activists began to decry the increasing influence of
corporations on our lives. Concerned citizens began to scrutinize products and
modes of production based on health, environmental and ethical concerns. In
more recent years, a slew of popular books and films (e.g., Fast Food
Nation, Food Inc., 100-Mile Diet, Supersize Me, Cowspiracy, The Omnivore's
 Dilemma and Cooked) have increased people's awareness of the inner workings
and widespread consequences of the food industry.
- All of these factors have led to an increased interest, among both the public and
scholars, about the place of food and the food system in our lives
What are Food Studies
- As mentioned earlier in this module, some aspects of food were studied
academically in the past (e.g., agronomy, economics, food science, home
economics), but these were often studied separately, with little interaction
between people in different fields. We now realize that different aspects of the
food system are so interconnected, and our food habits are so complex, that it
makes sense to study these things in relation to each other. For this reason,
contemporary Food Studies is a field that draws on many different disciplines (it
is multidisciplinary). Some scholars in Food Studies also combine the insights
and theories of more than one discipline into particular research projects (i.e., to
do interdisciplinary work).
- Further, Food Studies scholars often share insights and collaborate
with community food activists, people who contribute practical and traditional
knowledge such as farmers, gardeners, chefs and policy makers. Food Studies
conferences (e.g., the yearly conference of the Canadian Association for Food
Studies (CAFS) or Food Secure Canada (FSC)) try to break down the traditional
barriers between the community and academia by bringing people from both
areas together to share ideas. This relates to the critical approach of Food
Studies. A critical perspective does not mean being negative, but rather
developing a deeply inquiring attitude, analytical capacity, and research skills that
encompass a diversity of perspectives. Being critical also means understanding
how our current food system works and envisioning an alternative food system
that is more sustainable and just. Food studies in this sense offers both a critical
and a constructive approach to issues pertaining to food
- Many people come to the field of food studies because they see problems in the
food system that they want to change, like social inequality or environmental
degradation. (Perhaps these are issues that brought you to this course?)
Breaking down academic/community barriers is part of that critical movement
toward change. Food studies work such as this, that crosses both boundaries of
academic disciplines and engages people from across a range of skills and
interests is referred to as transdisciplinary
Definitions
- Food system: all of the activities and processes involved in the ways that people
produce, obtain, consume, and dispose of their food, including the inputs and
outputs required to make the system run
o The historically specific wed of social relations, processes, structures, and
institutional arrangements that cover human interactions with natures and
with other humans involving production, distribution, preparation,
consumption and disposal of food
- Food studies:
 o Interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary (it draws on diverse
disciplines and types of knowledge)
o Critical and transformative (it questions power and seeks to bring about
social change)
o System focused (it focuses on the connections between the food industry,
our government and political economic system, and our food habits)

WEEK TWO

Reading 1: Chapter 5 – Constructing “Healthy Eating”/ Constructing Self

Introduction
 A Canadian National Newspaper recommends that to boost nutrient intake and
improve health, Canadians should cut out processed foods and refined starches,
cook from scratch, reduce sugar intake and eat more vegetables.
 The population health approach points to a variety of individual, interpersonal
and environmental factors that determine healthy eating.
 The Food Choice Model describes how food decisions are shaped by values
and beliefs, as people balance food preferences, cost, convenience,
healthfulness and social relationships.
 For social scientists, “healthy eating” is understood as a socially constructed,
shifting discourse that shapes and is shaped by what people say and do in
relation to food, and that is specifically implicated in the ways people understand
and perform their social identities.
 For example, women and men think and talk about healthy eating
differently because social definitions of masculinity and femininity
construct certain ways of being in relationship to food.

Healthy Eating – Discourses of Food, Consumption and Health

 “Discourses” refers to pervasive ways of thinking that over time come to define
what can be said about something or even considered possible
 Discourses influence and determine how people are expected to think or
act in a given society.
 The power of discourses works through setting social standards that
influence behaviour and ways of thinking. For example, healthy eating
discourses construct some foods and practices as “healthy” or “bad”.
 While social discourses shape and constrain individual actions, individual actions
(and inactions) simultaneously shape social discourses, expectations and
practices.
 More marginal discourses may gain strength in different times or places, or may
dominate for specific social groups according to age, ethnicity, gender, education
or social class.
 A discourse that Canadian studies have called “mainstream” healthy eating
emphasizes consumption of fruits and vegetables, grains, poultry, some low-fat
meat and dairy products.
  With a focus on broad nutrition principles of balance, moderation, and
variety, as well as physical activity, this perspective fits well with current
official nutrition guidelines.
 A co-existing more “traditional” discourse of healthy eating emphasizes
consumption of home-cooked meals based on meat, potatoes and vegetables,
as well as unprocessed foods.
 Food is described as natural, and is rarely dissected into component
nutrients or associated with specific health risks.
 Clearest distinction between “traditional” and “mainstream” discourses
lies in how meat is described: while the traditional view sees meat as a key
component of healthy eating, the mainstream view sees meat, particularly red
meat, as unhealthy.
 “Alternative” healthy eating discourse emphasizes natural unprocessed foods
but focuses more on toxins and carcinogens in food, as well as protective factors
such as micronutrients and phytochemicals.
 Organic food production, the risks of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers,
and compounds in particular foods that boost the immune system or
combat environmental toxins.
 People using this discourse often express outright distrust of dominant
nutrition messages and suspicion of additives in processed foods as well
as environmental contamination, monoculture and factory farming
practices.
 Toxins in food as seen as causing immediate and long-term negative
health effects such as food intolerances and cancer.
 People learn about this alternative healthy eating discourse from
naturopaths, other alternative health practitioners, health-food stores,
books, magazines and nutritional supplement literature.
 Healthy eating discourses are strongly connected to body weight.
 Canadians tend to conflate healthy bodies with slender bodies and healthy eating
with maintaining low body weight.
 Healthy eating is seen as a lifestyle that entails “watching what you eat” as a
never-ending practice of self-surveillance, a practice embraced as an individual
responsibility by good and moral citizens.
 Certain ways of thinking about healthy eating seem to be articulated more or less
frequently by certain groups of people, for example by women rather than men or
by people from different ethnic groups.

Gendered Interactions with Healthy Eating Discourses

 Canadians tend to believe that gender does not shape our lives or our practices,
including our food practices.
 However, FOOD PRACTICES ARE HIGHLY GENDERED.
 Many foods are well understood to be “feminine” (e.g. ice cream, chocolate,
salads, vegetables and “light” foods) or “masculine” (e.g. steak and other red
meat, “heavy” and rich foods).
 Vegetarians are perceived to be less masculine than omnivores.
  Relationship between women and “light” foods largely centres on desire to
maintain low body weight.
 Less socially acceptable for men to admit to concern with body image
 Women’s foods were seen as prettier, fancier, more delicate and healthier
according to participants.
 Masculine eating was described as centered on meat, heavy and filling,
and unconcerned with health.
 Further exploring participants’ own eating practices revealed that most did
in fact adhere to at least some aspects of the stereotyped gendered food
practices they denied exist.
 Numerous studies have shown that men typically are uninterested in healthy
eating and in fact lack of concern for health is almost a defining characteristic of
masculinity.
 Men who do deliberately engage in healthy eating usually have other means
of securing their masculinity such as high levels of education or income.
 They are also more likely to engage as kitchen “helpers”, constructing
their wives or female partners as the experts on health and nutrition.
 Recent study suggests a discursive shift may be underway: while healthy eating,
body image and weight were decidedly the preoccupation of women and girls,
they did find some men and boys engaged with those discourses specifically
through the language of health.
 Boys and men tended to relate to obesity and weight loss through the
discourse of healthy eating, particularly through and for sport. This allowed
for males to perform weight loss and maintenance regimes without
appearing overly feminine.
 For women, healthy eating discourses make it possible to construct or convey
particular versions of femininity, most notably through supervising healthy eating
within the family.
 Mothers are understood to have a critical role in children’s nutrition education;
preparing healthful meals for children and male partners is one way women can
fulfill the social role of “good mother”.
 An added requirement to healthy eating expertise is that good mothers
are those who care for their children’s health by providing healthy food,
learning about healthy eating and educating family members about it,
monitoring what is eaten, and guiding their children and protecting them
from unhealthy influences.
 Women who do not (cannot, choose not to) feed their children foods considered
“healthy” are considered “failed mothers” in a way that men who do not feed
their children “healthy” foods are NEVER considered “failed fathers”
 The provision of foods considered healthy is a distinctively feminine (maternal)
expectation

Age and Life Stage – Interacting with Healthy Eating Discourses

 Children are routinely described as being either “good eaters” who readily eat a
variety of food or “picky eaters” whose narrow food repertoires require
considerable managing in relation to healthy eating.
 Strategies for encouraging healthy eating included coaching, coaxing and
coercing, though mothers also controlled consumption to some extent through
food purchasing and meal preparation.
 Mothers also made space for teens to develop a sense of autonomy by
allowing them to choose from the foods in the house, while enforcing
healthy eating by purchasing predominately healthy foods. Emphasised
support for teen autonomy as a particular approach to “good parenting”
 Teens pestered, cajoled, coaxed and manipulated parents to get foods they
liked.
 Some parents reported that their teens seemed to use food to convey an adult
identity only outside the home.
 Foods most likely to be seen as “teen foods” (as opposed to “adult foods”) were
almost identical with those foods perceived by adults and teens as “unhealthy”.
 Teens like convenient and tasty foods.
 Many of the teens in the study reported having healthy eating habits.
 Some families experienced considerable tension when parents were separated
or divorced, with teens caught between what they considered healthy eating in
one household and not-so-healthy fare in the other.
 Consumption of fast food has been strongly linked with teens and with unhealthy
eating, raising significant concern regarding the implications for health and
obesity.
 In the interview with 132 Canadian teens, they found that only 25 considered
fast-food consumption completely unproblematic.
 Most teens regarded fast food as unhealthy yet continued to consume it, albeit
with guilt.
 Most teens who ate fast food despite considering it unhealthy passed equally
harsh judgments on themselves, labelling themselves and their food choices as
“good” or “bad”.
 In their study they found teens from all social class categories used
disparagement of fast food as a means of judging; this was not a tool
exclusively employed by upper-class teens to mark their moral worth.
 In some families, teens are the ones attempting to introduce healthy eating to the
family.
 When teens adopt vegetarianism there is potential for intra-family conflict
with parents potentially refusing to accommodate the change.
 Parents who were supportive of their teens adopting vegetarianism,
were more likely to be middle or upper-middle class, with access to
material resources for experimental cooking, and a general approach to
food that emphasized creativity and flexibility, as well as an approach to
“good parenting” that emphasized teen autonomy.
 Parents who resisted teen vegetarianism were all low income, lacking
the material resources to accommodate their children’s vegetarian foods
or preparing vegetarian options to the main family meal.
 These parents resisted teen vegetarianism on the basis of health
concerns, fearing their children would face nutritional deficiencies
 and inadequate calorie intake through not eating meat. In these
families, many teens discontinued vegetarian eating.

Ethnicity and Race Interacting with Healthy Eating

 Women often pass along cultural values, norms, expectations, stories and skills
through cross-generational work in the kitchen.
 There are often intergenerational conflicts, as youth seek to solidify Canadian
identities through eating “Western” foods, while elders may prefer to eat the
foods of “home”.
 In one of their studies, Canadians of European heritage in both Vancouver and
Halifax thought about food and eating primarily through a lens of mainstream
healthy eating discourses, with an emphasis on minimizing risk of chronic
diseases.
 Punjabi Canadians who were relatively recent migrants and African
Canadians whose families had been in Canada for centuries tended to
employ broader understandings of health and well-being in relation to
food.
 They incorporated more than prevention of physical illnesses,
emphasizing spiritual wellness, family and community well-being
and cultural well-being.
 Many of them focused on other attributes of food, rather than
depicting certain foods as increasing disease risk. Foods were
described as strength-giving, energy-providing, healing and
improving resistance to disease.
 In Punjabi families, young people sought out “Western” foods and
understood healthy eating in terms of dominant discourses, highlighting
Canadian identity.
 Punjabi elders tended to think about healthy eating in more
traditional terms, focusing on cultural heritage.
 Participants in the middle generations generally moved smoothly
between traditional and scientific discourses of healthy eating,
displaying an integrated identity.
 In the African Canadian families, adults and youth all showed familiarity with
mainstream healthy eating discourses, yet also displayed resistance to them.
 Many saw the slender body type promoted in the media and through
healthy eating discourses as too thin for health.
 Participants knew and understood mainstream healthy eating discourses
but believed nutrition guidelines were based on research with Euro-
Canadians, not taking into account African-heritage cultures, body types
or lifestyles.
 Some argued that “healthy eating” is a white way of eating.
 Resisting mainstream healthy eating may be part of resisting racism.
 The healthy eating discourse which has been so strongly connected to an
“obesity epidemic” discourse in recent years has disproportionately targeted
women, people from racialized groups, Aboriginal people, immigrants, the
working class and those living in poverty.
  If watching what we eat is a sign of moral goodness and responsibility, marking
us as worthy citizens, then fatness and overweight (taken as signs of “unhealthy
eating”) are read as markers of immortality, irresponsibility and lack of moral
worth.
 In the case of long-standing racialized communities, resistance to “healthy
eating” may be – at least in part – a form of resistance to historical and ongoing
racism and colonialism.

Social Class Interactions with Healthy Eating Discourses

 Social class concerns not only income but also education and type of job, as well
as the education and employment of one’s parents and of their parents.
 While the upper class live mainly on inherited wealth, the middle class has at
least high school education and works in professional or semi-professional jobs,
considered “white-collar” work or mental labour.
 Income is related to diet.
 People with higher incomes have diets closer to mainstream healthy
eating guidelines, particularly concerning consumption of fruit, vegetables,
and dairy products.
 13% of Canadian households lack adequate and secure access to food.
 The lowest cost diets are considered least healthy, featuring calorie-
dense, shelf-stable foods (such as pasta) rather than nutrient-dense
foods.
 Low-income families and individuals are typically caught between
competing priorities, having to decide whether to use scarce dollars to pay
for food or pay rent or utilities. They are often compelled to emphasize
quantity and value over healthfulness. Lower-income shoppers are also
less likely to have access to transportation and often cannot afford the
costs associated with getting to a supermarket outside of their immediate
neighbourhood, forcing them to prioritize convenience over cost and
quality.
 The lower nutritional quality of diets identified by nutrition and health researchers
as common among low-income households is frequently assumed to be a
product of poor education or inability to prioritize health over taste and
convenience.
 Appropriate “solution” is assumed to be more or better nutritional
education.
 In fact, research shows knowledge of nutritional guidelines is widespread
among people living with low incomes; people simply cannot afford to eat
the way they would prefer.
 In the 1960s, Pierre Bourdieu argued that for lower classes, food has been a
means of sustenance, while for upper classes it has been aesthetic, both in the
presentation of food and in a focus on self-discipline to maintain a particular body
aesthetic.
 Engaging with food from a position of aesthetics, seeing food not as fuel but as
an arena of stylistic distinction, pleasure and appreciation, enables elite social
classes to demonstrate their distance from necessity.
  In contrast, the lower classes may focus on value for dollar, food that is
plentiful, tasty and filling.
 A US study found families that had fallen into poverty still emphasized nutrition
and preparing food from scratch, even though they no longer had the time or
money for those food practices.
 In their own research, they have found Canadians from all income levels
express strong knowledge of and commitment to mainstream healthy eating, but
not all can afford to indulge those food preferences.
 Healthy eating is one way to show class affiliation
 People who grew up in poverty but now live in relative affluence
tended to disparage the eating patterns with which they grew up,
emphasizing the lack of healthfulness, describing food practices as
“awful” and “disgusting”.
 However, people who grew up in relative affluence but now live in
poverty tended to speak with disdain of the food practices of others
in their current income bracket.
 Judgements concerning the healthfulness of one’s own or someone else’s diet
are employed everyday to bolster one’s own identity construction and to
distinguish from others deemed lesser in social hierarchies.

Conclusion
 Though the gendered nature of healthy eating discourses has historically limited
men’s uptake of healthy eating, since lack of interest in health, food and nutrition
help define masculinity, this may be shifting.
 Certain food practices are continually being constructed as morally
commendable (desirable, beneficial for well-being, responsible), while other
food practices are constructed as morally reprehensible (irresponsible,
disdainful and fat-promoting)

Reading 2: Cooking, Eating, Uploading: Digital Food Cultures By Lupton

Introduction
 All of these digital technologies (i.e. websites, social media, apps) work to
represent, locate, and share food-related images, ideas, beliefs, and practices in
public forums in novel ways.
 They serve to “datafy" food and food practices, rendering them into a
variety of digital data formats.
 These technologies allow for various modes of dataveillance (using
digital data to watch or monitor people) to be conducted.

Digital Technologies, Digital Data, and Popular Culture

 The use of digital technologies continually generates data about people's actions,
habits, behaviors, and preferences that are transmitted to the computing cloud
for storage and retrieval.
 All of these activities are cultural practices, and the artifacts that they
create-images, sounds, words - are cultural objects
  Not only are these digital cultural objects easily generated via the use of digital
technologies, but they can readily be shared across devices and software,
archived in digital databases, and used for many purposes.
 The term "participatory culture" has been used to describe the ways in
which digital media offer these opportunities to create and consume
content.
 While traditional media outlets have enabled participatory culture to a limited
extent, contemporary digital technologies allow people to communicate with
others easily and share material online.
 The sharing ethos is a central feature of digital participatory culture.
This ethos supports the idea that digital participation is highly social,
interactive, and collaborative.
 Developments toward participation, sharing, interactivity, and the technological
convergence of digital media generate quantities of digital data (usually referred
to as "big data") in unprecedented volume and rate of production.
 White digital participation builds on and further facilitates the sharing ethos of
internet, it has also become harnessed to the motives of commercial endeavors.
 Many business and industries have recognized the value of digital data
about cultural practices for researching consumer behavior and informing
the marketing, advertising, and distribution of goods and services.
 Users who upload content to online platforms and apps do so either for
private purposes or because they want to engage in collaborative
consumption and participate in the sharing and communal ethos end up
having their unpaid labor exploited by the developers and other
parties
 Internet companies attempt to better target advertising and send notifications to
users based on their previous consumption activities.
 These algorithmic strategies have significant implications for popular
cultural practices, in terms of the kinds of material people are offered by
companies when they go online.
 The personalization and customization of data analytics result in targeted
advertising, special offers, and recommendation systems such as those offered
by Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix to profile and categorize people's
preferences based on their online interactions, potentially shaping the future
tastes and actions of consumers.
 Algorithms, therefore, can have recursive effects, in documenting,
predicting, and manipulating people's behaviors.

Digital Food Cultures: From WEB 1.0 to 2.0

 The early years of the web (often referred to as "Web 1.0"), spanning the ten
years or so tram the mid-1990s to the middle of the first decade of the twenty-
first century, were characterized by the development of websites, discussion
forums, wikis, and blogs that provided information about food (such as offering
recipes and nutritional advice) and some limited facility for users to interact with
each other.
  Consumers were able to shop for their groceries online using several
websites
 Food activist efforts are supported by websites like Celiac.com that are offered
by the Organic Consumers Association, its tagline claiming that it is campaigning
for nothing less than "health, justice, sustainability, peace, and democracy"
 Since the emergence of the internet, food blogs have been a particularly popular
way for amateurs and professionals alike to write about food and caring, assisted
by the introduction of blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress
 By 2013, a list of most common blog categories showed food as the
eighth-most common topic, with over 2 million blogs on it,
 These blogs cover an extensive range of food-related topics,
including providing recipes and discussions of food preparation
techniques, focusing on health-related eating and nutrition and
special dietary needs related to allergies, intolerances, or ethical
food choices, discussing ways to purchase and prepare food on a
limited budget and directing attention to food-related political
issues.
 With me advent of mobile computing, social media, and apps, new ways of using
the web emerged in what is often referred to as "Web 2.0" or "the social web."
 Promoted the expansion of digital food cultures.
 Such practices as posting restaurant reviews to platforms like Yelp and
TripAdvisor have proliferated. YouTube has allowed amateur and
professional cooks alike to upload videos demonstrating cooking
techniques
 Food topics are the fourth-most popular category on the platform, after
gaming, how-to-style, and comedy videos
 While British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver was the most highly viewed
YouTube food content contributor, ne was followed by several amateur
cooks in attracting the highest number of views.
 Social media have been central to political and activist endeavors, and this is true
of civic engagement and collective activism related to food issues. Social media
like Facebook and Twitter have been taken up by food activists m draw attention
m their causes and communicate with interested parties.
 Food-related games and quizzes suggest the attraction of me ludification of
food, while restaurant review apps and food delivery apps meet people's
desire to seek out the best or most convenient dining experiences.
 These types of apps engage with the interactions between food and
entertainment and leisure cultures.
 the extreme popularity of calorie-counting apps represents the ways in
which food cultures are permeated by concepts of health and the
importance of body weight management.

Food Imagery and Embodiment In New Digital Media

 Visual images often organized by way of hashtags used to signify their content
and audience ate particularly important in the latest digital media.
 "Food selfies" are photos that people take of the food they have prepared or
purchased (with or without inclusion of the photo takers in the photos) and share
on social media platforms before or while consuming it.
 The image-focused social media platforms Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and
Snapchat have gathered momentum in the past few years, providing spaces for a
proliferation of portrayals of people cooking and eating food and of food itself.
 The hashtag #foodporn (and related tag #foodgasm) is frequently used on
these platforms when users are sharing images of food.
 "Food porn" is used to describe the attractive qualities that people seek
when visually portraying food in media such as cookbooks, television
cooking programs websites, and social media platforms.
 It suggests the performative dimensions of these images, which are
manipulated to incite feelings of desire or envy, and the emphasis on
appearance over other qualities
 #fatfoodporn to post images of and celebrate food that is culturally coded
as "fatty" or "fattening."
 Food selfies and other visual images of food and eating on social media also
frequently draw attention to the shapes and sizes of human bodies and their
assumed relative healthy statuses.
 In contrast to the food porn representations that focus on highlighting the sensory
pleasures of food, are visual images that focus on celebrating and performing
health and fitness.
 Images of food such as fresh juices, green smoothie, fruit, ancient grains, salads,
and muesli are often accompanied by those of the user in workout wear,
demonstrating her or his slim (and often very thin) Or taut and muscular body
and suggesting that this body has been achieved partially through the
consumption of these kinds of foods.
 Fat activists, for their part, use hashtags like #obeselifestyle and
#notyourgoodfatty to highlight images of themselves eating decadent food as a
way of countering fat stigma and challenging assumptions about the kind of diet
fat people "should" be consuming
 The convergences and cross-platform affordances of contemporary digital media
are evident in websites such as Foodspotting, which encourages users to take
photographs of food they enjoy (mostly when dining out) and upload them to the
site using geolocation tagging, so that other users can see where they purchased
the food.
 The platform also offers a blog and an app and encourages Instagram
users to tag photos with the #foodspotting hashtag.
 All of these representations of earing practices related to body size involve
people voluntarily displaying their eating practices and bodies.
 For those who seek to perform and display clean eating, slimness,
physical fitness, or extreme thinness of their flesh, the association made
between food, health, and embodiment is that of restriction, control, and
self-discipline
  In contrast, food porn aficionados and fat activists concentrate on celebrating
excess and the carnivalesque potential of enjoying eating the kinds of food that
are culturally coded as fattening, unhealthy, only for special occasions, or junk.
 Images of "unclean" "junk" foods are juxtaposed with burgeoning fleshy
bodies, drawing attention to and celebrating the direct association that is
typically made between fatty foods and fat bodies.

Big Food Data

 Another mode of digital surveillance afforded by new media involves
dataveillance using big food data
 Analysis of the vast data sets generated by social media content referring to food
can identify aspects of the social, cultural, temporal, and geographical patterns
and differences in consumption and preferences.
 Apps provide a major way by which developers elicit personal information from
users that they can then use for their own purposes.
 Although many apps do not directly require users co input personal data,
when people sign up to download apps they are frequently asked by the
developers to consent to share personal details like their gender, birth
dare, contact list, or geolocation
 Data uploaded to geolocational platforms and apps can identify
other elements of popular food cultures
 A study of Foursquare restaurant check-ins found that that people living in
counrries that are geographically close often share food preferences. In some
cases, however, the correlation was stronger with countries further away: for
example, the correlation of drinking practices between Brazil and France was
stronger than between England and France.
 Changes over time in food trends can also be identified in big food data sets. The
most popular search engine by far is Google Search.
 It offers a tool, Google Trends, which allows for the tracking of searches
conducted by users over time. Google uses its own data to generate
reports about search trends.
 Google noted that several broader trends are apparent in these data. One is the
interest in functional foods. This analysis showed that the term "best foods for ...
" has increased in volume, often followed by such words as "skin," "energy,"
"acid reflux," "your brain" and "gym workout." This trend suggests that
Google Search users have become more interested in the functional uses of food
over the past decade or so.
 Foods that have become culturally designed as "healthy" or even as
"superfoods" have also attracted far more attention-turmeric, apple cider
vinegar, avocado oil, bitter melon, and kefir are among the foodstuffs receiving a
higher volume of searches
 In the context of digital data economy, focus has turned to ways of harvesting or
scraping data to provide insights into populations' food preferences and practices
 Researchers have viewed social media content and other forms of online
interactions as ways of researching how members of the public are engaging
 in preventive health, health promotion, or self-management activities in relation
to their diet.
 The possibilities of using digital technologies to generate information by
crowdsourcing or citizen science projects have also been explored. Some of
these projects are attempts to develop better databases for public health or food
activist initiatives.
 More often, however, big food data analytics are turned to commercial
endeavors.
 The report suggests that the knowledge of which foodstuffs are trending
and what related information users are looking for can be employed to
direct consumers' attention to them via marketing strategies.
 Food industry companies are now urged to exploit the types of information
that consumers freely generate on social media sites for competitive
analysis, branding, and marketing strategies.
 Marketing companies and food-related industries are attempting to use the digital
data generated by online interactions to better target and promote their products.
 This strategy is evident in McDonald's Canada effort to research tweets
about coffee by Canadians. It found that people tweeted most about
coffee on Wednesdays and in the month of March. The company used
these data in their promotional tweets, as it the following tweet: "Did you
know Canadians tweet most about #coffee on Wednesdays, Grab a
#FreeCoffee today and join the conversation!"
 Market research companies have been at the forefront of developing apps
designee to monitor consumer food behavior. Using these apps, they can recruit
people to collect information on their shopping habits in real-time or to answer
questions on products as they move around a supermarket.
 In the effort to "earn" public attention, food manufacturers have
encouraged consumers to download recipes using their products, cook the
food, take a photo of the finished product, and then upload to Instagram in
a way of achieving free publicity for their products.
 Developers often fail to inform users that their data are available to third parties
 Cloud computing provides great opportunities for ease of data storage, sharing
and access from diverse locations. However, it also poses significant data
privacy and storage risks.
 During transmission and storage, many opportunities exist for data
leakage breaches, and hacking to occur.
 Geolocation data recorded and emitted by mobile devices and apps can
reveal to others the places people have visited and what their patterns of
movements are, leaving them open to potential criminal! harms.
 Personal data, therefore, have a "capacity for betrayal". They can reveal more
about people to others than they may want.

Conclusion
 The affordances of digital technologies, in datafying phenomena and rendering
them into digital formats, generate new ways of representing and discussing
food. Such aspects as the visual properties of food and consuming bodies, the
 geolocation of sites in which food is prepared, purchased, and consumed, and
the quantification of food and bodies are brought to the fore in digital food
cultures.
 The proliferation and unceasing generation of digital data about food and
eating is also a distinctive feature of new digital food cultures
 Using digital technologies, people are able to monitor and reflect on their habits
and preferences and share these with others. They can use digital data to
perform aspects of selfhood and social and cultural belonging. They are able to
step outside traditional boundaries that delineate who are considered to be the
expert voices in food preparation and nutrition and engage in aesthetic practices
related co food choice and consumption that previously were the preserve of
traditional media outlets.

Module Two: The What and How of “Healthy Eating”

When Canadians are asked about healthy eating, they often refer to Canada’s Food
Guide. We may likely take it to represent facts about nutrition and how to eat well
- The guide is updated every 5-10 years
- Differences between the food guides suggest that there are no absolute facts
about healthy eating, only “discourses” that change over time and place

The Social Construction of Healthy Eating: Introduction

- Healthy eating as a discourse
o This is the same as saying that ideas about healthy eating are socially
constructed
- Discourse: is a way of understanding an issue that circulates through a society
and is enacted through everyday practices
- Healthy Eating Discourse: is a particular way of understanding healthy eating
that circulates through society and is reproduced (and sometimes resisted)
through people’s eating practices
- Discourses are time and place specific
- To say that healthy eating is a socially constructed discourse means that there
are no absolute facts or truths about what kind of diet is best for our health
o Rather certain ideas get labelled as facts or truther in certain places and
times

The Proliferation of Discourses

- Discourses such as health discourses, are created and influenced by
government directives, the media (and pop culture) and interactions between
individuals
o To elaborate, discourses are created in a particular time period in a
particular society by people who are thought to be experts, and then
disseminated by government, media, and popular culture
o Then they are further circulated in conversations between friends and
family elsewhere, such as between doctors and patients
o They are also reinforced through people’s actions and behaviours
Competing Discourses
- There is usually more than one discourse about an issue that circulate in a
particular society at the same time
- These discourses compete with each other for acceptable, each touting itself as
the “truth”
- Scholars tend to label discourses that are most popular in a society (believed by
majority of people) as “mainstream” and discourses that are less popular
(accepted by a smaller number of people as “alternative”

Healthy Eating Discourses in Vancouver

- Mainstream: emphasis on eating fruits and vegetables, grains, and low-fat
proteins (similar to Canada’s Food Guide)
o All ethno-cultural groups in the study
- Traditional: emphasis on homemade foods, and meat as an important
component of healthy meals
o Mainly (older) African-Nova Scotians and Punjabi-British Columbians
some European-Nova Scotians
- Alternative: emphasis on eating organic and avoiding agri-food chemicals and
toxins
o Not specified
- Complementary/Ethical: emphasis on the environment, ethical treatment of
animals and relationships with local people
o Mainly European-British Columbians
- In Vancouver and Halifax, there was a profound pattern in the interviews in terms
of which ethno-cultural group tended to adhere to which of these discourses
- The mainstream discourse is more common, but this does not mean it is more
correct
- For sociologists, all of the discourses are socially constructed and worth of
scrutiny

Nutritionism: From Food to Nutrients

- Earlier decades of the 20th century we thought of meals as made up of different
types of foods – vegetables, meat, dairy products etc. – in recent decades, we
tend to think of meals as made up of different nutritional components – calories,
fat, vitamins etc.
- Some food activists, such as food journalist Michael Pollan, argue that this shift
in food discourse has actually been harmful to our health
- Nutritionism: a conceptualization of food that reduces the value and benefits of
food to its nutrient profile, thereby distancing eaters from the places and
contexts in which food is produced
- Lupton argues that these social media hashtags on food tend to focus attention
on eating and body size in ways that discount the other cultural associations we
have with foods
 o This in turn as an impact on how food is marketed to us and the type of
data that marketers collect from our social media interactions
(dataveillance)
- Two reasons that scholars are critical of nutritionsim:
o The abundant information we now have about the components of food is
confusing, hard to remember or cumberstone to put into practice
o Food has many other functions in society than promoting health, as we
talked about in module 1. Eating, shopping and growing food can be
pleasurable and satisfying. It can be a building block of friendship, family,
community and identity. Thinking about food only in terms of its nutrients
can be stressful and taxing

From Nutritionism to Eating “Real” Food

- Food journalist Michael Pollan is one of the most vocal opponents of nutritionism
- He argues that because of nurtitionism, food information is now too confusing
and cumbersome for people to realistically consider it for their diets

Healthy Eating as an Individual Responsibility

- There are many factors beyond an individual’s control that can affect the
healthiness of their diet
- There are larger structural factors that need to be considered in discussion of
healthy diets

Healthy Food Access and Affordability

- There’s an issue of physical access to healthy foods
- Food desserts: geographic areas with insufficient numbers of stores and other
food related facilities that provide access to fresh and healthy foods
- Typically, a neighbourhood is defined as a food dessert if:
o Resident have to go more than 1km to get to a grocery store
o Residents have limited access to a vehicle (and have to walk, bike or use
public transportation to go food shopping)
- The term food swamp has also been used in analyzing food access
o These analyses focus on health and neighbourhood characteristics in area
with a high density of fast food and convenience stores relative to healthy
food options
- Food desserts are often located in low income communities
o Low income communities are typically home to large numbers of residents
of colour, and the first nations reserves are often food desserts
o The concept of food desserts provides evidence of income and race
inequality in food access
- Food access is affected by a host of factors – including income, mobility,
transportation, walkability – that create a “layering of disadvantages”

Age, Ethno-racial Background, and Healthy Eating

- The influence of identity on diets – things like age, gender, and immigration
 - The desire to belong to a certain age group, gender, nationality, or ethno-racial
background influences what people want or feel they are supposed to eat

Age and Life Stage

- Many studies show that teenagers eat junk or fast food as a way of fitting in
- Many teens, especially boys, see healthy eating as an adult preoccupation –
something teenagers just don’t do
- Immigrant teens, especially visible minorities, might feel even more pressure to
eat fats or processed foods to fit in, particularly during weekday lunches when
they’re surrounded by peers
- Teens might see their home food as an unwanted marker of difference
- As adults, such teens might come to embrace traditional foods from their
backgrounds as they become more secure in their identities

Ethno-racial Background
- People not only identify with others of the same age but they also identify as
members of a particular race or ethno-cultural background
- This can also have an influence on the healthfulness of their diets
- For example, from the video, the interviewees in the film talked about an African-
American identification with “soul food”
o They saw eating soul food as a part of being black or a way of connecting
to African-American history with positive mental health outcomes
o Others pointed out that the real problem for health is not soul food but
rather, the fact that African Americans tend to live in food desserts
- Ideas about a healthy body type also vary by cultural background
o Many black women from this study suggested that being too thin was
unhealthy

Employment Culture and Household Demographics

- Peoples eating habits are constrained by where they live and how much money
they have
- They are also shaped by people group affiliations
- One in five household now has a full-time homemaker
- Working class families are affected by the constraints of both income and the
time available to spend on food preparation
- This means that even though people want to eat heathy and have the skills to do
so, they are often constrained by their job and other life responsibilities from
spending much time cooking
- We can recognize that employment conditions and household demographics
have some influence on people’s food habits

WEEK THREE

Chapter Three: You are what you Eat; Enjoying (and Transforming) Food Culture

- It has become a truism that culture shapes how we eat

 - Culture tells us how meals are prepared, what foods are enjoyable, and which
are taboo
- Culture is the linchpin between the physical, material dimension of food and its
more ephemeral existence as norms, ideals and phobias
- Culture seems an obvious and important influence on our food choices, but what
exactly do we mean by culture?
- Food culture is nebulous
o It’s even more perplexing when we consider the highly individualizes ideas
of eating that dominate the foodscape
- Culture: human processes of meaning-making generating artifacts, categories,
norms, values, practices, rituals, symbols, worldviews, ideas, ideologies, and
discourse
o Meaning making is how social interactions convey meaning and how we
interpret meaning

Using and Being used by Food Culture

- Cultural tool kits developed by sociologist Ann Swidler

o Seeing culture as a tool kits avoids seeing people as either manipulated
by culture or entirely free agents
o Swidler argues that culture should be viewed as a collection of culturally
defined elements that make up a tool kit of repertoire
o By viewing culture this way, scholars can appreciate the complex ways
culture is used by individuals in daily life
 Cultural sociologists have encouraged scholars to move away from
an idea of culture as a single, unified, monolithic “thing” that
determines social action
- How the does culture work at a less conscious level to influence our food
choices?
o The concept of habitus reflects how certain tastes and preferences
become internalized and converted into a disposition that generate
meaningful practices and meaning giving perceptions
o Bourdieu noted that the habitus typically translates people’s social class
into their embodied taste preferences that may give them advantages later
on in life
o A critique of the habitus concept is its black box quality: how do we know if
this is how culture works and what processes are involved in the
construction of habitus
- Research on culture, cognition, and consciousness is important for food
scholarship because it provides insights on how our food choices may not always
be processed at a fully conscious, discursive level
o Put simply what we eat may be based more on habits, hunches and
emotional associations than reasoned arguments
- Schemas are taken for granted frameworks for understanding our place in
society
 o They’re not actively deployed like cultural tools, but represent deep,
largely unconscious networks of neural associations that facilitate
perception, interpretation and action
o Schemas emerge from experience and allow people to act in more
automatic ways in their daily lives
o Schemas are connected to our emotions and motivate actions even if they
are not consciously articulated
o Cultural schemas also influence food behaviours at less conscious levels
o We argue that consumer culture, with all of its attendant institutions,
norms, markets, and habits, is a central and powerful influence on the
cultural schemas shaping food choices
o Consumer culture tends to focus on individual consumer choices as a
central terrain for cultivating individual pleasures, identities, and the good
life in general
o For grocery shopping, consumers believe that the ideal experience should
be aesthetically pleasing, be convenient, involve a wide range of choices,
and be relatively cheap

Challenging and Transforming the Dominant Food Culture: The Ethical

Foodscape

- Food culture is continuously evolving

- The process of social critique and market adaptation is a fundamental feature of
the foodscape
- The foodscape is a concept that captures the ways we understand food
consumption as well as our relationship to the material reality of food systems
- In the ethical foodscape, food is not simply considered an individual right but is
being connected to collective issues like sustainability, animal welfare, hunger,
labour rights, and social justice
- Philosopher Kate Soper identifies possibilities for transforming the food system
through cultural challenges with her concept of alternative hedonism
o The idea of alternative hedonism involves new conceptions of the good life
and finding pleasure in alternative ways of living – like biking or eating
home cooked meals from your garden
o Alternative hedonism critiques commodity solutions and draws attention to
consumer dissatisfaction with high-consumption lifestyles
o Soper argues that you have to offer people some kind of pleasure if you
want to attract them to make more sustainable, humane, socially just food
choices
- The dominant consumer culture actively shapes our schemas of food and food
shopping, but it is not unchallenged or static

Alternative Hedonism: coined by philosopher Kate Soper, the term refers to the idea
that alternative forms of consumption are not only motivated by altruistic concerns and
desire for “a better world” – they can also be motivated by the self-interested pleasures
of consuming differently. For example, eating a meal prepared with local foods appeals
to an ethical concern for how food is produced, but also to the pleasures of conviviality
and of taking the time to prepare and enjoy a homemade meal.
Food Culture in Action: Whole Foods Market and Karma Co-op

- Based on interpretive reading of interviews with shoppers at both stores, we

explore the ways deliberative food consciousness can contradict automatic
thoughts, habits, and feelings about food shopping
- Whole foods market: enjoying the pleasures of consumer culture (sometimes
guilty)
o Consumer pleasure is central to the WFM shopping experience
o Most shoppers interviewed mentioned the aesthetic appeal of WFM and
emphasized the allure of an enjoyable and attractive shopping setting: the
cleanliness, open layout, natural lighting, extensive selection, and the
overall play of colours and products were all part of participants’
pleasurable experience
o A particularly prominent element of consumer culture at WFM is the idea
of choice, an ideal that is central to modern consumer culture
o Several shoppers suggested that the selection at WFM was more
important than sourcing ethical products
 These consumers did not deliberately seek out unethical products,
nor do we want to suggest that interviewees were heartless
o Another key element of cultural schemas around food shopping expressed
in our interviews was the valuation of a luxurious and elite shopping
experiencing
o Interviewees acknowledged their attraction to WFM’s consumer pleasures
while identifying ambiguities and contradictions
o Food practices are shaped by influential cultural schemas linked to
consumer culture (and related ideals of choice, luxury, and escape) and
generate behaviours and pleasures that can contradict some consumers’
political and ethical beliefs
o Feelings of guilt and anxiety were the by-products of a tension between
consumer pleasures intuitively valued at WFM and normative
commitments articulates more deliberately at the level of discursive
consciousness
o The ambiguity expressed by some WFM consumers suggest that
engagement with food culture is more complicated than a simple
enjoyment of consumer pleasures
o Consumers’ engagement with food culture involves multiple (often
competing) motivations, values, and norms
- Resistance, Shopping Deliberately, and Alternative Hedonism: Karma Co-op
o Compared to WFM, Karma Co-op is a much smaller, more democratic,
and humbler market actor in ethical foodscape
o Its situated in a back alley in the Annex neighbourhood in downtown
Toronto
 o Despite its smaller size Karma stocks many staples of health conscious
and green lifestyles
o Karma co-op has existed in the guise since 1972 and currently has about
1000 active member households
o Karma shoppers’ purposeful decisions to participate in and promote a
different kind of food culture are sustained by the alternatively hedonistic
pleasures they experience while shopping
o A majority of the Karma shoppers interviewed expressed concerns about
social and environmental issues in the food system and viewed karma as
a more ethical option that conventional grocery stores
o Shopping at Karma was also described by members as a way to avoid the
feeling of manipulation in conventional shopping contexts and reclaim a
sense of control
o Shopping at Karma involves engaging in the more labour-intensive food
culture on offer at Karma through membership privileges and
responsibilities
o Their participation in Karma involved a relatively high level of deliberate
decision making, and fewer automatic, “non-thinking” pleasures that feel
uncomfortable or contradictory
o A key aspect of alternative hedonism is the idea that disaffected
consumers are not simply motivated by the moralistic satisfaction of “doing
the right thing”, but that consuming in an “alternative” way generate new
pleasures that sustain greener lifestyles
o Alternative hedonism draws attention not only to the pleasures obtained
from new forms of consumption but also to the idea that non-consumption
is gratifying
o Community and connection were big reasons for shopping at Karma
o Karma members emphasized the social rather than the aesthetic qualities
of the shopping environment
o Peoples account of why they shop at Karma is evident at the level of
deliberative consciousness – the intentional decision to shop differently
and avoid big box grocery stories – but is also based on pleasures
experienced at the level of practical consciousness
o While the majority of respondents expressed positive feelings about
shopping at Karma, some comments show that consumer culture and the
cultural schemas around food and food shopping – expectations of
convenience, bountiful selection, and inexpensive meat – still reside in the
cultural consciousness of Karma members

Conclusion

- Building a more sustainable and equitable food system is an economic and

political as well as cultural project
- Food culture both enables and constrains our eating practices
 - The cultural schemas of a dominant consumer culture exert tremendous
influence on food habits, desires, and preferences – often in ways that reside at
the level of practical consciousness, and this are not fully examined or articulated
by consumers
- Peoples food tastes are shaped by their classed upbringing and their habitus
- Food consumers do not live in a bubble of rational economic decision making
- Alternative hedonism is a hopeful sign in the ethical foodscape, and necessary
fuel sustaining efforts to build a more sustainable, social just food culture

Module Three: Food, Culture, and Shopping

- When we think about food culture, we often think of ethno-cultural background

- We look at how culture shapes us and how we shape it

What is Culture?

- Culture refers to things like knowledge, language, values, customs, and material
objects that circulate in a group or society
o Culture is consciously passed on from one generation to the next through
parenting and education
o It is also unconsciously absorbed and reproduced through things like
everyday practices, conversations, actions, popular culture, and the media
- How does culture influence food shopping?
o Less obvious and often-unconscious influence on all of us is capitalist
consumer culture
o As member of a capitalist society, we have certain expectations about the
shopping experience
o This is sometime more obvious if our expectations are not met
- Capitalist consumer values/principles:
o Variety/choice
 A store in which there is only one brand available of each item
o Predictability
 A system where you pay a certain amount for a weekly basket of
vegetables, but you don’t know ahead of time how many of what
kind of vegetable you will get
o Consistency
 A store in which produce is only available when it is in season
locally
o Cost-effectiveness
 A vendor that prices products based on what he or she needs to
make ends meet rather than what the market price is
o Convenience
 a store where there is no place to park a car
- The point is we have expectations about shopping from our larger culture that we
are often not aware of
 - Some of these principles have been challenged recently by alternative food
organizations or operations such as farmers’ market, community supported
agriculture operations, and food co-ops, but they still have a firm hold in our
society

Culture Shapes Us

- Cultural schemas: unconscious networks of neural associations that shape our

habits, including our food habits
o They are internalized through everyday experience in our culture and are
activated in certain situations to motivate our behaviour
- In a capitalist consumer culture like ours, one of the cultural schemas that we
might internalize is that our needs and desires can be fulfilled through the
purchase of commodities
- Foods can be co-modified valued more for the values they represent, than the
actual properties of the foods themselves
- We also internalize cultural schemas around shopping – such as the notion that
shopping and products should be convenient, predictable, consistent, cost-
effective, and should involve choice/variety
- Whole foods reinforce the idea that the principles of convenience, predictability,
consistency, cost effectiveness, and variety are important
o This in turn reinforces these principles in our neural networks
- Karma Co-op differs from Whole Foods in many ways because it is a non-profit
co-op with an environmental, social, and health mission
- Over the examination of these two stores it shows that dominant cultural
schemas in capitalist consumer culture are reinforces in some places (e.g.,
conventional for-profit stores as well as alternative organizations) and challenged
in others (e.g., alternative food organization like co-ops)
- Since most people shop at conventional stores, they are most often exposed to
cultural schemas that promote convenience, predictability, consistency, cost-
effectiveness, and variety
o Thus, most people come to internalize these capitalist consumer values as
desirable and good
o This is one way in which culture influences us

We Shape Culture

- There are many pleasurable and beneficial aspects to capitalist consumer culture
- This is one reason most of us agree to live in such culture and adhere to the
values of convenience, predictability, consistency, cost-effectiveness, and variety
- Having variety in food for example allows us to experience the sensual pleasure
of different tastes, smells, and textures
- If our favourite grocery store has a predictable list of products, we can count on
buying those products whenever we want or need them
- If a store has convenient hours, we can go shopping whenever it suits our
schedule
 - On the other hand, environments and social justice activists say that capitalist
consumer values promote environmental damage, social injustice, and human
health problems
o Consider the value of variety: if people expect grocery stores to carry all
types of products regardless of the season, a significant amount of global
imports is required because such variety can’t be grown or produced
locally
o Global imports in turn, can contribute to climate change because of long-
distance transport
o Global imports can also undermine the livelihoods of local varieties (which
often happens if imported varieties are cheaper), then local farmers suffer
financially
- Alternative hedonism: the idea that alternative forms of consumption (e.g.,
buying local, biking instead of driving, reusing items instead of buying new ones
etc.) are motivated not only by altruistic concerns and a desire for ‘a better world’
– they can be motivated by the self centered pleasure of consuming differently
- Alternative consumption (including “ethical eating”) can feel good to people both
because they feel they are improving the world and because alternative
consumption can be pleasurable in itself
- The word hedonism refers to pleasure, which means that “alternative hedonists”
enjoy different kind of pleasure than are typically emphasized in consumer
culture
- Since capitalist consumerism has negative consequences, such as traffic jams
on ugly highways, biking can feel like a pleasurable escape. Bikers might also
enjoy parts of the experience like feeling the wind in their hair, hearing the birds
sing, or becoming invigorates through outdoor physical exercise
- Some Karma Co-op shoppers Johnston and Cappeliez interviewed might be
considered alternative hedonists because they felt alternative pleasures around
food shopping that revolved around social connections (e.g., feeling “at home” in
a community of like-minded people or seeing “smiling faces”), not the typical
pleasures of capitalist consumer culture

Pleasure and Consumption

- People who pay attention to environmental, health, and social justice issues are
often portrayed as sacrificing themselves for the greater good.
- The idea is that they do without convenience, predictability, consistency, cost-
effectiveness, variety, and other things such as pleasure in order to live out their
values
- Alternative hedonism counters stereotypes and helps us to see how pleasure
and ethics can be combined
- Cultivating alternative or non-consumer pleasures is one way that alternative
hedonists influence culture

Changing Food Culture: Conscious and Unconscious Processes

 - Discursive consciousness refers to the ideas people have about their own
actions and decisions – ideas that people are conscious of and can fairly easily
articulate (express or talk about)
o One way to remember this term is to think about the word discourse,
which sometimes refers to conversation
- Practical consciousness refers to intuitive or unconscious ideas that drive
decisions and actions that people aren’t necessarily able to express or explain
o These ideas are so embedded in our habits or ways of thinking that we
usually aren’t aware of them
o Practical consciousness ties in well with the idea of cultural schemas
o Cultural schemas are part of what makes up our practical consciousness
- Peoples food habits are driven by both discursive and practical consciousness
- Johnston and Cappeliez argue that, if we want to change food culture, we need
to change both people’s discursive consciousness and their practical
consciousness. In other words, if we want the food system to become more
sustainable and socially just, we need to help people not only decide
consciously that they want to eat and shop in environmental and socially just
ways but also feel unconsciously that they benefit from eating and shopping in
these ways
- To make this idea more concrete, think about the members of Karma Co-op
interviewed by Johnston and fooCappeliez. Many Karma Co-op shoppers wanted
to shop at Karma for political/ethical reasons (discursive consciousness), but
they also “just felt good” there (practical consciousness). For Johnston and
Cappeliez, this is a positive trend toward improving the food system. The role of
practical consciousness in shifting the food system is also supported by other
research on the reasons for growing citizen support for alternative food retail
markets, such as farmers market. In these studies, consumer support farmers
markets corresponds with a value for the markets' contribution to a "sense of
community" rather than any particular attributes of the food itself

Changing Food Culture: Food Taboos

- A food taboo is the avoidance of a particular plan or animal as food, the thought
of which is often associated with revulsion or repugnance
o In mainstream Canadian culture, things like insect and cat and dog meat
are typically taboo foods
o A food is taboo, we assume, because it is naturally disgusting to
everybody

Classification: “Food” and “Not food”

- Sociologists and anthropologists point out that food taboos rarely have to do with
the food itself or with a natural human repugnance around eating certain things.
Rather, food taboos are more about classification. Every culture has a category
for “food” and “not food.” Interestingly, some foods that are taboo in a culture are
very similar appearance-wise to foods that aren’t taboo in that same culture. For
 example, crickets—classified as “not food” in our culture—are very similar to
shrimp, which are classified as “food.” In other words, classifications are not
necessarily based on the nature of the food itself. In fact, food taboos are often
felt viscerally and emotionally rather than because of conscious reasoning. If you
ask a Canadian why they don’t eat insects, they may simply say, “Because
they’re gross!” But how objectively “gross” are they if they are eaten in many
other parts of the world?

Classification: “Us” and “Them”

- This brings us to a second type of classification arising from food taboos. If in

mainstream Canadian culture, cats, dogs and insects are seen as “not food,”
then people who do eat these things are seen as “weird” or “strange”—
essentially “not like us.” Put differently, food taboos are a way for people to
shape their identities, to define themselves (“us”) in relation to others (“them”) 

Religious Food Taboos

- Food taboos resulting from religious directives are perhaps more noticeable than
general food taboos in Canadian culture. You are probably familiar with the
Muslim and Jewish prohibitions against eating pork. According to Jewish law,
animals are permitted as food if they (1) chew cud and (2) have cloven hooves.
Since pigs do not chew cud, they are forbidden as food. In the Muslim tradition,
pork is considered harmful to eat, and it is stated in the Qur’an (2:173) that “the
flesh of swine” is forbidden
- Some argue that religious food taboos are divinely inspired. They are simply the
word of God. Others, especially sociologists and anthropologists, suggest that
religious food taboos may have other explanations or origins. Above, we talked
about the social function of taboos. They help define the “in” group and the “out”
group. Religious food taboos can also serve this function. Particular foods might
also become taboo in a religion because of the health benefits of avoiding these
foods. Pork, for example, has been associated with parasites, high blood
pressure, rheumatism, arthritis, boils, asthma, and eczema 
- There may also be economic or material benefits to food taboos. American
anthropologist Marvin Harris is famous for his cultural-materialist perspective on
pork taboos. For him, pork was prohibited in some regions because pigs were
difficult to keep. They competed with humans for food and water and could not
be herded (Harris, 1985). This said, people may not be aware of these non-
religious benefits of food taboos. Food taboos may serve social, health, and
economic functions but still be regarded as divinely inspired
- In Harris’s theory of cultural materialism, social and cultural life arises from
people finding practical solutions to their daily problems. In other words, culture
has a utilitarian basis

Food Taboos: Sustainable Urban Food Production

 - A proposal by McGill University PhD student Jakub Dzamba shows that food
taboos can have implications on food system change
- Dzamba designed a system for cricket farming, which he proposes can help feed
food-insecure families (i.e., families who don’t have enough to eat). He promotes
his system as a very efficient way of producing nutritious, high-protein food in
urban centres

Changing Food Culture: Food as Fetish

- Another aspect of food culture that has an influence on sustainability and social
justice in the food system is the Marxist idea of the commodity as a fetish
- The 19th century German political-economic philosopher Karl Marx was
interested in capitalism and, in particular, how it created a class system dividing
those who owned companies (the capitalist or upper class) and those who
worked in these companies (the proletariat or lower class). One of his main
questions was why the proletariat class didn’t revolt even though they suffered
class inequalities.
- One of his theories, which applies well to the food system, is the idea of
commodities—items we buy on the market—as fetishes
- To understand the term fetish, we need to remember that, in Marx’s
time, fetish mainly referred to religious objects
- Objects that are believed to have special powers beyond their material form. For
example, a religious fetish might be thought to contain the spirit of a god or have
god-like powers
- For Marx, commodities in a capitalist system (in today’s world, they include
objects such as cars, iPods, and oranges) are like religious fetishes in that we
treat them as though they have power or value in themselves (Marx, 1867).
We sometimes even revere them like religious fetishes.
- This way of treating or seeing commodities is actually misleading, Marx argued.
The real value of commodities, he claimed, comes not from the commodities
themselves, but from the labour that goes into producing them
- The important issue for Marx was that, when commodities become fetishized in
capitalism—when we see cars, iPods, and oranges as valuable in of themselves
—we fail to recognize the labour that made them possible. Even more
importantly, we fail to see the unequal social relations that went into their
production (e.g., the income and power divide between company owners and
workers). And if we are blind to these unequal relations, we do little to oppose
them.

De-fetishization

- Although the fetishization of food products is common in capitalism, alternative

food organizations and projects have begun to de-fetishize food products.
Farmers’ markets and food certified by the international Fair Trade
organization are two examples of this. If people see the farmer face-to-face at a
market or see a Fair Trade label, they are more likely to think about the labour
 behind the products they are buying. They might then want to take action against
social injustice in the food system, whether in a small way—like continuing to
shop at alternative venues and buy fair trade products—or in a larger way—like
campaigning for migrant workers' rights. For this reason, some food activists
believe that de-fetishization is part of food system transformation.

Fetishization and Culture

- Capitalism fetishizes products, we don’t tend to see the labour behind the food
products that we buy (i.e., culture shapes us). But food activists are creating new
organizations and projects where food is de-fetishized. This can raise awareness
about issues such as farm worker exploitation (i.e., we shape culture).

WEEK FOUR
Chapter Six: Still Hungry for a Feminist Food Studies

Introduction
- Despite important changes in the gendered division of household labour, women
continue to perform the majority of foodwork in Canadian families and tend to do
certain types of foodwork, such as planning more than men do.
- women generally care more about food than men do, because there is so much
in stake for women in terms of their identities as women, mothers, consumers,
and citizen who meet – or fail to meet – dominant social experiment.

A Feminist Lens on Food Studies

- Although feminists have long had an interest in food related topics, much feminist
food scholarship has been conducted outside of the new interdisciplinary field of
food studies and within more traditional disciplines – critique thinness.
- feminist sociologists and anthropologists have analyzed domestic foodwork as an
axis of oppression in the gendered division of labour, in which women’s work in
social reproduction is largely invisible, unpaid, and undervalued.
- Given the association between foodwork and women’s oppression, which was
highlighted in the 60s & 70s, some feminists spurned scholarly analyzed of food
and rejected domestic foodwork in their personal lives
- feminist food scholarship is not always taken seriously, preventing feminist
analyzed of food and identity from gaining entry to a scholarly venue.
- feminist scholars have both embraced and avoided food-related scholarship, but
the work that has been produced has not always considered “food studies”.
- food studies scholarship has often neglected gender analysis
- Besasco argues that the oversight of critical analyses of food lies in a historical
context in which “women have been hesitant to write on food topics for fear of
being released to a pink ghetto of domestic scholarship, while men have avoided
the topic because they fear their work will be dismissed as scholarship life.
- food movement and unreflexive food scholarship may in fact exacerbate gender
inequities.
o want us to make food from scratch but Mcdonald’s helps feminists work.
 - feminist analyses of food seek to expose, critique, and ultimately change the
systems of power that lead to gender oppression as it intersects with racism,
classism, homophobia etc – intersectionality.
- intersectionality: urges scholars to attend to the way in which various
oppressions are interwoven and produce unique experiences of subjugation for
different individuals and groups.

Moral Imperatives of Food and Eating

- Coveney: “good food requires one to show less concern with the physical
pleasure of eating, and more interest in the good health that results from our
dietary habits.
- food in Canadian Culture is looked at through nutritionism.
- nutritionism: food roles in promoting bodily health is more important than any
other.
o promotes a simplistic way of engaging with food that ignores its multiple
symbolic dimension, such as those relating to family, community and
ethnic identity.
o eating and feeding others has taken on a specific, singular, moralistic
purpose.
- to challenge nutritionism, we encourage a critical, feminist theoretical standpoint
for food studies scholars informed by related perspectives from food studies and
critical dietics
- a nutricentric person is not genderless but must be understood as situated within
various intersecting forms of oppression that texture their experiences of food
and eating as well as their bodies

Emerging Theories of the Body: Fatness and Embodiement

- Fat studies also exposes the dominant discourse on the body as racist/classist.
- scholars of fat studies and critical dietics urge us to resist the wave of fat panic
that has been buttressed by public health policy – think of the UK sugar tax.
o it is the feminists heartfelt, well-meaning desired to help low income
minority groups, especially women and children, who have poor access to
fresh food and recreational facilities, and who have higher rates of fatness.
- obesity: want to be caring and compassionate but can lead to marginalization.

Gender and Unpaid Work

Unpaid Foodwork and the Public Private Dichotomy
- the ideological dichotomy of public and private spheres mirrors dominant gender
ideologies and underpins the gendered division of labour – including foodworks.
- Dominant gender ideologies associate men and the public sphere with
independence power, paid employment, and financial support of the family –
women and the private spheres are coupled with dependence, vulnerability,
caregiving, and feeding the family
o private is less important than public sphere
- real work is considered remunerated like in the public sphere – unlike foodwork
 o disregard for foodwork as real work renders the persons held responsible
for it (women) of less consequence than those who are ideologically
positioned as family breadwinners
- Unpaid foodwork involves tasks and processes carried out in the public sphere
and which influence and are influenced by it – budgeting, purchasing, transport
o think of a holiday meal/bake sale – more than just making food but has
meaning
- housework is getting more equitable
- 4 main theories that explain women’s larger contribution to housework
o relative resources, time constraints, gender ideology, and gender
construction
o either “pragmatic strategies” and “patriarchal dynamics”
- Pragmatic Strategies: relative resources and time constraints
o cohabiting couples rationally allocate distribution of household work based
on relative material and social resources and availability
- Relative Resource Theory: based on the idea that in the interests of maximizing
available resources, the partner with greater social economic status will get out of
chores
- Time Constraints: more paid work is equal to unpaid work for both men and
women
o issue with these theories is that neither attends to the underlying issue
that underpins the inequitable distribution of unpaid work – do not equally
impact men’s and women’s participation in household work.
- Gender Ideology Theory: gender is not determined at birth but by socialization
experiences is fixed at an early age – if you have a traditional gender ideology,
women will do more work – liberal attitudes = shared work
- Gender Construction Theory: sees as an impermanent aspect of identity that is
continuously produced through individual’s everyday activities – performing
household work is beyond significant beyond individual’s socioeconomic worth,
availability or ideological values because it is implicated in the very constitution of
individual’s gender identity.

Foodwork and Gender as Iterative Processes

- gender is a matter of an individual’s everyday activities and interactions with their
social environments.
- for women unpaid foodwork roles is a central part of their gender.
- men don’t have that same negative vibe because they create a “leisurely vibe” to
cooking.
- for women creating “proper meals” – identity
- food discourse: food make as pleasure, knowledge and expertise (men)
Problematic view for women who view it as caring for family.
- highlight of intersectionality: Punjabi (foodwork is women work); African and
Europeans (women have more time)
- economics and marginalized: Gullan and Indians used food to set themselves
apart from their colonizers.
 o marginalization: less food and poor quality of food – isn’t a pleasure

Module Four: Food and Gender

What is “Foodwork”?
- Foodwork: the efforts involved in food production, procurement, preparation,
service, and clean up. It may be paid (as employment) or unpaid (in the
household)
- In this session, we're going to focus on unpaid domestic (household) foodwork.
- Let's think about household foodwork for a moment. Since it has historically been
the domain of women in most cultures, in the private space of the home, it tends
to receive only limited attention. Many of the activities involved have also become
somewhat invisible to us, since we don't think of them as “important.” However,
feminists have shown that the activities involved in feeding a household are
varied and complex—worthy of the term “work.”
Foodwork Activities
- They include:
o Planning meals
o Travelling to food stores
o Selecting and purchasing products
o Growing food
o Preparing raw ingredients
o Cooking/baking
o Cleaning up
o Disposing of waste
- DeVault and others also point out that, while foodwork can be satisfying and
pleasurable, it is also complex and draining. This is because the activities
involved are not only physical (e.g., walking around a grocery store or chopping
vegetables). They are also mental (e.g., making sure to buy enough food and the
right ingredients to make meals for the entire week) and emotional (e.g., deciding
how to negotiate the different food preferences, allergies, nutritional needs, etc.
of different family members). Some feminist scholars also consider teaching table
manners to children and facilitating dinner-table conversations, as types of
foodwork.
o Foodwork includes activities that are:
 Physical
 Mental
 Emotional
What is Gender?
- In our culture, many people think of gender as a biological or genetic fact. If
someone has XX chromosomes and female sex organs, they will act like a girl or
a woman. If someone has XY chromosome and male sex organs, they will act
like a boy or man.
- However, we also know from living in the world that some biological “men” act in
traditionally “feminine” ways and some biological “women" act in traditionally
 “masculine” ways. Transgender children have also frequently been made to live
as either a “boy” or a “girl,” even though they have biological or genetic
characteristics of both sexes. Clearly, biology is not the only factor at work
- Feminist scholars have noted that women and men (or transgender individuals
who live as one or the other) have different opportunities in the world because
of social institutions (e.g., the workforce or the family) and the patterns within
these institutions. For example, women may be better cooks than men not
because they have a biological affinity for it, but because they typically have
more opportunities to learn how to cook. In many families, girls have been
expected to do more “indoor” work and boys to do more “outdoor” work. If a
woman chooses to work at her job fewer hours than her male partner because
she is expected to do more childcare, she, again, may have more opportunities
to spend time in the kitchen than a man
- The role of socialization in creating gender has also been emphasized. Children
are taught when they are young to act in gender-appropriate ways (ways that a
particular culture sees as “feminine” or “masculine”) by their parents, teachers,
the media, and other influences
- More recently, a fourth way of understanding gender has become common in
sociology. The theory is often referred to as “doing gender” (or what Brady et al.
refer to in Chapter 6 of the textbook as “gender construction”). In an influential
article published in 1987, sociologists Candice West and Don Zimmerman
observed that people don't stop developing a gender identity in childhood, as the
socialization theory suggests. Rather, they “act” or “perform”
gender throughout their lives. When people don't act in gender-appropriate ways,
West and Zimmerman argue, they suffer social and material penalties
- The “doing gender” theory is often the most difficult for people to understand. So,
let's think about this for a second. If you were suddenly to start acting like a
different gender, what would happen? What social, physical, and material
penalties might result?
- Example of penalties for not “doing gender” properly:
o Social penalties: teasing, dirty looks, bullying, ostracism
o Physical penalties: spanking by parents, violence (e.g., anti-gay hate
crimes, which have been on the rise in recent years)
o Material penalties: discrimination in employment
- The point is that, if we don't act in appropriately “masculine” or “feminine” ways
(according to your particular culture's definitions of these ways), there are
negative consequences. As a result, West and Zimmerman argue, we cannot say
that we “have” a gender that is biologically determined and stable throughout our
lives. Rather, we “do” gender in interaction with others as we go about our lives
Defining Gender
- For Risman, gender operates at:
o The individual level of identity, which is influenced by socialization.
o The interactional level, where individuals "do" gender in response to
cultural expectations.
 o The institutional level, where organizational practices (e.g., in the family,
employment, etc.) create a gendered distribution of resources and
opportunities.
- These gender domains are continually influencing each other
What about Biology?
- The role of biology is a controversial one in the sociology of gender. For a long
time in academia, gender was understood as primarily, if not wholly, biological.
Sociologists note that biological explanations of gender are dangerous because
they can perpetuate gender inequality. For example, consider the argument that
women are better cooks because they are innately (biologically) better at
nurturing others. This can lead to assertions that women should,
therefore, remain in the domestic realm, leaving men to dominate the workforce
and public realm
- For these reasons, sociologists tend to downplay biological explanations of
gender. Some acknowledge that biology plays a part alongside sociological
influences in creating gender. Others argue that biology is a tool that perpetuates
gender stereotypes but in reality, has nothing to do with how folks act.
Who is Doing the Foodwork?
- Take a moment to look at the graph. What do you notice about men’s domestic
cooking and cleanup time since the 1960s?
- There hasn’t been much change. In fact, overall, men cook and cleanup only
about 30 minutes more per week (or 5 minutes more per day) than they did in the
60s.  
- The gap between men and women’s time in the kitchen has decreased since
1965, but that’s mainly because women now spend much less time in the kitchen
than they used to, not because men spend more
- We see a similar trend to what we saw in the U.S. data, with women doing less
cooking and cleaning up over time, but only slightly since 1998. The time men
spend cooking and cleaning up has mostly stagnated since the late 90s, with no
change between 1998 and 2005 and only a three-minute increase per day from
2005 to 2010.
- Another thing to notice is the difference between men and women’s time. Women
still spend about twice as much time cooking and cleaning up (6.4 hours/week)
as men (3.2 hours/week) in Canada.
- In other words, we have to be very careful about conflating what we see on the
Food Network with what’s happening in real households. 
- Another important point is that these statistics are about the general population.
The statistics are quite different if we look at co-habiting men and women.
- The gap is bigger between married men and women than between single men
and women. Women tend to cook more after marriage while men tend to cook
less.
- One thing to take away from this chart is that gender roles typically become more
exaggerated after marriage. This is a pattern that researchers have found for
domestic work in general. We have said that women generally do about twice as
 much cooking as men. But, from the chart, you can see that married women cook
about 4.5 times as much as married men.  This pattern has also been observed
in a recent analysis of US data of who is making the grocery shopping trips for
households (Taylor, Ralph and Smart, 2015). In this analysis of couples with
similar time commitments to employment outside the home, women made almost
twice as many of the grocery shopping trips as did their male partner.
Why are Women Still Doing the Foodwork?
- Four main theories that explain the gendered division of labour in the home.
These theories cover cooking as well as other household work, such as
childcare, cleaning, and laundry.
o Relative resources
o Time constraints
o Gender ideology
o Gender construction
Time Constraints Theory
- According to this theory of gender, women do more foodwork because they do
less paid work and, therefore, have more free time. It's true that women do
slightly less paid work than men. Employed men spend about 45 minutes more
per day at work than employed women (Statistics Canada, 2010). Also, interview
research shows that some co-habiting couples do, in fact, negotiate who does
what housework based on things like who gets home first from work or who does
more paid work
- On the other hand, other studies have shown that many women still do more
foodwork than male partners even if the women do more paid work. In fact, some
men do less foodwork when they are unemployed and presumably have more
time
Gender Construction Theory
- According to the gender construction theory, men do less foodwork and women
do more because these activities are ways for men and women to “do gender.”
In other words, cooking more often is a way for women to show that they are
“proper women” and cooking less often is a way for men to show that they are
“proper men.”
- So, why do some unemployed men cook less than female partners even though
they have more time? Some scholars use the gender construction theory to
explain this. The idea is that men feel emasculated by losing their jobs and don't
want to add to their emasculation by doing foodwork, a traditionally “feminine”
task (Hochschild, 1989).
- As we said in the above section, “What is gender?,” the gender construction
theory also talks about negative consequences for women and men when they
don't act according to socially defined gender roles. The following video clip gives
an excellent example of this in relation to food practices
Exceptions: Resisting Gender Roles Around Foodwork
 - While the dominant, or most common, discourses in our society associate
womanhood, motherhood, and femininity with household foodwork, there are
also alternative or counter-discourses. To put it another way, some women
resist traditional gender roles by rejecting household foodwork, and some men
resist traditional gender roles by embracing household foodwork.
- British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is one example. There has traditionally been a
strict dichotomy between men's cooking (e.g., professional, artistic, restaurant
based) and women's cooking (e.g., domestic, mundane, home based). But in his
books and TV shows, Oliver is sometimes portrayed in a domestic setting,
cooking for his wife and kids. He also famously encourages women and men,
girls and boys, to learn how to cook for themselves and their families. Jamie
Oliver is unusual in promoting men's domestic cooking, so this is a weak counter-
discourse. However, it is one example of resistance to traditional gender roles
around food. You may be able to think of others.
- Another example comes from Sex and the City, a TV series that ran from 1998 to
2004 (with film sequels in 2008 and 2010). In the series, different versions of
femininity are portrayed in the main characters, and there is often subtle
commentary on traditional gender roles. You might know, for example, that
Carrie, the main character, uses her oven for storage
Gendered Foods and Eating Patterns
- Through their interviews with 87 B.C. adults and teens, McPhail, et al.
(2012) found that:
o Participants mainly denied the fact that people eat in gendered ways,
believing these ideas to be stereotypes not based in reality. However, they
ate in gendered ways themselves.
- For McPhail, et al., this way of thinking lines up with more general attitudes in our
society about gendered behaviours and gender inequality. We tend to believe
that people do things according to individual choice even though, in reality, our
behaviour is shaped by larger social structures (e.g., gender). Denying the
influence of larger social structures means that we can deny or
ignore systemic issues (issues based on our social system, rather than on
individual issues or opinions). In other words, people tend to think that sexism is
the result of a few sexist individuals rather than a larger social pattern. If we want
to combat issues like gender inequality, we need to recognize the social
structures and systemic issues that support it. We discuss this further in the next
section
Implications: Gender, Food, and Oppression
Foodwork in the Home and Gender Inequality
- Gender inequality around domestic foodwork relates to a number of issues,
including the following:
o If one person in a relationship is expected to do the majority of the
household foodwork, even if they are employed, this can lead to overwork
and exhaustion.
 o If one person in a relationship is expected to do the majority of the
household foodwork, they may have trouble balancing work, life, and
career advancement. This, in turn, leads to inequalities in the public
sphere (e.g., men having more leadership roles in government and
companies than women).
o If household foodwork is seen as “feminine,” men are discouraged from
doing it, and they are denied the pleasures, meanings and skills
associated with this work.
o If one person in a relationship works only part time, or is “stay-at-home”,
they may become less time-crunched. However, these choices mean
financial dependence. In other words, they become dependent on the
wage earner in their lives (often a man) and have fewer choices if they
want or need to change life paths (e.g., leave a failed or abusive
relationship). Financial independence is also important for self-confidence.
o If time for foodwork in the household is limited, and food choices are
affected, parents may be made to feel responsible/guilty for poor eating
habits and limited food skills of children.
Gendered Foods and Eating Styles and Gender Inequality
- Gender inequality around food and eating styles include the following issues:
o If women are expected to eat “healthy,” dainty foods and small portions
(and pay attention to their weight), this can contribute to a culture where
women are undernourished or develop eating disorders. (Susan Bordo
[1993] has done great work on this subject. If you're interested in reading
more, check out her book, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western
Culture and the Body, especially the chapter called “Hunger as Ideology.”)
o Studies of college-age students across a range of gender identities found
transgender women to be particularly vulnerable to pressures to conform
to specific eating and body image norms as evidenced by rates of eating
disorders in this group that greatly exceeded studies of women that did not
differentiate based on gender identity.
o If men are expected to eat meat, avoid healthy foods, and eat larger
portions, they may find it difficult to resist gender norms and chose foods
they actually like or that represent their political convictions through eating
patterns such as vegetarianism
o Studies have also shown that this association among meat, unhealthy
foods, and “masculinity” can be detrimental to men's health and make it
more challenging to adopt healthy food practices.
o If eating “healthy,” dainty foods and small portions is encouraged as a
feminine ideal (and paying attention to body weight), this may also
contribute to fat discrimination and “body moralizing.” This is something
that Brady, et al. discuss in Chapter 6 of the textbook. We will also discuss
this more in Module 6
WEEK FIVE
 Chapter 13: Spatial Colonization of Food Environments by Pseudo Food
Companies

Introduction

- Canada is facing a looming health crisis related to characteristics of diets and

lifestyles as they have evolved over the last several decades
- Globally obesity has doubled between 1980 and 2008 – 12 percent of the world’s
population is obese
- Serious chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes are strongly correlated with
excess weight and sedentary lifestyle
- Obesity will only be curbed by population-level measures supported by
legislation. Treating obesity does not work well; preventing it would be better
- While there’s a variety of factors shaping eating behaviour, political economic
determinants of diet have yet to receive the full attention they warrant
- This chapter considers the contemporary food environment as a problematic
subject that is in need of critical analysis

Conceptual Issues

- Food environments: those institutional spheres where food is displayed for sale
and/or consumed
o The rise of industrial capitalism undermined the unity (of eating food on
the site it was produced – agrarian societies) in what became the
developed world, as masses of people were forced off the land and into
the industrializing cities
 This fact alone has been fundamental to the development of the
food industry
- Today there are some noticeable differences distinguishing the procurement of
food from its consumption
- Food is procured from private, for profit retail institutions which are now
dominated by supermarket chain store operations that increasingly operate on a
global scale
- Unlike the realm of procurement, the realm of food consumption is still
characterized by the continuing existence of not-for-profit institutional spheres
o At home consumption is one of the most obvious
o Another significant not-for-profit sphere of food consumption is the school,
where the food environments traditionally were run on a not-for-profit
basis, although this is rapidly changing in many jurisdictions, with notable
consequences
- Food consumption is increasingly taking place in for-profit institutional setting, as
such factors as time constraints on family like, both parents working away from
home, and the loss of culinary skills, among other influences, determine that
more and more people find they must eat away from the home or eat food
prepared by other elsewhere that is then brought into the home
- Pseudo foods are those nutrient poor edible products that are typically high in
fat, sugar, and salt, and, other than the calories they provide, often in
overabundance, are notably low in nutrients such as proteins, minerals and
vitamins essential for health
- Differential profit is a concept that attempts to account for the fact that where
foodstuffs are very highly commoditized, some food and beverage products
attract higher returns, or profits, for their sellers and others
o In a capitalist economy, profit and the rate at which it can be accumulated
is the prime mover, that orients flow of investment
o The rate of profit, or the earnings, plays a fundamental role in shaping the
organization of food environments
- Highly processed foodstuffs, goods with more “vale added”, have more attractive
rates of return for retailers and processors
- Foodstuffs that have undergone minimal levels of transformation, such as
potatoes, milk, eggs, flour and tomato paste, are referred to in the food business
as “commodity” products, typically have thin profit margins, and are often sold
below cost as “loss leaders” solely to attract customers to the store
- Food retailers have indicated that salty snacks are the second most profitable
product category, only outpaced by bakery products
- The profitability of the pseudo foods is corroborated by a representative of one
of the worlds largest salty snack manufacturers – PepsiCo’s Frito Lay
o Pseudo foods are further corroborated by industry data from chain store
companies that control convenience stores in the USA
- In Canada the snack food industry has experienced much more rapid growth
than has the food industry as a whole
- Corporate concentration helps to explain why these nutrient-poor products are
so lucrative, beyond the fact that many of them are fabricated largely form cheap
commodities, like sugar and wheat, and sold at a high return
- Mass advertising is the process whereby a company’s product becomes
differentiated in the market place
o mass advertising and corporate concentration in the food business go
hand in hand then – they are mutually reinforcing processes
o the high cost of mass advertising on such media outlets as network
television means that only the largest companies have the funds to afford
access
- Food companies are intense advertisers, and spending on pseudo foods takes a
priority
- Special colonization is a concept designed to help us understand how
differential profits, corporate concentration, mass advertising, and market power
come to affect the geography of food environments and the prominent role of
pseudo foods within them
- To translate manufactured demand into sales, it is necessary to secure the
physical visibility and availability of the product within a particular food
environment
 - The process of spatial colonization refers to the power of food processors to
place product in the most visible and effective selling spaces in a food
environment

Pseudo Foods and Private Sector Institutions: The Supermarket

- There is a considerable cost to a product being prominently displayed in the

supermarket food environment
- Few companies can compete with the market power of the large concentrated
corporations that dominate the production of pseudo foods
- The relationship between processor and supermarket chain is not simply a
“landlord-tenant” relationship; it is more complex
- How is spatial colonization manifested in the geography of the supermarket?
o Supermarket layout, the overall positioning of product categories is
noteworthy
o Low profit commodity items that most shoppers will purchase no matter
what else they buy are places at the back of the store, as far as possible
form the entrance so that customers will have to pass by less essential but
more profitable products first
- Does the spatial manipulation of product have any real significance?
o Yes, it does, research indicates the powerful effect of shelf positions on
sales, and studies have suggested that the use of special end of aisle
displays in supermarkets can boost unit sales by several hundred percent,
even when no price reduction occurs
- While special display devices can be utilized hypothetically to market any manner
of goods normally found in supermarkets today, in practice we found they were
overwhelmingly dominated by nutrient poor products

Pseudo Food and Public Sector Institutions: The High School

- Nutrient needs are higher in adolescents than at any other time in the life cycle
- It is believed that food choices and eating patterns developed at this time are
likely to influence long term behaviour and help determine the vulnerability to
chronic diseases such as heart disease, certain cancers, and osteoporosis later
in life
- High sugar and high fat foods were all purchased in large quantities at the
cafeteria
o The staff felt obliged to cater to student demand for fast food items
- Purchases of fresh fruit and vegetables were extremely low in almost all cases

Determinants of the High School Food Environment

- Why do student food purchasing patterns in the study diverge so widely from
what would be considered ideal form a nutritional perspective?
o Has to do with the effect of aggressive mass advertising targeting children
and youth by corporate purveyors of junk and fast foods
 o Since the era of Ontario provincial government cutbacks to education in
the mid 1990s, school cafeterias and vending machines are expected to
generate revenues to pay for a host of student activities and equipment
needs and even essential parts of school infrastructure
 They have been forced to view their students as customers, and
cafeterias and vending machines as profit centres to make up for
lost government revenues
o There are also food environments found in the immediate area outside of
the school

The Struggle to Promote Healthy Eating in Schools

- Broader initiatives from governments don’t exist to address these problems

therefore it’s up to local initiatives to improve the situation
- A key factor appearing to undermine healthier eating in schools was the
corporate food environment surrounding most schools

Conclusion

- Pseudo foods has an inordinate impact on the content of contemporary food

environments
- Important factors shaping the high school food environment were (1) previous
rounds of cutbacks by the Ministry of Education, which encouraged the use of
vending machines to make up needed revenue; (2) kitchen staff shortages, also
due to cutbacks, that resulted in the use of trans fat laden baked goods prepared
off site; and (3) the food environment adjacent to schools, which was dominated
by the presence of fast food outlets and vendors of nutrient poor products

Mosby and Galloway Article: The Abiding Condition was Hunger: Assessing the
Long Term Biological and Health Effects of Malnutrition and Hunger in Canada’s
Residential Schools

- Recent studies of residential school survivors and their families focus on the
impact of school experiences on the social determinants of health, especially
mental health. Less studied is the connection between residential school
survivorship and patterns of chronic disease risk among Indigenous peoples in
Canada
- Children who attended Canada’s Indian residential schools experienced chronic
undernutrition characterised by insufficient caloric intake, minimal protein and fat,
and limited access to fresh produce, often over a period of five to ten years
- What was once referred to vaguely as ‘residential school syndrome’ has now
been widely recognised as a complex of health outcomes that includes mental,
physical, emotional, and cultural traumas experienced by former students as a
result of their common experience of surviving what the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission of Canada (TRC), the six-year investigation into residential school
experiences, has concluded was nothing short of an attempted cultural genocide
 - Less recognised are the long-term and intergenerational physical consequences
of the residential school experience. Perhaps the least understood but potentially
most profound of these physical legacies is the impact of chronic malnutrition.
- A second and equally important goal is to raise awareness among health care
providers as well as public health and health decision makers that the health
patterns observed among their patients may, in part, be the result of biological
processes arising from residential schools that have previously gone
unrecognised

Hunger was Never Absent

- For breakfast, children were given: two slices of bread with either jam or honey
as the dressing, oatmeal with worms … or corn meal porridge which was minimal
in quantity and appalling in quality. The beverage consisted of skim milk and
when one stops to consider that we were milking from twenty to thirty head of
pure-bred Holstein cattle, it seems odd that we did not ever receive whole milk
and in my five years at the Institute we never received butter once
- Lunch consisted of ‘water as the beverage [and] if you were a senior boy or girl
you received … one and a half slices of dry bread and the main course consisted
of a “rotten soup” (local terminology) (i.e. scraps of beef, vegetables, some in a
state of decay)’. For supper, ‘students were given two slices of bread and jam,
fried potatoes, NO MEAT, a bun baked by the girls … and every other night a
piece of cake or possibly an apple in the summer months’
- Students were fed just enough ‘to blunt the sharp edge of hunger for three or four
hours, never enough to dispel hunger completely until the next meal’
- ‘We felt hungry all the time. I can remember my stomach aching and feeling
empty’
o The food, she recalls, was not just inadequate but was also often spoiled.
In fact, years later, she discovered her regular bouts of what she called
‘yellow jaundice’ as a student were likely the result of food poisoning
- As historian J.R. Miller sums up the food service in residential schools, ‘the food
was inadequate, frequently unappetizing, and all too often consumed in
inhospitable and intimidating surroundings’
- Existing levels of malnutrition were used as a baseline for investigations into the
effectiveness of vitamins, fortified foods, and other nutritional interventions.
- Recent research published by Paul Hackett and colleagues reveals that the
malnutrition observed at residential schools in the 1940s and 1950s was largely
the product of the school environment, and that students were actually well-
nourished prior to entering the schools

Comparison Studies

- It is hard to estimate with any accuracy the average caloric intake or the overall
nutritional status of children attending residential schools in Canada. In large part
this is due to the limitations of the existing archival record
 - When combined with the inconsistent and unpredictable record keeping practices
of the churches responsible for running these schools, it is clear that any attempt
to reconstruct the specific diet of students in a particular school at any given time
is extraordinarily difficult
- Overall, then, the picture of residential school diets is one of sustained
malnutrition characterised by insufficient caloric intake; minimal protein and fat;
severely limited access to fresh fruit and vegetables; and frequent bouts of food-
borne infection.
- A generous interpretation of Moses’ account describes a regime delivering a
maximum of 1260 kcal per day
- we estimate the average daily caloric intake at many residential schools like
those described above to be in the range of 1000–1450 kcal per day;
requirements for moderately active, healthy children aged 4 to 18 years range
from 1400–3200 kcal
- Over the course of a five-to-ten-year period, exposure to poor diet quality and
caloric restriction of this magnitude has significant consequences on the biology
and health of individuals.

Individual Effects

- The most evident of these impacts is stunted growth (low height for age). The
effect of malnutrition on achieved stature is pronounced: child survivors of
twentieth-century famines are height stunted by an average of 1–3 cm compared
with their age-matched peers
- Stunting is the most common growth impairment observed in developing
countries (more common than low weight for height), with fully 74 per cent of the
global burden of stunting confined to the world’s poorest countries in Africa and
South-Central Asia
- Stunting has profound health effects throughout the life-course. Children whose
growth falters due to malnutrition have lower fat-free mass, impaired bone
development, and a tendency to prioritise fat- over lean-mass deposition
- Stunted adolescents exhibit lower insulin levels and greater insulin sensitivity
than non-stunted controls and are therefore at greater risk of developing Type II
diabetes
- Studies document a strong association between stunting and high blood
pressure among height-stunted adolescents
- Prolonged under-nutrition also alters thyroid function in an attempt to reduce
energy expenditure, resulting in hypothyroidism and lower basal metabolic rates
among height-stunted individuals
- Stunted women have greater risk of stillbirths, miscarriages, pre-term births,
complications of labour and delivery, and decreased offspring birth weight
- Stunting is known to affect both cognitive development and educational
attainment negatively and has been associated with delayed school entry,
greater grade repetition and dropout rates, decreased graduation rates from
primary and secondary school, and lower school performance
 - Malnutrition produces a cascade of immune system effects leading to both acute
and chronic changes in immune response and ultimately heightening risk of
infectious disease, even in moderately malnourished children
- Shorter stature, lower lean mass, lower resting metabolic rates, and greater
insulin sensitivity predispose individuals to obesity and a range of chronic
diseases, including Type II diabetes and cardiovascular disease
- In addition, malnutrition is itself a powerful stressor. Nutritional deprivation
activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal stress response, causing a
prolonged increase in cortisol secretion. An elevated cortisol level is exacerbated
by the reduced rate of metabolic clearance of circulating cortisol due to lower
basal metabolic rate
- Elevated cortisol further blunts insulin response, inhibits the function of insulin-
like growth factor (IGF-1), and produces long-term changes in lipid metabolism,
thereby worsening growth impairment and further increasing risk of obesity and
chronic disease. This cascade of effects leads almost inexorably to a complex of
obesity, hypertension, and diabetes.
- Scholars report higher BMI and fasting plasma glucose, unfavourable lipid
profiles, higher prevalence of diabetes and hypertension, and higher incidence of
heart attack and stroke at ages 40 to 60 among famine survivors
- Sustained exposure to caloric restriction produces a biological complex of height
stunting together with metabolic changes that lead to greater risk of obesity and
chronic disease in people who experience malnutrition in childhood.

Intergenerational Effects

- While observational studies are revealing the impact of malnutrition on the

biology of those directly exposed to malnutrition, they are also revealing a
complex of intergenerational effects on the children and grandchildren of famine
survivors. Height-stunted women have been found to be more likely to give birth
to low-birthweight babies
- Maternal obesity and diabetes have also been associated with greater risk of
inter-uterine growth failure, both low and high birthweight with their attendant
risks, growth faltering, and the development of insulin resistance and diabetes, in
offspring
- it is clear that the negative health impacts of sustained malnutrition are multi-
generational. A further part of the intergenerational impact, it seems, has to do
with the psychological and cultural – and not just biological – impacts of
residential schools on the dietary practices of survivors and their families. Many
former students and their families trace contemporary unhealthy eating habits
and a range of diet-related diseases to their residential school experience
- Not only did residential schools, themselves, attempt forcibly to strip students of
their Indigenous dietary practices – leaving generations of children alienated from
their own culinary traditions during their formative years – but they supplanted
them with diets formed predominantly of unhealthy, nutritionally inadequate
starch-heavy alternatives.
 - While more research still needs to be done examining the intergenerational
effects of residential schools on the food cultures and dietary practices of
Indigenous communities, it is nonetheless clear that the residential school
experience often had a devastating effect on Indigenous diets and health even
well after students left the schools

Conclusion

- Nutritional deprivation, with its concomitant effects on growth, body size, and
metabolism, sets an individual on a path toward lifelong risk of obesity and
chronic disease.
- Residential school survivors from every part of the country have long testified
that hunger and malnutrition defined their residential school experiences, yet
there have been few studies of the long-term health effects of this hunger and
malnutrition. In attempting to take the testimony of survivors seriously and to
investigate the nature and extent of hunger and malnutrition in residential
schools, the present research indicates that the high pattern of low birthweight,
childhood and adult obesity, early-onset insulin resistance, and diabetes
observed among Indigenous peoples in Canada may, in some part, be
attributable to the prolonged caloric restriction experienced by those who
attended residential schools. This knowledge introduces into both the health
research and practice communities the very real possibility that much of our
evidence base overlooks a significant driver of Indigenous health in Canada:
malnutrition in childhood.
- Comprehensive, culturally appropriate, and community-driven interventions are
therefore necessary to support improvements in health and nutrition for the
survivors and intergenerational survivors of residential schools
- These changes also have both individual and intergenerational effects, shifting
the trajectories of growth and health in positive directions for current and future
generations of Indigenous children

Chapter 14: What Constitutes Good Food? Toward a Critical Indigenous

Perspective on Food and Health

Introduction
 Food is fundamentally about healthy and sustainable food systems.
 Food security is a serious and growing issue in Canada, particularly for
Indigenous communities.
 Inuit in Canada face the highest documented rates of food insecurity of any
Indigenous population living in the developed world.
 If food security is understood as a goal to be achieved, then food sovereignty
should be thought of as the means to achieve it.
 Food sovereignty involves providing increased involvement in and
therefore, control over the means through which food is procured
(obtained).
  The increased involvement of Indigenous peoples in their food systems promotes
healthier communities by decreasing dependency on globalized food systems
and promoting traditional methods of harvesting and gathering foods that are
sustainable and healthy.
 Local and traditional foods are often cited as alternatives to market foods, as they
are healthier, sustainably sourced, and culturally appropriate, helping to combat
food insecurity.
 Cost is not the only impediment for many, since traditional food procurement
also requires that the knowledge of how to engage in these activities is passed
from generation to generation, often made difficult by competing demands (e.g.
full-time employment, child care, urban living).
 Such barriers indicate that a shift needs to occur at a systemic/policy
level to support not only the ability to access the resources necessary to
procure traditional foods, but also the corresponding sharing of knowledge
necessary for the continuation of traditional food procurement practices.
 The debates that occur around the issue of food security for Indigenous peoples
and the best way to achieve it are often rationalized by assuming that
improvements to an individual’s health will occur through modifications to
an individual’s nutrition intake and diet.
 This approach to food and eating, which distances individuals from the contexts
in which their foods are eaten and reinforces a growing ignorance about the
interconnectedness of the health of people and the health of the planet, has
become so pervasive that it has been dubbed by its critics as nutritionism.
 Attempting to address complex issues such as food security within a
nutritionism framework fails to account for Indigenous peoples’
perspectives on how and why their communities are food insecure.
 Situating the argument for food security squarely within the realm of
nutritionism to the exclusion of other important contexts – such as
historical, social and cultural circumstances – often limits the discussion of
food security to one that only reflects the view that people needs to make
better food choices and to become more educated about what foods they
should be eating and that education about proper nutrition will somehow
lead to better overall food security.
 The systematic exclusion of Indigenous peoples about discussions regarding
food is a form of ongoing colonization – that is, the dismissal,
underrepresentation, or complete undermining of Indigenous peoples’ knowledge
regarding the important role of food within their communities in any discussions
about their food systems.

Nutritionism: A Handmaiden of Colonialism

 Responsibility of food choices shifted away from individuals and into the hands of
large multinational corporations, whose interests are not so much about
sustainable, just and healthy foods as they are about ensuring that foods are
marketable, produced in mass quantities, and profitable.
 Scrinis (2008) labels this societal shift nutritionism, which he argues
valorizes scientific and profit-driven understandings of food to the
 exclusion of the culture and context-specific knowledge that has
characterized food and eating since time immemorial.
 Coupled with a shift toward a wage-economy and away from a
subsistence way of life, many Indigenous communities (particularly in
northern and remote places, but also in rural and urban locations) have
experienced alarming increases in the availability and affordability of
processed and prepackaged foods with low nutrient value.
 Efforts to address the resulting health effects of such dietary changes have often
happened through educational and behavior-change efforts. However this
does little in terms of addressing underlying societal structures that are
perpetuating food insecurity and the movement away from traditional foods.
 Failure to address the underlying causes of food insecurity through the
spread of nutritionism amounts to a cultural oppression of food.
 It does so by deepening the growing disconnection between food, people
and place, severing the important and integral relationships people once
had with their foods and the environment
 Nestle (2007) affirms that “nutrition confusion” has led to the overeating of
unhealthy foods and poor nutritional practices.
 For example, under the influence of nutritionism people tend to do a quick
scan of food labels to judge them according to nutritional guidelines (i.e.
low on fat, sugar and sodium but may also include other ingredients that
aren’t good for one’s health)
 NUTRITIONISM highlights how distanced we have become from understanding
our food and how the food industry has manipulated and marketed food for
reasons that go beyond improving the health of people.
 If we view the foods we eat as inseparable from the social, cultural, political
and natural environment in which foods are procured and consumed, then
we begin to see that Indigenous communities are perhaps best positioned to
offer valuable advice on food and eating and indeed, what constitutes good food.
 Whereas the goal of nutritionism is to reduce foods to biochemical
properties and categories, the goal of food and eating within many
Indigenous communities is to provide a means to express culture, uphold
cultural traditions and strengthen cultural knowledge.
 Side effect of the above relationship is positive health outcomes.
 Indigenous peoples who obtain the bulk of their nutrient
energy from traditional sources get more essential nutrients
than those who substitute traditional foods for market foods.
 Although market foods tend to provide more energy, they have an
overall lower density of essential nutrients than what is found in
traditional foods.
 Food allowed diverse cultures to survive in their particular localities and also to
develop relationships with their surroundings that are expressed through culture

The Imperative of Indigenous Food Sovereignty

 Food sovereignty has the aim of reclaiming a public voice on issues related to
food.
  Supporters of the food sovereignty movement feel strongly that those who
depend upon food systems should have a say in decisions about every
element of its procurement, production and consumption
 Food sovereignty has its roots outside of Indigenous realities.
 The term Indigenous food sovereignty (IFS) holds special significance for
Indigenous peoples, because although the concept itself is relatively new, it
speaks to issues that Indigenous peoples and communities have been struggling
with for many generations.
 IFS advocates stress the importance of decolonization and self-
determination, and the inclusion of co-management strategies for resource
development and food use.
 Critique of the global (non-Indigenous) food sovereignty movement
suggests that its policy demands are very modest, often focusing on an individual
ethic of making food choices that are local, organic, nutritious, and healthy to the
exclusion of a broader discussion about structural changes that are needed in
our food systems at the national or international level.
 Those seeking Indigenous food sovereignty advocate for a more collective,
relational approach, wishing to “honour, value and protect traditional food
practices and networks in the face of ongoing pressures of colonization”.
 To date, Indigenous peoples within Canada have, more often than not, been
systematically excluded from discussions about when and how often to eat, and
how much and even what types of food can be eaten.
 Within Canada, the conversation about Indigenous food sovereignty has largely
been spearheaded by the British Columbia Food Systems Network Working
Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty.
 Four principles of Indigenous food sovereignty:
1. Food is sacred
2. Participation
3. Self-determination
4. Legislation and Policy reform

1. FOOD IS SACRED
 The connection and belonging that Indigenous peoples have with their natural
surroundings is born not out of romantic notions of “living close to nature” as is
often assumed, but rather, is viewed as reciprocal relationship where the earth
provides resources for survival as long as people take care not to deplete their
surroundings.
 Improving amounts and types of resources available for further
generations
 This perspective aligns with th goals of Indigenous food sovereignty,
which is to create the conditions necessary for people to procure food
sources from the land in ways that do not separate the health of people
from the health of the environment.
 For many Indigenous cultures, humans form an inseparable part of their
physical surroundings; thus, all the foods that are eaten reaffirm a direct
and intimate connection to the earth and all things living and nonliving.
  The natural surroundings in which foods are obtained provide important
ingredients for medicines, clothing, shelter and indeed, for overall health
and well-being.
 For Inuit in particular, ensuring that all parts of an animal or plant were used
largely stemmed from times when foods were scarce.
 The foods eaten are intimately connected to health; since foods come from lands
and waters, the health of individuals and communities is dependent upon the
health of those resources.

2. Participation (at an Individual, Family, Community and Regional Level)

 Humans must manage and control our own behaviours towards the land.
 Rather than being defined by industry, Indigenous food systems are defined to
include all land, soil, water, air, plants and animals as well as Indigenous
knowledge, wisdom and values.
 Indigenous food systems are maintained through active participation in
cultural harvesting strategies, making individual and community involvement in
food procurement, preparation and consumption a necessary element of the
sustainability of this type of food system.
 How groups of Indigenous peoples organized themselves varied according to
geographic location and the ages and genders of the group members, as well as
the roles and responsibilities assigned to each member. Clearly defined roles for
each group member, as people depended upon one another for the group’s
survival.
 Food not only protected against nutritional deficiencies but also reinforced a
collective solidarity, fostering emotional, mental and spiritual health and well-
being.
 Everyone participated equitably in ensuring the survival of the community
 Ie in Inuit they share the first salmon caught in the spring with all members
of the community. Showed benevolence and respect for others, ensured
that even the young and frail had a meal and provided an important
means to protect against hunger at a time of year when supplies of food
were at their lowest.
 In many Indigenous communities, men and women had roles and
responsibilities that were clearly divided by gender (those with multiple
genders often being viewed as providing additional value to communities), yet
unlike the Western world’s gendered divisions of labour, roles were given
equitable value.
 If anyone failed to accomplish their assigned duties or did so inadequately,
the entire family and perhaps community might go hungry or starve.
 Elders were considered the transmitters of culture and were expected to
pass on their knowledge to younger generations through the provision of
advice and guidance.
 Interactions with the earth and the resources utilized from it must be carefully
considered in order to ensure the survival and well-being of future generations.
  The knowledge passed on through generations, whether through actions or
words, must be given privilege and respect if there is to be greater
understanding of our food systems.

3. Self-Determination
 Self-determination is the ability to make informed decisions over the amount,
type, quality and quantity of foods that are procured – hunted, fished, gathered,
grown.
 Indigenous food sovereignty, then, offers a means through which Indigenous
communities can regain control over their own food systems.
 ***Many Indigenous people continue to face pressures to end traditional
practices of food gathering.
 Pressures come from all directions – through the decimation of
Indigenous lands for industrial development, through conservation policies
that undermine traditional practices of food gathering, and through the
increasing corporate control of the food economy which undermines the
value of traditional food-gathering practices.
 Important for understanding the historical context of food sovereignty are the
accounts that demonstrate the commonly held assumption by European colonists
that the lands and waters upon which they arrived were undiscovered and
untouched by humans, terra nullius, and were therefore awaiting human
intervention in the form of “development”.
 Turner (2005) suggests that what was assumed to be untouched wilderness on
Canada’s west coast was interpreted as prime real estate by Europeans,
when in fact such bounty was the result of year of carefully crafted resource
management practices by the Coast Salish, who tended and cared for the land
using centuries-old practise of burning, clearing and harvesting.

4. Legislation and Policy Reform

 Indigenous food sovereignty advocates for coordinated, cross-sectoral
strategies that address food insecurity through such efforts as wildlife co-
management strategies, asserting the harvesting rights of Indigenous
communities, and taking a strong position on the cross-border trade of animal
products.
 Nutritionists remain isolated from sociologists and anthropologists and public
health officials are largely unaware of their counterparts who work in areas of
political economy and environmental stewardship - to say nothing of key
Indigenous knowledge holders whose voices are often completely absent from
these discussions. Very little in cross-sectional conversations
 The result is that policies and programs that rely upon the research
advances within specific disciplinary fields are overlooking key areas of
concern that exist across multiple disciplines and that our efforts at
addressing these crises are resulting in ongoing damage to our waters,
soil and air, which we ultimately depend on for good food.
 Policies and programs meant to address problems of environmental
devastation or population health may contribute to the harm affecting the
 overall health of the environment and the people who live in it, when they do not
seek to more broadly understand issues that affect health outside of specific
disciplinary silos.
 As Indigenous youth, our most precious resource, grow up to learn that
traditional land use is not regarded as contributing to the economy in the same
way as more conventional agricultural or industrial uses might be, they are
discouraged from adhering to the ways of their Elders.

Conclusion: What Constitutes Good Food?

 Some of the greatest population and public health concerns being faced today
are linked to over-consumption of nutrient-poor food (e.g. CVD, obesity,
diabetes)
 Indigenous communities are a microcosm of these global food security
concerns, where both hunger related to maldistribution of foods and chronic
diseases related to eating too many nutrient-poor foods can be simultaneously
present.
 **Our food systems are characterized by capitalist commodity exchange,
which emphasizes profit over all else, including the health of people and the
ecosystem.
 It does so by insidiously touting nutrient-poor “foods” as heathy, by
commodifying the practice of hunting (putting the cost of the hunt out of
reach for those most reliant upon it), and perhaps most concerning, by
doing irreparable damage to the natural world, making Indigenous food-
gathering practices impossible due to contamination and disruption of the
environment for the purpose od unfettered economic development.
 Promotion and protection of Indigenous food systems needs to happen through
the protection and promotion of diverse Indigenous cultures
 Inclusion of Indigenous peoples as a fundamental part of the
decision-making process around food systems and positioning
Indigenous voices rather than corporate voices at the centre of food
systems discussions.
 SOLUTIONS COME IN THE FORM OF FOOD SOVEREIGNTY
 Solutions must come from Indigenous communities who are best positioned to
know what works and what does not within their specific social, political and
cultural locations.
 Wittman et al. discusses a vision of food sovereignty that views food as integral
to local cultures and is based upon local knowledge.
 Food sovereignty cannot be achieved without political sovereignty,
aligning with Morrison’s (2001) vision for Indigenous food sovereignty as
fundamentally embracing self-determination as one of its key pillars.
 Indigenous peoples within Canada currently face struggles with respect to
accessing and using their traditional territories for food procurement
purposes like hunting, fishing, trapping and growing.
 These struggles exist for a variety of reasons, all related to historical and
ongoing colonial practices: strict government regulations that prevent
traditional food-gathering practices from taking place, economic
 development processes that affect Indigenous communities but do not
include them in decision-making.
 Continued forms of colonization present new challenges for Indigenous peoples
in procurement and consuming food necessary to uphold, strengthen and
celebrate their diverse cultures.
 The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights defines the right to
adequate food as “when every man , woman and child, alone or in community
with others, has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or
means for its procurement.”
 The growing networks of Indigenous peoples across the country who are working
toward Indigenous food sovereignty will contribute to discussions and critiques of
nutritionism and the devastating impacts such an approach can have on Mother Earth.
 What constitutes good food? No one recipe for god food; it is Food that is
harvested, prepared and consumed according to the principles, values and
norms of the Indigenous peoples on whose territory that food has been acquired;
it is about understanding the diversity of communities and the people within them
as unique, understanding that their knowledge about their own lands and waters,
and thus, their foods is also unique.

Module 5: The Obesity “Epidemic”

According to statistics Canada, 1/3 children ages 5-17 are considered overweight or
obese
According to statistics Canada, 2/3 adults ages 18-79 are considered overweight or
obese

Introduction

- Obesity and being overweight are typically measured using the Body Mass

Index or BMI. This is calculated by dividing a person’s weight (in kilograms) by
the square of their height (in meters). An adult of 18 years or over with a BMI of
30+ is deemed “obese.” An adult with a BMI of 25 to 29.9 is deemed
“overweight.” An adult with a BMI of 20 to 24.9 is “normal” and a BMI of under 20
is “underweight”
- [Being] overweight [or obese is] associated with an increased risk of numerous
health problems, including type 2 diabetes, hypertension, obstructive sleep
apnea, osteoarthritis, many types of cancer (including breast, colorectal and
pancreatic) and cardiovascular disease (coronary heart disease and stroke)

Obesity and Overweight: Causes

- Much of the mainstream discourse (reproduced in government, media, and

popular culture) assigns responsibility for being overweight to individuals and the
lifestyle and food choices that they make
 - Body weight has to do primarily with diet and exercise, which are seen to be
individual choices. The subtext of this discourse is that people who have large
bodies are at fault because they are lazy and not well-educated about food
- However, if it were true that individual personality and lifestyle were primarily the
cause of being overweight, there would be no noticeable differences between
groups of people, nor would there be differences over time. But this is not the
case. There are many noticeable differences between socio-economic groups
and changes over time that can help us to understand the issue more fully. There
has also been a well-publicized increase in being overweight over the past few
decades. In the next few pages, we’ll look at these differences in turn

Trends over Time

- As you are no doubt well aware, the number of people who are overweight or
obese has increased dramatically in the past few decades.
- In 1979 and 1989, less than 15% of the Canadian population were considered
“obese.” In 2004, the percentage rose to 23.1. In 2008, the percentage was 25.4.
- Political economy is a branch of social science that studies the relationships
between individuals and society and between markets and the state, using a
diverse set of tools drawn largely from economics, political science and
sociology. Specifically, in this analysis, he talks about the types of foods available
in both supermarkets and schools. His research team investigated 12 Loblaws,
Sobey’s, and A & P supermarkets in Guelph, Kitchener, Waterloo, and
Cambridge to find out what foods were available and how they were presented.
- In particular, Winson was interested in the availability of what he calls pseudo-
foods
o An average of 31% of supermarket shelf space was devoted to pseudo
foods
o Pseudo foods were heavily marketed at the checkout and through
numerous special displays
o Entire aisles were devoted to pseudo-foods
o Pseudo-foods are not only plentiful but heavily marketed in supermarkets.
As Winson notes, if we see such foods all over the store and then again at
the check out, we are more likely to buy them, especially on impulse
- You might think: But we aren’t automatons that do whatever marketing tells us.
We don’t have to buy anything. This is a good point. On the other hand, we are
up against a formidable opponent in food marketers. The food industry spends
billions of dollars on psychological research to understand our shopping and
buying patterns and on advertising to manipulate our desires and emotions so
that we buy more (Nestle, 2002). Further, much of this research attempts to
understand the minds of children who do not have the same will power and
reasoning skills as adults. You may have heard of the “nag factor,” a marketing
term describing the different ways in which children manipulate their parents to
make a purchase and that marketers use to their advantage. Like many other
marketing strategies, “nag factor” strategies were developed after in-depth
research by child psychologists on children
 - Winson’s concept of differential profit is useful here. The idea is that pseudo-
foods offer stores a higher profit than less-processed foods, such as produce or
milk. This is because of the food industry notion that the more a food is
processed, the more it has “value added.” If a store wants to maximize profits, a
good way to do this is to sell more pseudo-foods. The result, says Winson, is that
we are seeing more and more pseudo-foods around us. He calls this the spatial
colonization of our food environments by pseudo-foods. For Winson, this heavy
marketing of pseudo-foods, which has increased significantly in the past few
decades, is partially responsible for the rise in obesity.  He contends that when
there is corporate concentration in food retail, that is when few companies
have the majority of the market share in a particular sector of the food system,
this type of marketing is more likely to take place.

Region
- The percentage of obese adults in Canada is 17.1% overall. The percentages in
specific regions are as follows: Peel Region (14.7%); Toronto (12.7%);
Vancouver (6.2%); Waterloo Region (21.6%); and King’s County, PEI (32.1%).
- The general pattern is the larger the city, the lower the obesity rates
o One reason related to the notion of obesogenic environment, an
“environment that promotes weight gain and is not conducive to weight
loss”
- Obesogenic environments:
o Neighbourhoods or regions built primarily for cars
 These are urban areas with few sidewalks, bike paths, and
greenspaces, which makes walking and biking unpleasant or
dangerous. Or conversely, they are rural areas with long distances
between destination, making driving a practical necessity
o Poor neighbourhoods or regions
 These may be food deserts, with little access to healthy foods.
Residents may have little money or political clout for neighbourhood
beautification (again making biking or walking unpleasant). Or if
crime rates are high, people may be afraid to do outdoor activities
An Indigenous Perspective
- Ryerson University is on the land the “Dish With One Spoon Territory.” The Dish
With One Spoon is a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and
Haudenosaunee Nations that bound them to share the territory and protect the
land. Subsequent Indigenous Nations and peoples, Europeans and all
newcomers, have been invited into this treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship
and respect. To find out who's land you inhabit, the website Whose Land has
developed an interactive mapping tool
- One of the main issues Martin and Amos (Chapter 14) ties to health problems
among Indigenous people is the transition from traditional foods (obtained
through hunting, gathering, fishing, etc.) to non-traditional, store-bought foods.
We might think that it is the choice of Aboriginal peoples whether or not they eat
traditional foods. However, as Martin and Amos point out, colonization and
 issues of land access often create barriers in terms of First Nations people's to
access traditional foods and food practices

The Truth and Reconciliation Report

- The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (TRC, 2015) on the
experiences of First Nations people in Residential Schools helps to provide an
understanding of how the processes of colonialism are both historically rooted
and the implications they have today.  The reading by Mosby and Galloway
(2017) assigned this week highlights some of the physical and mental health
consequences the Canadian government policies specifically designed to
separate children from the cultural practices of their parents. These policies have
been documented as having both short term and long term (intergenerational)
impacts on Indigenous health

Weight Discrimination as the Real Problem

- So far in this module, we have considered overweight and obesity issues through
the lens of mainstream medical-scientific discourse. This is a discourse that sees
being overweight as problematic and something to overcome. However, as we
said in Module 2, there are competing discourses about key issues in every
society
- One discourse that opposes the medical-scientific one is the discourse promoted
by self-described fat activists—proponents of the fat acceptance
movement. There is now a National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance in
the U.S., and, in 2011, the first annual   Canadian Summit on Weight Bias and
Discrimination was held in Toronto. 
- According to the fat acceptance movement, being overweight in of itself is not
actually a problem. What is a problem is the prejudice against, and lack of
accommodation for, large bodies. Some fat activists (for example, American “fat
pride” activist and author Marilyn Wann) even celebrate and embrace fatness
and the term “fat.
- These activists, along with scholars, are bringing increasing attention to
discrimination against people with large bodies in areas like employment,
education, and health care.
- Fat activist Marilyn Wann suggests that in many cases, obesity may be
correlated to rather than the cause of health problems (Wann, 1998). Her claim is
that people with large bodies may have health problems not because of the
weight itself but because they suffer discrimination in health care and society.
Research is beginning to support this claim
Fat Discrimination in Health Care
- Several North American studies show that health care professionals respond
negatively to obese patients, and that doctors and nurses associate obesity with
things like hostility, dishonesty, inadequate hygiene, and laziness
- There are several mechanisms by which provider attitudes may affect the quality
of care. Firstly, providers may be less likely to communicate information with
patient they believe are not likely to be adherent to care regimes. Secondly,
patients are less likely to seek care if they feel devalued in the patient encounter.
 One study found that a third of 174 Canadian and American nurses surveyed
would prefer not to care for obese patients at all 
- People with weight issues are aware of this hostility and, according to other
research, may delay or avoid medical care because of it 
- The result of this discrimination may be that people with large bodies receive
improper diagnoses or inadequate treatment of health issues both related and
unrelated to their weight 
Fat Bias, Mental Health and Self Care
- Alternative perspectives on weight and health also suggest that weight
discrimination may have negative consequences for mental health.
- Bullying and other forms of anti-fat bias may contribute to self-hatred.
- Discrimination in employment and hiring may cause despair.
- This self-hatred and despair may then lead to unhealthy dieting behaviours or
risky medical procedures
Weight as a Dangerous Moral Issue
- Let’s think about the term “epidemic.” It usually refers to a situation in which there
are a large number of cases of a contagious disease in a particular area. The
term invokes fear. Think of the SARS epidemic, for example. But obesity isn’t
contagious, so what is there to be afraid of? You may have noticed earlier in the
module in the description of the BMI ranges that the label for what is often
referred to as “healthy weight”; the range or 20 to 24.9, is referred to in the BMI
calculators as “normal”.  This word choice suggests that although a majority of
Canadians fall in to the “overweight” and “obese” categories, they are not
“normal”
- Sociologists and other scholars suggest that the recent attention to obesity is a
type of moral panic—a collective fear of a real or imagined situation fuelled by
intense media coverage
- These scholars argue that there is widespread association between our growing
BMIs and moral depravity in society. The fear is that, with more and more obese
people, society is “going down the tubes.” This relates to the negative
associations with obesity that we discussed on the last page. Large people are
seen as morally devoid: lazy, incapable, undisciplined, irresponsible
- On the flip side, slender people are assumed to be virtuous—kind, capable, and
successful—simply on account of their slimness. Food scholar Charlotte Biltekoff
points to recent news and reality TV programming in the U.S. that frames weight
loss as a patriotic duty
- For these scholars, calling obesity an “epidemic” is an exaggeration that leads to
a misrepresentation of the real underlying issues. There may be legitimate issues
about obesity and public health, they argue, but the fear being generated, as in
many cases of moral panic, is a fear of social change
- Campos et al. (2006), for instance, suggest that the current focus on obesity in
the may be, in part, a backlash against feminism and women’s movement away
from the kitchen and into the workplace. Indeed, articles like the one from the
British Daily Mail(Opens new window) suggest that “it’s feminism we have to
thank for the spread of fast-food chains and an epidemic of childhood obesity.”
SOC808 Week Seven

Week 7 (June 15, 2019)

Module 7

Global Industrial Architecture

Topics

1. The Canadian farm crisis

2. Historical changes in agricultural systems
3. Positive and negative consequences of global, industrial agriculture

Learning Objectives

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

List some challenges faced in Canadian agriculture currently.

Outline ways in which capitalism and the profit motive has influenced agriculture.
Explain some of the criticisms against globalized, industrial agriculture and the
motivations behind the food sovereignty movement.

Required Readings

Critical Perspectives in Food Studies (2017), Chapter 8 (Albritton) Critical Perspectives

in Food Studies (2017), Chapter 10 (Wiebe)

Activities

Class Discussion Board

Module Seven: Global Industrial Agriculture

Introduction
- Although consumption and production are always intertwined, and it’s difficult to
speak about one without considering the other, our starting point from now on will
be production
Plummeting Farmer Incomes
- Farm net incomes
o In 1926, net farm incomes were about $10,000. They rose to over
$30,000 in the mid-1970s. From 1985 to 1995, they hovered around zero
and from 2000 to 2005, they were below zero
- You no doubt observed that farm incomes in some recent years are less than
zero! In other words, not only are farmers not profiting from their farms, but they
are even losing money
 - Most Canadian farmers are only able to survive because of off-farm income
(other jobs), government farm aid, and increasing levels of farm debt (NFU,
2012). Many others are simply going out of business—Canada has lost two-
thirds of its farmers since 1941 (NFU, 2012). Further, young people are not
entering the farming sector. The average age of Canadian farmers in 2011 was
54 (NFU, 2012). Clearly, these changes, of course, affect our access to food.  
Changes in Agriculture Post World War Two
- As you read in Chapter 10 of the textbook, there have been many changes in
agricultural technology over the years, with the most rapid changes happening
since World War II. For example, in this period, crop researchers began to
develop high-yielding crop varieties (e.g., wheat) that produced many more tons
per hectare. However, these new varieties were dependent on agricultural
chemicals. In fact, they were often more productive because they were bred to
absorb more chemical fertilizer than older varieties. Also, since the new varieties
were grown in monocultures (large areas of the same crop), they were more
vulnerable to pests and needed chemical pesticides
The Cost-Price Squeeze
- Expenses have increased dramatically as a percentage of gross revenues over
time (from 53% in the 1950s to 94% in the 19802 to 104% in the 2000s)
- In other words, farmer incomes are decreasing despite the increasing revenues
because their expenses (often called “inputs”) are so high. This explains the cost-
price squeeze
- The cost-price squeeze is the difference between the cost of farm inputs (e.g.,
fuel, agro-chemicals, machinery, seeds, antibiotics, etc.) and the price farmers
receive for their products.
- The cost of inputs is continually rising, while the cost of farm products has
remained fairly constant or have even fallen in the past 50 years. Most variation
in farm profitability in recent years is more likely to be a result of changes in input
costs (such as the cost of fuel) that are not within the control of the individual
farmer rather than in the prices that farmers receive for their product
- The result of the cost-price squeeze is that many Canadian farmers are going out
of business. Those that remain dedicated to farming resort to:
o Off-farm income (mentioned above)
o Borrowing money
- This is why Wiebe mentions “killer debts” among farmers.  These economic
challenges facing farmers also mean that it is difficult for young people to get in
to the business of farming resulting in an increase in the average age of farmers
Government Policy and Legislation
- Government decisions also contribute to the farm crisis. As Wiebe notes, while
some government decisions can be helpful to farmers, many actually benefit
agro-chemical companies to the detriment of small, family farms. One good
example of this is plant breeder's rights legislation in Canada. Farmers have
been saving seeds from the previous year’s crop for the next year’s crop for
generations. This practice, along with that of exchanging and selling seeds within
 the farm community, has meant that farmers could reduce costs and have a
degree of self-sufficiency
- What is the consequence of plant breeder’s rights legislation for farmers?
o The legislation protects the rights of large seed and chemical companies
to gain a profit from their investment in seed research
o In doing so, it restricts farmers’ rights to sell and trade seeds with each
other.
o If a farmer buys seeds from a company one year, he or she is not
permitted to save seeds from the harvest to plant the next year
o Therefore, unlike the past, farmers have to buy seeds from these
companies year after year
o This means increased costs and decreased self-sufficiency
- There is also the issue of government farm programs (aid). As Wiebe points
out, since the 1980s, Canadian agricultural policy is focused on increasing crop
yields for food export. The idea is to simultaneously make Canada competitive on
the world market and help farmers survive by encouraging them to increase their
farm size and productivity. For these reasons, the majority of farm program
money goes to large farms. Meanwhile, small, family farms—including farms that
attempt to use sustainable practices—receive less government aid, with many
going out of business
Farmer Share of the Food Dollar
- You may have heard in the news that the cost of food is rising. In fact, data
collected by Statistics Canada indicates that food prices have gone up
dramatically in the past five years (Loney, 2015). The rise was led by meat
prices, up 11.2 per cent from the previous year. Does this help address the farm
crisis?
- Not really. This is, in part, because of farm input costs described earlier. It is also
because farmers receive a small percentage of the price you pay in a typical
grocery store or restaurant for food. The rest of the money goes to the all of the
other actors in the food system that are involved from the farm gate to your plate.
Can you guess how much farmers receive from the price you pay for food?
Additionally, out of this amount they must cover the cost of all of their farm inputs
such as purchasing seeds and fertilizers, in many cases leaving very little as
actual income for the farmer
- What percentage of the food dollar do Canadian farmers receive?
o Approximately 10%. This number fluctuates somewhat every year, but it
has not gone above 13.5% in the past fifteen years
- An American dollar divided up according to the number of cents received by
different food-system actors. Farms and agribusinesses receive 11.6 cents. The
rest of the dollar goes to food processing, packaging, transportation, retail, food
services, energy, finance and insurance, etc.
- This partly explains the recent interest among Canadians in farmers’ markets.
The idea is that when you buy directly from farmers (and cook more from the raw
ingredients that farmers sell rather than buying packaged or restaurant food),
 farmers receive a greater share of your food dollar and your household food
budget is less
The First Great Food Revolution (15,000 to 5,000 BCE)
- What happened during the “First Great Food Revolution”?
o The advent of agriculture. Humans began to grow plants and raise animal
rather than just gathering and hunting
- This revolution was important because it created a surplus of food. One farmer
created more food than could be eaten in his or her own household. This meant
that some people didn’t have to farm and people could establish permanent
settlements with a reliable food supply. The time that was freed up for those who
weren’t involved in farm labour could then be put to other uses. This led to the
development of class stratification (e.g., farmers versus merchants versus land
owners). It also contributed to the development of government and the state
The Second Great Food Revolution (1945 to Present)
- What happened during the “Second Great Food Revolution”?
o Capitalism took over food production in general
- This means, more specifically, that companies began selling products to farmers
that farmers used to provide themselves.
1. During the Second Great Food Revolution:

 What were horses (which could be bred from one generation to the next)
replaced by?
 What was manure (provided by farm livestock) replaced by?
 What was the farming practice of saving seeds from one year’s harvest to the
next year’s replaced by?
 What was natural pest control (e.g., planting a variety of different crops rather
than monoculture) replaced by?
(Check your answers on page 114 of the text.)
In other words, control and profit in agriculture gradually moved from farmers to
corporations and the system of agriculture in North America became much more
dependent upon access to petroleum
- The term “revolution” to talk about the capitalist takeover of agriculture because
he sees it as a positive change
o FALSE: Albritton uses the term “revolution” to mean a large-scale change.
However, he sees the change as having many negative consequences
Industrial Agriculture: Proponent Views
- Some commentators argue that capitalism’s takeover of agriculture (what we will
from now on call “industrial agriculture”) has been generally beneficial. They note
that the development of more advanced crop varieties and agro-chemicals has
meant that farm yields are much higher and harvests more predictable. The
International Food Policy Institute, for example, suggests that because of these
changes, “most industrial countries achieved sustained food surpluses by the
 second half of the 20th century, and eliminated the threat of starvation” (Hazel,
2002, p. 1).
- This claim is also made in relation to countries in the global South (i.e.,
developing countries), where a so-called Green Revolution took place, albeit
later in time
The Green Revolution
- In the post-war period, countries in Latin America and Asia (e.g.,  India, Mexico)
faced hunger and malnutrition and, in some areas, widespread famine. In the late
1960s, the American Rockefeller and Ford foundations launched an international
agricultural research program that aimed to bring new agro-chemical products
and technologies from the global North (i.e., developed countries) to these poorer
nations. The increase in agricultural yields in these countries that resulted from
the American intervention prompted then Administrator of the US Agency for
International Development, William Gaud, to announce in 1968:
- Record yields, harvests of unprecedented size and crops now in the
ground demonstrate that throughout much the developing world—and
particularly in Asia—we are on the verge of an agricultural revolution…
These and other developments in the field of agriculture contain the
makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of
the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call
it the Green Revolution.
- The revolution was termed “green” presumably to bring to mind an abundance of
plant life
Industrial Agriculture: Opponent Views
- Opponents of capitalist, industrial agriculture see the situation quite differently.
For them, the proliferation of capitalist modes of production and agro-chemical
technologies all over the world has caused widespread damage. These concerns
are not seen as a product of globalization per se, but rather it is the increasing
power of agro-chemical companies in this system that is concerning
- Albritton notes a number of environmental and human health concerns resulting
from the widespread and growing use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and oil-
dependent farm equipment. He also discusses the poor conditions
and exploitation of agricultural workers
The Capitalist Profit Motive
- Many critics of capitalist agriculture (including Albritton) also argue that the
negative consequences for the environment, social justice, and human health
that result from current forms of agro-food production are the result of capitalist
imperatives. In other words, these consequences arise from basic principles of
capitalism and addressing them requires a rethinking of capitalism itself.
- A key point here is that any for-profit company in a capitalist system must
put short-term profit, reducing the turnover time between purchase of inputs
and sale of outputs above all other company goals in order to survive. Let’s take
the case of large apple farms in Ontario. The lower the apple-picker wages, the
higher the companies’ profits. If Farm A decides to boost wages to help the
 workers, they may have to raise their apple prices. But apple buyers, like retail
stores and juice manufacturers, may stop buying from Farm A if Farm A’s apples
are more expensive (retailers and manufacturers want to increase their profits as
well). As a result, Farm A could eventually go out of business.
- We can also think of larger agro-chemical corporations like Monsanto and
Syngenta. Imagine the CEO decides for benevolent reasons that Monsanto
pesticides should become more environmentally friendly and less toxic for
workers and eaters, even if this will cost the company more and profits will suffer
by 0.1%. This is actually illegal. A CEO is legally bound to increase profits for
shareholders and cannot pay attention to environment, health, or social justice
unless this move increases profits
- Albritton also discusses how the capitalist profit motive relates to the concept
of externalities, the social and environmental costs that are not accounted for in
the price that we pay for food.
American Imperialism?
- Opponents of the Green Revolution also suggest that U.S. involvement in the
agricultural economies of countries like India in the 1960s were not as
benevolent as proponents argue. Indian scholar and activist Vandana Shiva, for
example, suggests that U.S. involvement had more to do with political and
economic reasons than humanitarian ones. Before the 1960s, India was engaged
in land reform programs so that poor peasant farmers would have better access
to land. In Shiva’s view, the pro-capitalist U.S. became involved in Indian
agriculture as a way to prevent communist tendencies (e.g., communal land
ownership), especially in the wake of communist uprisings in China (Shiva,
1991). Shiva’s argument is thought-provoking, especially if we think back to the
1968 speech by the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International
Development, which seems to juxtapose the Green Revolution with political
uprisings elsewhere in the world: “It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the
Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the
Green Revolution.” 
- Shiva also notes that U.S. agro-chemical companies benefited tremendously
from the Green Revolution. Because the agricultural practices introduced by the
U.S.–led programs were highly dependent on chemical pesticides and fertilizers,
the Green Revolution was a way of opening up new economic markets for these
companies
Debilitating Debt
- As in the Canadian case, many farmers in countries in the global South took on
tremendous debt to buy the new machinery, seeds, and chemicals
recommended to them as part of Green Revolution programs. While some claim
that the Green Revolution increased farmer incomes and decreased poverty in
countries like India (Hazel, 2002), others note that farmer debt led to extreme
consequences when crops failed.
- There are many reports for example, of widespread farmer suicides in India and
other countries with Green Revolution programs during this period and decades
afterward. It is difficult to determine exact numbers—the government reports
 2,116 suicides from 1986–2005 in the Punjab region alone, while activist groups
report as many as 50,000 in the same time period (Kaur, 2010). However, farmer
suicides are a big enough issue to warrant activist attention
Globalization of the Food System
- When you think of the globalization of the food system, what comes to mind?
You might think of the fact that food products are imported to and exported from
all over the world. This is true, and the types of foods we have access to are
continually increasing (think of recent introductions into the North American diet,
such as nori from Japan, quinoa from South America, and chia seeds from
Mexico).  
- However, “globalization” also refers to economic globalization or "free trade."
- Free trade is a system that sets out how nations are able to buy goods from and
sell goods to each other.
- Economic globalization or free trade is trade in which a country does not
discriminate between its trading partners and does not discriminate between
domestic and foreign products, services, or workers (World Trade Organization,
2019a, p.10).
- What this means is that if a country has signed a free trade agreement, it cannot
give locally produced products, services, or workers preferential treatment over
imported products, services, or workers. And it cannot give products, services, or
workers from trading partner/country A preferential treatment over products,
services, or workers from trading partner/country B. If a country is seen to be in
violation of an agreement, any one of its trading partners can bring a complaint to
the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO is the body that orchestrates
trade negotiations and monitors trade among countries. 
- Free trade proponents argue that free trade boosts world economic growth and
trade (WTO, 2019b). This is the position of the Canadian government, which is
party to several free trade agreements with countries around the world.
- However, there is a significant and growing opposition to free trade. You may
have heard of the many large-scale protests that have taken place in cities where
the WTO has held negotiations over the past several decades. If you do a
Google image search for “WTO protest,” you can get an idea of the large number
and intensity of these protests.
- So why is there such passionate opposition to free trade and the WTO? Let’s
look at a particular case to bring some of the issues into sharper focus.
Food Sovereignty
- This brings us to the important concept of food sovereignty. In Chapter 14,
Martin and Amos described the role of colonialism in eroding the control over
food systems by indigenous people here in Canada. Because of the Green
Revolution and free trade, the U.S. and other countries of the global North have
had a tremendous influence on the agricultural economies of countries of the
global South. Multinational agro-food corporations and the WTO (both led in
large part by the U.S.) have also had significant influence on the food systems of
countries of the global North, including Canada.
 - For this reason, activists and citizens have become concerned about the power
and influence of these foreign corporations, trade bodies, and governments on
their food and agriculture. This is where the term “food sovereignty” comes from.
- Food sovereignty is “the right of nations and peoples to control their own food
systems, including their own markets, production modes, food cultures and
environments” (Wiebe & Wipf, 2001, p. 4). The term was coined in 1996 by the
transnational agrarian movement, La Via Campesina ("The Peasant Way"). 
- La Via Campesina is a grassroots movement of peasants, farmers, farm workers,
local women, and indigenous communities who came together to fight against
what they saw as the social inequalities and environmental damage of capitalist
agriculture. Canada’s National Farmers’ Union was a founding member.
-

SOC808 Week Eight

Week 8 (June 22, 2019)

Module 8
Hunger in the Midst of Plenty
Topics
1. Global and local food security and insecurity 2. Food banks
3. Food aid
4. Food sovereignty
Learning Objectives
By the end of this module, you should be able to:
Understand food sovereignty approaches in global food security.
Critique food banks as a solution to food insecurity in Canada and food aid as a solution
to food insecurity worldwide. Explain the role that governments and corporations have in
challenging or exacerbating food insecurity.
Required Readings
Critical Perspectives in Food Studies (2017), Chapter 15 (Dachner and Tarasuk)
Critical Perspectives in Food Studies (2017), Chapter 24 (Desmarais)
Activities
Class Discussion Board
Assignments (graded)
Food Bank/Food Aid Assignment and comments on group discussion board. Initial post
due by Tuesday of this week by 11:59PM , comments due by Thursday of this week @
11:59 PM. (Will be graded at end of the term with the Discussion Board Assignment
submission)
 Chapter 15: Origins and Consequences of and Responses to Food Insecurity in
Canada
Introduction
- A growing number of Canadians are struggling to afford the food that they need
o This problem is popularly referred to as “hunger” but also termed
household food insecurity, and it constitutes a serious social problem
and population health concern in Canada
Awareness of “Hunger” as a Problem in Canada
- Communities across the country in the 1980s began to establish as hoc
charitable food assistance programs in response to concerns that people I their
midst were going hungry
o These programs took the form of “food banks”, community organizations
established to collect donated foodstuffs and redistribute them to the
needy
- Through their continual public appeals for food donations (food drives), food
banks have rendered problems of “hunger” in Canada visible
o They have also become the public face of hunger and food insecurity in
Canada with their highly publicized campaigns for donations and regular
reports on food bank usage
The Experience of Food Insecurity
- Food insecurity defined as inadequate or insecure access to food due to financial
constraints, is understood to be a managed process, whereby the quality of foods
consumed is likely to be compromised before and substantial reduction in the
total amount of food eaten occur (i.e. going hungry)
- There are also disruptions in familial eating patterns, as adults limit their own
food intakes as a way to free up scarce resources for younger children
- Research suggests that older children also try to minimize their own food needs
during times of food shortages
- Food insecurity occurs in the context of severe financial constraints, and the food
problems that have come to define this condition are essentially manifestations of
material deprivation
- As resources dwindle, people mount extensive efforts to stretch what food they
have and augment their existing supplies so as to minimize experiences of food
deprivation
- It is a condition characterized by social isolation and feelings of marginalization
and alienation
- People who are food insecure often delay bill and rent payments; put off filling
prescriptions for needed meds; try to borrow food or money for food from
relatives and friends; purchase food on credit; sell or pawn any possessions they
have that can net some money; terminate telephone, internet or cable services;
and even obtain food through illegal means
 - Thus, the experience of food insecurity extends well beyond food, ultimately
impacting all aspects of one’s life
Food Insecurity Measurement and Monitoring
- In 1996, questions about household food insecurity began to appear on the
national population health survey and then on its successor, the Canadian
Community Health Survey (CCHS)
- Unfortunately, it was not until 2004 that food insecurity began to be measured
consistently on CCHS using a standardized, validated questionnaire
- This questionnaire, the Household Food Security Survey Module (HFSSM),
assesses household’s experiences of food insecurity over the previous 12
months
- The module consists of 18 questions asking the respondent whether they or
other household members experienced the conditions described, which range in
severity from experiences of anxiety that food will run out before household
members have money to buy more, to modifying the amount of food consumed,
to experiencing hunger, and finally, to going a whole day without eating
The Prevalence of Food Insecurity in Canada
- The prevalence of food insecurity in the USA in 2012 is almost three times higher
than the rate in Canada
- Four provinces – Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, and BC – accounted for 84% of food
insecurity households in Canada in 2012
- Food insecurity is most prevalent among households characterized by social and
economic disadvantage
- The single strongest predictor of food insecurity is low income, but being reliant
on social assistance, being black or of Aboriginal status, renting rather than
owning, and being lone-parent female-led house hold also increase the
probability of food insecurity
Food Insecurity and Health
- Among children, food insecurity has been linked to poorer health status and the
subsequent development of a variety of chronic health conditions, including
asthma and depression
- Household food insecurity appears to increase the likelihood of nutritional
deprivation among older children and adolescents in this country
- Household food insecurity is a potent marker of nutritional inequities in the
Canadian adult population, with adults in food-insecure household less likely to
meet their nutrient requirements for good health
- Food insecurity is associated with poorer physical and mental health among
adults
o More likely to report chronic conditions and multiple conditions
- There are here potential mechanism through which adults’ health can impact
their household food security status: (1) chronically poor health impedes adults’
earning power, increasing their likelihood of having low incomes; (2) it places
 additional financial demands on the household as people who are chronically ill
may require more money for prescription medications, special dietary needs,
transportations, etc.; and (3) chronic illnesses can limit adults’ abilities to manage
in the context of scarce resources
- In a 12-month period, adults in severely food-insecure households cost the
province, on average, more than twice as much in health care dollars as those
who were food secure
Response to Problems of Hunger and Food insecurity
Community Based Responses
Charitable Food Assistance
- Primarily is in the form of food banks, but also meal programs, is currently the
only direct response to household food insecurity in Canada
- Food banks and meal programs have evolved over time in ways that are, in part,
unique to the features of the particular community, yet they share many
fundamental characteristics
o Almost all are heavily reliant on food donations and volunteer labour
- Only half of food banks and two-thirds of meal programs have any paid staff; the
provision of food assistance hinges on the work of thousands of volunteers
- Only 20-30% of people experiencing food insecurity report seeking charitable
food assistance
- Food charity is most likely to be accessed by those facing severe food insecurity,
but even among this group, food bank usage is very low
- The failure of charitable food assistance programs to prevent people from going
hungry speaks to the extraordinary levels of vulnerability of those who seek their
assistance
- It also reflects the limited assistance that individuals can receive from what has
evolved to be a highly fragmented, resource-constrained system of food relief
- Food banks are aware that they are unable to address the root causes of hunger
and food insecurity
- Many food charities have worked to advocate for social policy changes to
address the poverty underpinning the food problems that their clients face
Children’s Nutrition Programs
- Breakfast and soon to be lunch programs for children
o Over the past two decades these programs have proliferated through
community-based voluntary efforts, occasionally receiving finding support
from school boards or municipalities
- There have been increasing investments by the provinces and territories and
repeated calls for a universal school nutrition program
- Every province and territory is now investing in school nutrition programs, in
some instances with funds allotted as part of provincial poverty reduction
initiatives
 - A study of food assistance programs in secondary schools in disadvantaged
neighbourhoods in Quebec suggests that these programs may improve
scholastic performance of adolescents in food-insecure families, mitigating
difficulties typically associated with household food insecurity
Community Food Security Initiatives
- While charitable food assistance through food banks, meal programs, and school
programs remains the mainstay of community responses to household food
insecurity, several other types of food programs have emerged in recent years
- These programs such as community kitchens, typically operate on a much
smaller scale than charitable food assistance programs and involve only a small
fraction of those at risk of food insecurity
- Despite the ever-evolving landscape of charitable food assistance programs and
community food security initiatives, there is widespread consensus that such
community efforts do not and cannot tackle the root causes of food insecurity in
Canada
Government Responses
- Historically, Canada’s approach to social welfare has been a social safety net,
created to protect citizens from the devastating effects of extreme poverty
through income transfer programs such as social assistance, employment
insurance, and old age security
- Canada has no dedicated federal policy intervention to address household food
insecurity and very few initiatives provincially, although school nutrition programs
and some community-based food programs targeting low-income groups are
supported to some extent by public funds
- There is no national plan to address food insecurity that has been put into place
Social Assistance
- Social assistance includes welfare, the last resort support program meant to
provide for the basic necessities in life, as well as disability, the income
assistance program available to working aged adults who are permanently
unable to work for medical reasons
- Social assistance programs fall under provincial/territorial jurisdiction, and the
prevalence of food insecurity among social assistance recipient varies
accordingly, from a low of 46% of social assistance households being food
insecure in Newfoundland and Labrador to a high of 79% in Alberta
- The experience in newfoundland and Labrador indicates that policy reforms to
improve the incomes and expand the benefits for people on social assistance will
improve their food security
Seniors’ Benefits
- At the age of 65, individuals in Canada become beneficiaries of Canada’s public
pension system consisting of the universal old age security program, the mean-
tested Guaranteed Income Supplement, and the contributory Canadian Pension
Plan
 - These programs create an income floor for adults 65 years and older that has
been linked to a dramatic reduction in poverty rates among Canadian seniors;
Canada now boasts one of the lowest rates of elder poverty in the world
- Similarly, the rate of food insecurity is relatively low among seniors
- In an examination of the impact of the income floor created by the seniors’
support programs on household food insecurity
o The prevalence of food insecurity among low-income Canadians living
alone decreased by nearly 50% at the age of 65
o This research suggests that a guaranteed annual income (GAI) ensuring
that all Canadians have enough money to afford basic needs for food and
shelter could be a powerful intervention to reduce household food
insecurity
o A GAI would remove extraordinarily high vulnerability to food insecurity
experienced now by individuals and families with very low income
Conclusion
- There is no federal or provincial policy intervention with the explicit goal of
reducing household food insecurity
- The primary response has been food charity, delivered through a massive and
diverse array of community programs, conditional on donation and volunteer
labour
- While these efforts are incapable of tackling the root causes of food insecurity,
national data is enabling identification of policy interventions that would
fundamentally improve the material well-being of food-insecure households
Chapter 24: Building Food Sovereignty
Introduction
- Food security is an emphasis on increasing global production, productivity, and
liberalized trade, and pursuing another green revolution through the greater use
of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agricultures
- Food crisis now linked to the economic and environmental crisis – is the result of
decades of destructive policies that spurred the globalization of a neoliberal
industrial and corporate led model of agriculture and that “the time for food
sovereignty has come
- La Via Campesina is an international peasant movement bringing together 164
organizations based in 73 countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa
o Many consider it to be the world’s most politically significant transnational
agrarian movement because of its persistent resistance to the
globalization of neo-liberal agriculture and the way in which the movement
works to expand, further define, and disseminate the idea and practice of
food sovereignty
Going Beyond Sustainability and Food Security – Food Sovereignty
- The idea and practice of sustainable agriculture reflected a profound respect for
ecology; it focused on local production for local consumption and required
 environmentally friendly practices such as, among others, integrated pest
management, organic or low-input and small-scale agricultural production, and
polyculture
- The concept of sustainable development does imply limits – limitation imposed
by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental
resources and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human
activities
o But technology and social organization can be both managed and
improved to make way for a new era of economic growth
- The World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Agriculture reflected the belief
that food security could best be reached by increasing agricultural trade
accompanied by expanding the power of the WTO in global governance over
food, genetic resources, natural resources, and agricultural markets
- History has shown that food security does not equal self-sufficiency of a country
o It has more to do with international trade in food products that makes them
available at competitive prices and sets the right incentives for those
countries where they can be produced most efficiently
o Food shortages have to do with poverty rather than with being a net food
importer
o Food security nowadays lies not only in the local production of food, but in
a country’s ability to finance imports of food through exports of other
goods
- Currently the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) define
food security as a situation that exists when all people, at all times have physical,
social and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets
their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life
- The concept of food sovereignty emerged as peasants and small-scale farmer
struggled to survive in this harsher political and economic environment that
effectively threatened their very modes of existence
o As peasants and farmers were being driven off the land, rural
impoverishment was on the rise, and environmental degradation
worsened, organizations of peasants form the global south and small- to
medium-scale farers in the North gathered together to form La Vie
Campensia
 Defined food sovereignty as a framework “directly linked to
democracy and justice” that exposes the power dimensions in
ongoing agriculture debates and puts control of productive
resources (land, water, seeds, and natural resources) in the hands
of those who produced food
What is Food Sovereignty?
- Food sovereignty is the right of peoples and nations to control their own food and
agricultural systems, including their own markets, production modes, food
cultures, and environments
 - Food sovereignty is a framework that keeps small-scale producers on the land
and enables them to make a living from growing food
- It is a radical alternative to corporate-led, neo-liberal, industrial agriculture
- Food sovereignty stresses that it is not enough to ensure that a sufficient amount
of food is produced nationally and made accessible to everyone
- Food sovereignty includes farmers and peasants right to produce their own food
in their own territory and the right of consumers to be able to decide what they
consume and how and by whom it is produced
o It places those who produce and consume food at the center of decision
making and in doing so it addresses head on issues of power and power
dynamic
- In a world increasingly dominated by the ideals of liberalized trade governed by
undemocratic and distant global institutions, food sovereignty is nothing less than
revolutionary
- Food sovereignty subordinates trade relations and transcends the fetishism for
agricultural commodities as it reintegrates social, ecological, and co-operative
production relations; revalues land, food, and those who work the land; and
addresses questions of rights and social reproduction of agrarian cultures and
ecological sustainability
- Food sovereignty cultivates solidarity over individualism, envisions food as more
than commodity, rejects free markets, and demands state intervention and
market regulation
- Food sovereignty demands the rights to have rights and expands our
understanding of human rights to include the right to land and natural resources,
peasants rights and even the right to food sovereignty
- Food sovereignty is ben understood as a radical democratic project that, on the
one hand, exposes the power dynamics in the current global food system, and on
the other hand, cultivates new spaces for inclusive debate on food and
agriculture
Building a Global Movement for Food Sovereignty
- Initially food sovereignty focused on issues if production, reflecting the interests
of peasant and small-scale farmers
- However food sovereignty gained momentum as la Via Campesina worked in
alliance with other social movements, non-governmental organizations, and
community based organizations that were using food sovereignty in efforts to
shift agriculture policy in different part of the world
 - Food sovereignty goes beyond food and agriculture and created the
opportunities and possibilities to fundamentally alter social relations, cultures,
and politics – indeed, it prompts us to question the very basis of modern societies
Conclusion – The Challenges to Food Sovereignty
- First is the sheer extent and complexity of change required
o After all, we are talking about a fundamental transformation of societies –
one that involves the redistribution of all kinds of resources, including
power
- When the necessary political conditions are created and food sovereignty
succeeds in carving democratic spaces for debate on food and agriculture, a
second challenge emerges
o What mechanism and processes can those advocating food sovereignty
introduce to reconcile class interests and balance power dynamics to
ensure that all voices are heard and acted upon
 - A third challenge to food sovereignty is the threat of usurpation by powerful
interests who can reshape its meaning and thus dilute it of revolutionary potential
Module Eight: Hunger in the Midst of Plenty
Did you know that, for example, almost one-in-twenty Canadians used a food bank in
2017 (Food Banks Canada, 2017). 
Here are some other statistics that you might not know:

 More than 1/3 of those helped by food banks in Canada are children.
 In the Greater Toronto Area, more than 1/3 of those using food banks have a
college or university degree.
 Students most likely to access the food bank at Ryerson are those in programs
with the highest tuition (Engineering and Architecture).
 Asia is the continent with the largest number of hungry people (more than twice
the number of Sub-Saharan Africa).
 More than half of the hungry people in the world are farmers.

Global and Local Hunger: Introduction

- The concept of food security also takes into consideration people’s environment
and their access to food
- Food security: a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical,
social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their
dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.
- As you can guess, food insecurity, then, is the absence of one or more of these
elements.
- At a more basic level, to determine food insecurity in households, organizations
like Statistics Canada ask Canadians: “Have you, in the past year, not had
enough to eat, worried about not having enough to eat, or not eaten the quality
or variety of food desired?” 
- Here, you can see that worrying about not having enough to eat is also important
to the notion of food insecurity. People are considered food secure when they are
no longer in precarious or uncertain circumstances that cause worry
Food Security in Canada
- Dashner and Tarasuk (2017) conclude that the strongest predictor of food
insecurity is low household income and that government policy approaches that
tackle poverty (anti-poverty approaches) would help to reduce to prevalence of
food insecurity.
- In Chapter 24, Desmarais (2017) analyzes food access from a food sovereignty
perspective (pp. 364-366).  According to this perspective, food prices would be
less volatile, if food production and distribution systems were more in the hands
of citizens (food producers and consumers), and control by multinational
corporations was more limited.
- Both of these perspectives are valid and important. The anti-poverty perspective
helps us to understand that government decisions have major impacts on
 whether all Canadian citizens can be food secure. The food-sovereignty
perspective demonstrates that food security, both in Canada and abroad, is also
affected by issues beyond our borders, such as international agreements on the
global production and distribution of food.

Poverty in Canada
- According to Dachner and Tarasuk, food bank use in Canada has a lot to do with
incomes
- Maps show census tracts of very high-income, high-income, middle-income, low-
income, and very low-income households. In 1970, the map was mainly
populated with middle-income households, with some patches of very high- and
high-income households in the central north and low- and very low-income
households in the downtown area. In 2005, many of the previously middle-
income areas have been replaced by low- and very low-income populations.
Some of the previously middle-income areas have been replaced by very high-
income populations.
- What changes took place form 1970 t0 2005 in terms of income?
o In 2005, there are a lot fewer households with middle incomes. There is a
greater number of very high-income households and a much greater
number of low- and very low-ncome households. Some commentators
have called this phenomenon “the vanishing middle class
- The take-home message here is that poverty has been increasing in the GTA as
well as across the country. This, then, affects food security

Incomes, the Cost of Living, and Food Security

 - For households to be food secure, it’s not only important how much money
people make but it's also important what their incomes are relative to the cost of
living. This includes the cost of food, shelter, and other basic necessities.
- We already talked about substantial rent increases in Ontario since 1998. This is
particularly acute in Toronto where the average rent for a one-bedroom
apartment has been deemed unaffordable by low-to-moderate income earners by
many critics (Sundar, 2017).
- You may have also noticed that the cost of food has increased significantly in the
past few years. As noted in Module 2, the cost of food items considered to be
healthier, such as fruits and vegetables, is rising faster than other items
(Charlebois et al, 2018). Here is a Statistics Canada table showing the average
cost of selected food items from the past four years
- Reasons for the increase in the cost of food
o The conversion of land used for food production to agrofuel production
(affecting localized systems of food production).
o The long-distance transportation of food in a global market (linking food
prices to changes in oil prices).
o The cost of running farm machinery and the cost of petroleum-based
pesticide and fertilizer (linking food prices to changes in oil prices).
o A focus on exports commodities rather than food for domestic
consumption in agricultural policies (affecting localized systems of food
production).
o Increasing prices for seeds (linking food prices with control of seed
production by mulitnational corporations).
- Despite these rising costs, social assistance rates in many jurisdictions in
Canada have not kept up.  Daschner and Tarasuk identify that one notable
exception to this is Newfoundland and Labrador. It is also the one province that
has experienced a reduction in the rate of food insecurity, as situation which
Daschner and Tarasuk use to support their assertion that policy reforms to
improve incomes can improve food security
Food Banks as a Solution?
- Many scholars and activists criticize the idea that food banks are a real solution
to food insecurity. One main argument is that food banks are a short-term
solution that does not get to the root of the problem. The idea is that we should
fix the more fundamental problems of poverty and inequality in our society so that
people can feed themselves, rather than simply give people food
A Band-Aid Solution?
- Some scholars, like Janet Poppendieck (2000), take this argument even further.
She suggests that when well-off people donate their time and/or money to food
banks, they may actually be exacerbating the problem. If well-off people make
themselves feel good through their focus on food banks and think they are
helping, they may not fight for more fundamental changes in our society. The
recipient, on the other hand, may experience feelings of shame and low self-
esteem and may not want to draw attention to their situation. This issue is
 important for Ryerson, where there are yearly food drives, especially around the
holidays, to raise food for local food banks.
- What do Daschner and Tarasuk identify as limitations of food banks?
o This form of food assistance is dependent primarily on the work of
volunteers rather than paid employees
o Only 20-30% of people experiencing food insecurity report seeking
charitable food assistance
Food Security and Insecurity in the Global South
- This is another area where the media has influenced our ideas about the causes
of food insecurity. We either get the idea that people are hungry because of bad
luck (natural conditions) or because of their own poor decisions.
- However, countries of the global North (“developed countries”) are in many ways
implicated in food insecurity elsewhere. We’ll talk about why in the next few
pages.
Structural Adjustment
- In Module 7, we touched on the fact that the Canadian government is a big
proponent of export agriculture. This is, in fact, a trend promoted by mainstream
economists across the global North. The idea is that, in a global economy,
countries benefit economically from exporting their products on the global
market. 
- This economic logic is so popular that it has been used by countries of the global
North to “help” countries of the global South. One way this happens is through
loans given to poorer nations through the World Bank or the International
Monetary Fund (IMF). As a condition of receiving such loans, recipient nations
are required to engage in what is called “structural adjustment programs”
(sometimes now called “austerity programs”). Structural adjustment means that
recipient nations are required to make changes to their political and economic
practices to “cut costs” for government. Examples include cutting social services
and privatizing public institutions. 
- What is the most important for our purposes is that structural adjustment typically
involves a country converting lands to export agriculture. So, for example,
significant amounts of farmland in India that was previously used to grow food for
local consumption is now being used to grow flowers destined for flower shops in
places like Canada (Hines, 2004). The same thing has happened in many
countries of the global South, who now grow things like coffee, chocolate, and
bananas for us, rather than food for themselves. At the same time, as Desmarais
(2017) points out, there is an increase in the number of countries that used to be
able to grow food to feed their people having shifting to being food importers and
an decrease in the number of small farmers with control over their lands under
current global trade agreements.  Furthermore, the diversity of the types of food
crops grown has decreased (IPEC, 2016), a situation associated with specific
nutrient deficiencies that compound the problem of hunger and susceptibility to
illness
International Food Aid
 - The need for international food aid is often presented in the international media
as a consequence of climate change induced crop shortages or interruption to
food supply as a consequence of war or inter-state conflict
- According to Dr. Fraser's research, what factors other than food production
capacity are linked to food access in developing countries? Try to identify
at least three.
- Unemployment
- Poverty
- Political marginalization of citizens
- Globalization (control over local food production by non-local companies)
- It is also important to note that while food aid is often given under the guise of
“helping” poorer nations, the main motivation for providing food aid can be to
benefit the donor country. For example, at times when rice was not selling well in
the U.S. and the price of rice in the U.S. dropped as a result, rice producers
lobbied the U.S. government to ramp-up food aid in the form of rice (Oxfam,
2005). The idea is that getting rid of surplus rice in the U.S. would help raise
prices for U.S. farmers.
- Food aid might also be a way for a country to promote a benevolent image in a
recipient nation and thus potentially improve their political reputation. In Figure
8.3, you can see that U.S. food aid is clearly marked with the letters “USA” in the
blue and red stripes of the American flag.

SOC808 Week Nine

Week 9 (June 29, 2019)

Module 9
Factory Farming and Meat Eating
Topics
1. Relating factory farming to environmental sustainability 2. Alternatives to factory
farming and meat eating
Learning Objectives
By the end of this module, you should be able to:
Compare the environmental and health impacts of factory farming versus its alternatives
.
Explain how externalities are related to the “meatification” of global diets.
Critique arguments that suggest that vegetarian or vegan diets are always better for the
planet.
List some reasons that make it difficult for people to switch to more sustainable and
healthy food choices.
Required Readings
Critical Perspectives in Food Studies (2017), Chapter 9 (Weis)
Also for this week, read about differing perspectives on meat eating from the following
module links to the webpages for short, downloadable
documents:
Pollan, M. (March 31, 2002). Power Steer. New York Times Magazine.
Butler, K. (July 9, 2010). Steak or veggie burger: Which is greener? Mother Jones.
Activities
Class Discussion Board

Module: Factory Faming and Meat Eating

Factory Farming: Introduction
- In the textbook, Weis (2017) refers to the system as the industrial grain-
oilseed-livestock complex (p.121) The term factory farming is typically used to
describe the type of farming in which at least one of the following is true:
o Crops are grown using monoculture techniques, typically on very large
scales, using chemical pesticides and/or fertilizers.
o Animals are raised in high density farms and feedlots, fed on the grain
(primarily corn) raised using the monoculture techniques rather than less-
intensive animal pasturing.
- What's alarming to some commentators is the prevalence of factory farms in
modern times. According to Weis (2017), in the U.S., more than 90% of pigs are
raised in CAFOs of more than 5,000 animals, and 99% of chickens are raised in
CAFOs of more than 100,000 birds (p. 122). In Canada, statistics are fewer and
further between. However, we know, for example, that in Saskatchewan, hog
production doubled between 1981 and 2001, even though the number of hog
farmers declined by 80% over the same period (Ervin et al., 2003, p. 15). This
means, of course, that farms became much larger and began to use much more
intensive farming techniques, such as confining and force-feeding animals
Factory Farming: Pros for Consumers
- You may have heard that meat consumption has been increasing substantially
worldwide. This change in diet has led some scholars to claim that we are
undergoing a meatification of our diets 
- This is not only the case in rich Western countries. Meat consumption is
increasing everywhere, especially in countries where meat consumption was
fairly limited until recently.
- In 1975, meat consumption in China was about 8 million tons, while in the U.S. it
was about 20 million tons. Now, meat consumption in China is about 70 million
tons, while in the U.S. it is about 33 million tons
- You probably noticed that meat consumption in China in 1975 was less than half
of that in the U.S., but now, meat consumption in China is about double that of
the U.S. There has certainly been a “meatification” of diets in China
Why is this a Pro?
- Think about the positive aspects of meat—it can taste good, it is high in protein,
and it plays a part in marking ethno-cultural and gender identities. If we
consider that access to meat gives people access to these benefits, then
increasing access to meat worldwide can be viewed in a positive light. We might
even say there has been a “democratization” of meat worldwide. Whereas meat
was available to, and eaten mainly by, the upper classes in the recent past, it is
 now more available to people of all incomes, all around the world. This is
especially noticeable through the proliferation of fast-food hamburger chains
around the world. Figure 9.2 shows a McDonald’s in North Africa. Without factory
farming, which makes large quantities of meat available quickly and cheaply, this
democratization of meat may not have been possible
Factory Farming: Pros for the Agricultural Industry
- As Pollan notes, factory farming has also been very beneficial for grain farmers—
especially corn producers
- Why is factory farming beneficial for the corn industry?
o Factory-farmed cattle, unlike pasture-raised cattle, are now fed corn. So,
industrial cattle farmers provide an excellent market for corn
- During the early 20th century, depression and war resulted in food shortages in
North America. As a result, governments put into place subsidies for farmers.
The more of a crop a farmer produced, the more financial support he or she
would receive.
- This resulted in an abundance of certain grains, most notably corn. Because
there was a corn surplus and governments were subsidizing corn production,
corn prices fell. Meat producers began to see corn as a cheap source of cattle
feed.
- Since corn was cheap, beef became cheaper to produce
- We might say that this creates a win-win situation for the corn and cattle
industries. The cattle industry gets a cheap source of feed: corn. And corn
producers have an excellent market for their corn: cattle farmers.
- This also relates to the democratization of meat, which we discussed on the
previous page. Since corn production is subsidized by many governments, meat
ends up being cheaper
Factory Farming: Cons for Everyone
- So far in this module, we’ve said that corn is cheap because it is subsidized by
governments, and this makes meat, especially beef, “cheap.” This is true if we
think only about the price that cattle farmers pay for corn and the price that we
pay for a hamburger or a steak.
- But if we consider the other costs of factory farming—such as to the
environment, our health, the welfare of feedlot animals, and the well-being of
farm and slaughterhouse workers—we might no longer find “cheap” an
appropriate word.
- Pollan mentions several ways in which feeding corn to cattle is problematic for
health, the environment, animal welfare, and workers' well-being. You might also
know of some other problems from previous readings you’ve done or films you’ve
watched. Take a moment to jot down a few of those issues. Then, check your
answers below
- What are some of the environmental, health, and social and animal-welfare
issues associated with feeding corn to cattle?
o Animal welfare: Cattle become sick because their digestive systems
aren’t meant to digest corn. E. coli develops in the digestive systems of
cattle because of eating corn instead of grass.
 o Environment: Cattle are given antibiotics because of illness, which then
leach into our water. This, in turn, can cause antibiotic resistance in
humans.  
o Health: Antibiotic residues remain in meat and have been associated with
human health problems. The E. coli from cattle can also leach into our
water, creating another human health threat. Corn-fed beef is higher in
saturated fat than grass-fed beef too.
o Workers' well-being: Slaughterhouse work is one of the most dangerous
types of work in North America (Pollan, 2002). Also, workers on factory
farms and in slaughterhouses have to deal with the overwhelming sights,
sounds, and smells of sick and dying animals, day after day.
Other Environmental and Social Issues
- The livestock industry is problematic not just because of the practice of feeding
corn to cattle. A large-scale UN report (Steinfeld et al., 2010) documents other
serious environmental and social consequences of the livestock industry, such
as:
o Deforestation; loss of biodiversity resulting from converting forest land to
farmland.
o Overtaxing of ecosystem services, resulting in significant water and land
pollution from livestock waste and agro-chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
o Displacement of small-scale farmers and Indigenous people from their
land, for the creation of large-scale livestock-production facilities.
o Significant greenhouse gas emissions from the transport and production of
livestock and livestock feed. (In fact, livestock production was calculated
to be responsible for about 18% of global greenhouse-gas emissions).
- Biophysical consequences of industrial agriculture are summarized by Weis,
2017, p. 129 in your textbook. These consequences bring us to the concept of
“externalities,” which we will examine on the next page
Factory Farming: Externalities
- Cattle farmers are able to buy corn for a cheap price, and we are able to buy
cheap hamburgers and steaks in part because the health, environmental, and
social- and animal-welfare costs are externalized. In other words, the costs are
not reflected in the market price because they are paid elsewhere.
- Externalities are costs arising from an economic activity that:
o Affects a third party not involved in that economic activity.
o Are not reflected in prices.
- Food scholar Raj Patel has calculated that, if the health and environmental costs
of a hamburger were reflected in the price of a hamburger rather than
externalized, it would cost much more than the $3 or $4 we pay at the till. What
do you think he found?
- According to Patel’s calculations (2010), how much would a $4 hamburger
cost if the associated health, social, and environmental costs of producing
that hamburger were not externalized?
 o $200
The Benefits of Vegetarianism
- You may have heard arguments suggesting that because of the problems
associated with livestock production, we should move to a meatless diet or at
least reduce our consumption of meat (e.g., Lappe, 1971; Lappe, 2010; Pollan,
2008).
- Indeed, there is mounting evidence to suggest that the production of plant-based
meals contribute less to things like global warming and deforestation than meat-
based meals (Davis et al., 2010; Baroni et al., 2006; IPES, 2017). One of the
reasons for this is related to the efficiencyof producing vegetables versus
livestock. As Butler notes in the second reading for this week, if you put 100
calories of energy into producing beef in a confined animal feedlot operation
(CAFO), you only get 6.4 nutritional calories when you eat it. If you put the same
100 calories into producing soy beans, you get 415 calories—over 60 times
more! This is why it is argued that growing protein-rich plants like soy is a much
more efficient use of land than raising livestock. It takes much less land to
grow x number of calories of soy than to raise the same number of calories of
meat.
Vegetarianism: Processed versus Non-processed Meals
- According to Butler, vegetarian meals are always better for the
environment and health than meat
o False
o Vegetarian products that undergo more industrial processing can require a
similar amount of energy (from fossil fuels) in their production as meat
products. Manufacturers of vegetarian products may also use unhealthy or
pollution-causing products (such as hexane, as Butler points out) in the
processing
- Another issue is whether the products we are considering are frozen or not. A
Swedish study compared the energy use of two meals, one meat and one
vegetarian:
o A (never-frozen) pork chop meal (labelled as “soy” pork chop in Figure 9.3
because the pigs were fed soy feed).
o A veggie burger meal (where the burger, which was made of peas, was
frozen).
- The energy use of each of these meals, from the farm to the plate, is charted in
Figure 9.3 below. As you’ll see, the pea-burger meal took roughly the same
amount of energy to produce as the pork-chop meal.
Why is this the case?
- As you can see in the chart, pig farming (beige) is much more energy-intensive
than pea farming (green),but keeping the veggie burger frozen from the
manufacturer (grey) to the retailer (blue) to the household (red) takes more
energy than keeping the pork chop refrigerated.
- Of course, you might argue that veggie burgers are not always frozen and pork is
not always fed soy. These are important points to consider.   There are many
 different styles of food production and many of the analyses are based on those
types of production and manufacture that are most common. The overall point is
that we cannot assume that vegetarian meals are always better for the
environment than meat-based meals. 
The Challenge of Changing our “Foodprint”
- Given what we’ve said about the benefits of vegetarianism, there may be an
argument to be made for a vegetarian revolution, so to speak (especially
vegetarianism that involves minimally processed foods). However, as you’ve
seen throughout the course, there are many more factors involved in our food
choices than considerations about the environment, worker and animal welfare,
and our health.
- Another approach to changing our foods habits that is currently promoted by the
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations is to reduce our
“foodprint”, the impact of our eating habits on the environment, by reducing the
amount of food that we we waste (FAO, 2016). According to FAO data, up to
40% of the food that is harvested is not eaten. In North America, the majority of
that food waste happens in households, after you bring it home from the store. 
- One thing to consider as you think about these issues is that vegetarianism is a
way of life for large groups of people in many parts of the world. Many Buddhists,
Jainists, and Hindus, for example, have adopted vegetarianism as a way of life
consistent with their spiritual beliefs. These cultures have developed complex
and varied vegetarian cuisines as a result. Some of these groups also consider
wasting food to be against their spiritual beliefs (Soma, 2016). Consider the
variety of food and the portion sizes in Figure 9.4. Keep this in mind as you think
about the feasibility of a reduction in meat eating and food waste in Canada
Alternatives: Pasture-Raised Meat
- If raising livestock in factory-like conditions and feeding them things they are not
meant to eat can be unsustainable, unhealthy, and cruel, what about raising
livestock in a more traditional way?
- There is growing interest these days in pasture-raised meat and small-scale
farming (that is, small in comparison to massive industrial feedlots in places like
Texas that hold up to 840,000 heads of cattle [Galyean et al, 2011). There are
several farms in southern Ontario that pasture raise their animals for meat,
including Beretta Farms in Etobicoke, whose owners sell their meat all over
southwestern Ontario including mainstream retail outlets and YU Ranch from
Norfolk County Ontario who provide pasture-raised beef to a number of public
institutions, including here at Ryerson.
- What might be some benefits of pasture-raising animals? Using Pollan’s article,
what we’ve talked about so far in the module, and the Beretta website and YU
ranch website, make a list of potential benefits. Then, check your answers below.
- Potential benefits of pasture-raising animals?
o Because they are fed what they are naturally meant to digest (e.g., grass
rather than corn for cattle), pasture-raised animals typically get sick less
often, and they require fewer antibiotics than factory-farmed animals. This
is also better for animal welfare. 
 o When animals are out in pasture rather than in confined feedlots, their
manure can be used to fertilize the land, rather than building up in
massive piles of waste that pollute nearby water and land.
o Meat from pasture-raised animals have less fat and more (beneficial)
antioxidants than meat from factory farmed animals (Daley et al., 2010).
o Farm workers are less subject to toxic, unpleasant, and dangerous
conditions on small-scale farms.
More Radical Alternatives: Insects as Protein
- In Module 3, you were introduced to Jakub Dzamba’s urban cricket-farming
enterprise. You might remember that, according to Dzamba’s calculations, cricket
farming is about 50 times more energy efficient than any other type of meat
production.
- Could insect farming be scaled up to feed the masses?
- There is evidence that this type of project might have large-scale impact. A team
of MBA students at McGill, who consulted with Dzamba, recently won the $1-
million Hult Prize(Opens new window) presented by former U.S. president Bill
Clinton for business plans with positive social outcomes. As mentioned in the
article, the students plan to introduce insect-farming units to farmers in countries
of the global South that are experiencing food insecurity. They also intend to set
up a system where they buy the insects back from these farmers, process them,
and then sell them to the urban population.
- But what about in Canada?

SOC808 Week Ten

Week 10 (July 6, 2019)

Module 10
Food Marketing and Information
Topics
1. Food labelling
2. The limits to food information systems 3. Food marketing
Learning Objectives
By the end of this module, you should be able to:
Give examples of how we are “alienated” and “distanced” from our food.
Connect labelling terms and English food words to our consciousness about where food
comes from and how it is made. Explain why “alienation” and “distancing” matter to our
diets and the food system.
Identify misleading or deceptive food marketing claims and the relation to our healthy
eating discourse.
Required Readings
Critical Perspectives in Food Studies (2017), Chapter 16 (Knezevic)
Activities
Class Discussion Board
Assignments (graded)
Food Marketing Assignment and comments on group discussion board. Initial post due
by Tuesday of this week by 11:59 PM , comments due by Thursday of this week @
11:59 PM.

Chapter 16: Making Wise Food Choices: Food Labelling, Advertising, and the
Challenge of Informed Eating

Introduction

- The current nutrition label modernization initiative in Canada aims to create a

“modern food labelling system that responds to current and future challenged”
and in doing so the Canadian food inspection agency is removing the mandatory
requirements for information on vitamins A & C
- The justification is that these are no longer public-health issues, but what the
change reveals is both the level of information clutter around food (which
requires the regulators to weed out wheat they no longer consider critical
information) and the highly selective nature of food labelling information
presented to us
- In a system where the supplier of food is most commonly a vague corporate
entity, food labels are the link between that entity and the consumer, and this
link is becoming increasingly complex
- Consumer demand has led to a greater number of more detailed labels on
industrial food
- The symbolic power of labels shapes our discourse on food and hence our
understanding of it
o Sophisticated marketing practices ensure that the products are always
presented in a positive light, so labels commonly advertise much more
than they reveal
- In shaping the discourse, labels also play political and ideological roles by
helping the industry appear properly regulated, thus making radical policy
changes appear unnecessary
- Labels assist the industry in co-opting and commercializing alternative food
models
- In doing so, labels minimize the effects of alternatives on the industry
- Labels help turn those alternatives from attempts at undermining the industrial
food system into profitable niche markets

Labels as Discourse

- A variety of “in Canada” labels target consumers looking for Canadian products
- Labels on food products are the communicative bridge between the
producer/processor and the consumer in a food system in which the two may
never otherwise communicate
- Food labels bring together within a very small space and short text, the interests
of major discourse communities. ON a food label, the discourses of business,
 marketing aesthetics, law, science, health, environmentalism and the family, all
meet, intermingle, and compete
- The content of a label then, complex as it is, is never a simple message, and its
loaded meaning is further complicated by its interaction with other labels on the
same product
- In theory, labels inform and reassure the consumer that their food is monitored,
nutritionally analyzed, and held to a variety of safety and quality standards
- In practice, they are more of an opportunity to advertise and make glowing claims
about products
- They are the tool of the packaged food industry, necessitated and developed by
it, and as such can really only serve one master faithfully – the industry that need
them for its very existence
- Labels do more than just promote and perpetuate the processed food industry
o They also determine the boundaries of discourse
o By giving us “need to know” information, they also indicate what should
not be of concern to us
o The messages conveyed by labels obscure more than they declare, by
selectively providing the information the manufacturers want us to know
o They shape our understanding of the food items we buy and consequently
our understanding of the food system
o They tap into what we want to hear (and read) by providing constant
reassurance that the food system is under control and functioning
o In the long run, they assist the industrial food system in minimizing
criticism and challenges
o They provide a sense of security and knowledge and at the same time
discourage questioning of the food system

Distancing from Food

- Brewster Kneen uses the term distancing to describe the process of “separating
people from the sources of their food and nutrition with as many interventions as
possible”
- Distance is both physical and informational
- Consequently, consumers’ purchasing decisions are informed mainly through the
labels on the packaging
- Without any connection to the field or the farmer who produced the food,
consumers are prompted to associate their food with brands
o They’re also prompted to rely on the labels to tell them how one product
can be a better choice than the next and to assure them that the product
meets some set of standards of quality and safety
- Food labels can be mandatory or voluntary, and both types can distance people
form their food
o Mandatory labels are the ones required by the extensive regulatory
framework imposed on the agri-food companies to ensure certain
standard are met and that certain information (such as the nutritional
breakdown or expiry date) is available to the consumer
 - Labelling (and its regulation) not only fails to address many of the shortcomings
of the industrial food system, it also facilitates the system by providing few and
easily surmountable obstacles, which rather than significantly challenging the
system, actually provide it with a cloak of legitimacy
- Whereas a mandatory label such as a nutrition table can tell us about the level of
sodium in a food item, the manufacturer is not required to explain how it treats its
labour force or how it disposes of its waste
- Voluntary labelling, on the other hand, refers to the labels that the manufacturer
can choose to apply, usually because such a label extols some virtue of the
products, such as “low in fat”, “no sugar added” or the above noted labels of
origin
o Voluntary labels are still somewhat regulated- though not required, their
use is restricted at time and some of the claims are carefully defined
o Voluntary labels fragment the information surrounding food
 They can really convey only one or two messages at a time,
allowing for distancing to continue

Advertising and Labels

- Food labels try to highlight information that can sell the product while obscuring
the information that may make us question the product
- Nutrition tables are still useful for the concerned consumer, but a 2008 US
Department of Agriculture (USDA) Economic Research Service study indicated
that fewer than two-thirds of consumers use nutritional information in making
their purchasing decisions, and that even those numbers have been declining,
particularly among young adults
- Mandatory labels in the ends are the insurance policy for the larger, louder, more
colourful voluntary labels that are commonly placed on the front of the package

Selling Health

- Food labels are no commonly communicating misleading messages of health

- The messages are effective marketing strategies that is made possible by the
cunning work of manufacturers as well as by the fragmented understandings of
food and nutrition
- When avoiding particular nutrients and choosing others is so often equated with
health, the door to misleading marketing is wide open
- Nutritionism started in the early 1980s with scientific codification of dietary
components, which has over the years transformed food into “nutrients”
o Nutritionism in its cultural context is merely another form of scientific
reductionism, the attempt to reduce complex interactions to isolated
simple relations
o The reductionism is often justified as simplification, a way to make
complex scientific information more accessible to the general public
o Cultural reliance on scientific reductionism (treating food as nutrients)
results not only from reductionist nutritional science but also from a
 particular advertising discourse that has for decades attempted to sell
health through reducing the human body to a machine
- The term body maintenance indicates the popularity of the machine metaphor for
the body
o This phenomenon was a direct product of consumer culture and its
aggressive discourse of advertising
- Health claims of all sorts are made for marketing purposes, although they
frequently highlight a product’s levels of one or two nutrients and in effect only
obscure other ingredients

Responsibility

- Labels provide information, however selective, but by doing so, they also
individualize responsibility for eating habits
- Once the information has been conveyed to the consumer, responsibility has
been transferred with it, which helps circumvent demands for better policy
options
- Research on the social determinants of health indicates that the most important
determinant of an individual’s poor health is poverty
- Food insecurity and poor nutrition are both associated with lower socio-economic
status
- Healthy food is more expensive per calorie and choosing them requires at least
some knowledge of nutrition, thus linking healthy food choices to social factors
such as education and income levels
- Food labels communicate with the individual consumer, not society
o They suggest that healthy diets are determined at the individual level
o This individualization of diet choices downloads the responsibility from the
industry, which continues to profit, to the consumer, who is faced with
limited and at times confusing information
- Choice is difficult in a complex, problematic food system, and it can be effective
only when combined with appropriate policy changes
- Labels, however, shift all the responsibility to the consumer; moreover, they imply
that the industry is quite capable of communicating with the consumer, and that
policy change is not needed
o The inadequacy of this implication is evident in a recent labelling initiative
o Much has been made of the recent New York city law requiring fast-food
chains to label their items with calorie counts, but the move doesn’t affect
the ingredients nor the way the items are prepared
o Instead, the new label suggests to the consumer that if eating cheap chain
food makes them overweight, it is their own fault
- Food labelling clearly does little to change the food system itself, and by
providing the industry with the veil of honesty it actually reinforces the status quo

Alternative Food Choices – The Organic Example

- Consumers who can afford to choose alternatives are redefining themselves as
food citizens and are making choices that chip away from the system
- By reclaiming the power to make decision about food, citizens are shaking a
metaphorical fist at industrial food and its ideological foundations
- In doing so they create new spaces for production, exchange, and consumption
of food upon which other social relationships can be built, and they open new
understandings of food and food economy
- In the spirit of individua choice and responsibility, many of the alternatives
demonstrate the “voting with your dollar” concept, promoting improvements to
certain aspects of the food economy but leaving the underlying economic
underpinnings intact
o As such, many of the alternative food choices have failed to substantially
alter the foodscape and instead have lent themselves to the very system
they once sought to oppose
- Organic foods may be the most salient example of this co-opted resistance
o Organic foods for many years meant shrinking the gap between the
consumers and the sources of their food
o But as the popularity of organic foods grew, instead of presenting a
greater challenge to the industrial food economy they became a new
marketing opportunity for large industrial players
o The greater demand in fact allowed for greater distancing, and, set in the
landscape of consumer culture, organic foods quickly fell into the trap of
certification, standardization, and labelling shortcuts
o Labels replaced interpersonal trust and helped to reduce organics from
more sustainable alternative to merely chemical-free foods within the
industrial food system
o With labels to mediate trust, large food industry payers launched their own
organic lines and bought up successful independent organic labels
o Critics have been challenging this trend both in scholarly writings and in
activism, but with little success
o Now mostly produced and distributed on a large scale, organics have
become industrial food, albeit grown without pesticides, chemical
fertilizers, and artificial hormones
o Labelling regulation has helped this process by providing communicative
shortcuts through standardized certification
- Organic standardization and the labels that represent it imply that the consumer’
demand for organics is only about removing the potentially harmful chemicals
form their diets
- The emphasis on individual health trumps environmental and social well-being
and contributes to further fragmentation of food information
- The environmental benefits of eliminating chemicals may still be significant on an
industrial organic farm, and thus help promote the food as “greener: options
- But industrial farms, characterized by intensive and specialized production, are
not good for ecosystems even if elimination of chemicals makes them more
acceptable than their chemical-using counterparts
 o As well, processing and distribution in the industrial model cause problems
associated with packaging and transportation, which organic products still
require
- National organic labels do nothing to shrink the distance between the consumers
and the source of their food

Conclusion

- Food labelling has had its bright moments, and many attempts have been made
to make labelling more honest, transparent, and informative
- While making minor corrections to the foodscape, labels still operate within the
confines of the industrial system
o They serve the industry much more than they control it
o Their ultimate message is that the food system as a whole cannot be
changed and neither can the workings of the global economy, with all its
negative environmental and social consequences
o The more we rely on labels, the more we accommodate the problematic
industrial food system and the less likely we are to act as agents of real
change
- A sustainable food system entails informed and responsible choices made within
a context of comprehensive well being
- Labels, as communicative shortcuts across numerous interventions, are but
reminders that such a context does not exist
o They provide a bandage for all that is wrong with the industrial food
system, but they cannot fix its fundamental problems
o If they did, labels would render themselves obsolete

Module Ten: Food marketing and Information

Warm Up
- In this week’s module, the topic is food marketing and information. One of the
main sources of food information for packaged foods is the label. (For our
purposes, we will define the label as the entire section of the package, including
the brand, images, logos, certifications, and other textual information such as
nutrition information and ingredients.) How much do you pay attention to food
labels and what do you look for?
- Indeed, labels can be very useful as we wade through the myriad of products on
grocery store shelves. On the other hand, some scholars (like Knezevic, whom
you read in Chapter 16 for this week) suggest that labels—and other information
we get about food—can be misleading or harmful. We will consider these issues
in more detail in this module
Food Information: Introduction
- “Labels are not needed for food grown in community gardens, preserves
purchased from a friend, or bread bought from a neighbour’s bakery.”
- You also don’t find labels on food at a friend’s dinner party, a family meal, or a
school bake sale.
 - Why is this?
o Trust and the availability of information are key. We trust that our friend,
neighbour, or family member is using safe (and perhaps healthy)
ingredients. Or, we may know how and where the food in a neighbourhood
garden was grown because we have observed the gardening process,
even from afar.
o However, these are rare cases. Most of the food we buy is made or grown
by people we don’t know, with largely unknown processes, and in largely
unknown locations. This trend is escalating globally, with sales of
packaged foods have growing by over 90% within the past decade
(Scrinis, 2015). Long-time Canadian food activist Brewster Kneen calls
this current state of our food system “distancing.”
- Distancing: “The separation between consumers and the sources of their food
typical of the industrial food system” (Kneen, 1995, p.,11).
- Distancing is a key concept in food activism because when we don’t know much
about how or where our food was made, we may not be aware of the harmful
processes involved. A key point about the separation between consumers and
the sources of their food is that this breeds a lack of awareness.
- This concept ties in very well with the Marxist concept of alienation, to which we
turn on the next page.
Alienation
- To refresh your memory, one of Marx’s main goals, as a philosopher and political
activist in 19th century Europe, was to understand class inequality. He wondered
why the working classes—who had very harsh working and living conditions—
didn’t revolt to oppose their situation. One reason, Marx argued, was that people
in a capitalist society are alienated. Marx talked about different kinds
of alienation, but two of the most relevant for our discussion of the food system
are alienation from products and alienation from nature. 
Alienation from Products and Nature
- Alienation from Products
o The activity on the last page was meant to get you thinking about how
much you produce what you consume. In pre-industrial times, people
more often produced what they consumed. Production and consumption
happened in the same household and often by the same people. For
example, people typically made the clothes that they wore, built their own
dwellings, and grew their own food. For Marx (1867), in a capitalist
system, consumption and production become separated. People typically
have little involvement in producing what they consume. Also, in their paid
work, people generally produce products or services for an employer
rather than for themselves. In other words, people also rarely consume
what they produce.
o Sociologist Don Slater explains the situation this way:
 I sell my labour-power and produce goods I do not need in
order to get the cash to buy goods I need but did not
produce. Being unrelated to my own transformative work on
 the world, these goods must appear to me as alien. (1997, p.
106)
o Because of the separation of production and consumption in capitalism,
we have little knowledge about where the products we use come from or
how they were made. The products are thus “alien” to us
- Alienation from Nature
o Another outcome of the separation of consumption and production in
capitalism is that we are alienated from nature.
o As scholar Ross Wolfe (2011) stated, in capitalism “the natural world is
further and further removed from the worker, and arrives only in a
relatively processed, mediated form. The immediacy of nature has been
lost, and nature confronts humanity as an alien, unknown entity. Not only
are we alienated from food products but we're also alienated from the
plants and animals that become our food. We’re often blind to the
conditions they live or grow in
Alienation and Distancing in the Supermarket
- With the explanations of alienation and distancing in the previous pages under
our belt, we can apply these concepts to the food system.
- Kneen’s term “distancing” and Marx’s term “alienation” are similar but not
equivalent. “Distancing” refers specifically to the ways in which eaters are
separated, physically and information-wise, from food production. It is specific to
the food system. “Alienation” refers to the ways in which workers/citizens in
capitalist systems are separated from nature and products in general.
- Where might we find examples of distancing and alienation in the supermarket?
- One excellent place to look is in the way food is packaged. In mainstream
Canadian supermarkets, food is in what we might call sanitized packaging.
Why Alienation and Distancing Matter
- Lack of Awareness, Lack of Action
o We already said above that distancing is important because it breeds
ignorance. The more people are separated from the products they
consume, they less they know about these products. From an activist
point of view, this is important because it means people are less motivated
to change problematic aspects of capitalism, including the negative
environmental, social, and health consequences of industrial food
production (which we talked about in previous modules).
- Deskilling
o Some scholars also note that the separation of consumption and
production in our society has lead to a kind of “deskilling” (Braverman,
1974). Food scholars Jaffe and Gertler (2006), for example, suggest that
consumers are increasingly less capable of determining what is nutritious,
recognizing good quality and taste, and understanding the effects of their
purchases on the food chain.
o This is also tied to current work conditions in late modern capitalism,
where women have moved in great numbers into the work force and many
 jobs entail non-standard work hours with limited meal breaks. In these
conditions, people become increasingly reliant on convenience foods. The
result is that food preservation and preparation skills are being both lost
and devalued (Jaffe & Gertler, 2006).
o Another important point for Jaffe and Gertler (2006) is that if people are
deskilled when it comes to food, they rely increasingly on product
marketing to make food decisions. For example, if someone has limited
knowledge about what ingredients are healthy or how or where food is
grown, they are more likely to choose a product based on the most
attractive packaging or the most memorable ad. But packaging and
marketing may actually increase the distancing between eaters and the
sources of their food, as we will discuss on the next page
- Opportunity for Change
o While distancing may reduce motivation to change, some scholars see
this aspect of Western foodways as a possible opportunity (Higgs, 2015).
If new or novel foods, that may be more favourable in terms of
environmental, social and health outcomes are presented in a way that
allows us to "distance" ourselves from the food source, we may be able to
overcome some of the food taboos and traditions that prevent us from
trying new options.   Think back to the way insects were presented in the
"Future of Food" video from the previous module or at the Thailand market
pictured in Module 3. Are you more likely to try a new food like some types
of insect if they are in their original form and you know how they are
produced? Or,  would you be more likely to experiment with a new food if
it was in the same format as a familiar food item such as portion bar such
as the Vancouver-based company Coast Protien is trying?
Label Information
- Some of us may shop at butcher shops or farmers’ markets, where we get a
much greater sense of the natural origins of our food than from packaged food.
But many of us these days buy our food in grocery stores, so some degree of
alienation and distancing is inevitable. But can labels limit this distancing?
- On the one hand, labels give us information about products that we might not
otherwise know or be able to find out. For example, we can get some information
about the manufacturer, ingredients, nutrition, and provenance on labels. In this
way, labels can reduce distancing and alienation. On the other hand, as
Knezevic points out, labels may not reduce distancing. Why not?
Limited Information
- There is much information that is left out of labels. It is typically difficult to find out
information about worker conditions or farm practices on labels, for example.
Were chemical pesticides used? Were workers paid fairly? Some of this
information may be available from certification logos claiming a product has been
“organic certified” or “fair trade certified,” but this type of information is voluntary,
not mandatory. This means that we typically pay more for it. Also, since
certification is expensive, some food producers may in fact be organic or fair
 trade in principle, but cannot afford the certification process that would allow
them to use the relevant logo
Misleading or Confusing Information
- As Knezevic discusses, some terms allowed by Canadian labelling regulation
can be misleading. She gives the example of wines that are labelled “cellared in
Canada” which can in fact be up to 70% bulk-imported wine. The “Made in
Canada” label has also been a subject of controversy. When you see “Made in
Canada,” what do you assume about where the ingredients are from or where
the product was made? 
Deceptive Marketing and Mislabeling
- On the previous page, we talked about some of the problems with government
regulations on food labelling. We may also be distanced or alienated from our
food because of the lengths to which companies go, following regulations or not,
to sell us their products.
Selling Health: Healthwashing and greenwashing
- Healthwashing and greenwashing are terms that have gained currency in
popular culture. Knezevic provides examples of the strategies marketers use to
influence consumers interested in seeking out healthier alternatives as shoppers
navigate an increasingly complex and fragmented set of messages about food
and eating.  Healthwashing refers to the act of making a product with a
questionable nutrition profile seem healthy in company
marketing. Greenwashing refers to the act of making a product with negative
environmental impacts seem environmentally-friendly in company marketing. In
fact, there are now awards for the “best” examples of greenwashing and
healthwashing. You might have heard of the Facebook Healthwashing Wall of
Shame(Opens new window) begun by Toronto nutritionist Meghan Telpner

Mislabelling

- Food companies and vendors not only try to circumvent regulations to their best
advantage but some even violate these regulations.
- Several incidents of the mislabelling of a food’s nutrition content or place of
originhave surfaced in the news in the past few years. According to research by
University of Guelph professor Bruce Holub, 15% of the products have
inaccurate nutrition labels (CBC, 2007). Also, only about 5% of companies that
are the subject of mislabelling complaints to the Canadian Food Inspection
Agency receive fines (CBC, 2007). This speaks to the limited capacity of
government, especially in a neoliberal age of cutbacks to government agencies,
to properly monitor food information.
Other Forms of Distancing: The Language of Food
- Another way that we are distanced from our food is in the language we use to
talk about it. This is especially the case in English, which has many terms for
food that differentiate it from where it came from.
- Think, for example, of English words for “meat”. Many words are not the same as
the word for the animal the meat came from. For instance, we say “pork” for the
meat of a “pig.” For meat that is less common, the word is sometimes the same.
 We use the same word for the “rabbit” on our plate as the “rabbit” in the forest,
for example.
- What are some English words to describe a type of meat that are different
from the animal the meat originated from?
- Some examples are beef versus steer or cow, mutton versus sheep, venison
versus deer, and veal versus calf. You might have thought of a few more.
- On previous pages, we talked about the ways in which the modern industrial food
system, including company marketing practices, distance us from our food. In the
case of the language we use for food, it is a deeper matter of cultural practice.
Research in linguistic psychology demonstrates that our words influence the way
we think and even act (Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011). Using non-animal words
for meat may be another way we are distanced from the origins of our food.
Awareness through Language
- On the other hand, words can also inform us, bringing attention to where our food
comes from and the conditions under which it was made. Think of words and
phrases like “factory farming” and “soil mining” which highlight the industrial
conditions under which animals are raised and plants are grown. New terms like
“fair trade” also bring attention to the fact that the trade we normally engage in
with other countries may not be fair; workers may not be working in humane or
just conditions. So it’s important to remember that language can both distance us
from and bring us closer to the origins of our food. It can promote and challenge
alienation
Food Information and Responsibility
- A final key point about food information is the question; Who is responsible for
making sure our food system and our diets are healthy, sustainable and socially
just? 
- Knezevic points out that, in some ways, labelling food puts responsibility for the
food system and diets in the hands of consumers/citizens. The idea is that, if
information is available to us, we should be able to act on it. For example, a food
manufacturer might say that it is not up to companies to limit unhealthy
ingredients in an eater’s diet, make sure workers are paid fairly, or ensure
animals are treated humanely. If labels and logos tell eaters this information,
eaters can make up their own minds, the argument goes. This fits in well with the
contemporary neoliberal ethos that governs much political and economic
decision-making in countries of the global North at the beginning of the 21st
century. As you may have learned in other classes, neoliberal thinking
emphasizes individual responsibility and downplays the role of the state in such
issues as diets.
- Yet there are also opponents to this way of thinking. If labels are incomplete,
inaccurate, misleading, or deceptive, as we’ve discussed, we might argue that
eaters don’t have enough information to make informed decisions. It is for this
reason that some food activists are pushing for changes at the government level,
such as changes to food policy and regulations (e.g., regulations restricting the
amount of trans fats that foods can legally contain or imposing a mandatory
colour code for “healthy” or “unhealthy” foods on packaging).
 - Other activists have tackled the inadequacies of labelling through more
grassroots approaches, such as by coming up with new, more informative labels
(see the Toronto organization Local Food Plus for an example).

Week 11 Readings

Reading #1: Toronto’s Food Charter

 “the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger.”

 The City of Toronto supports our national commitment to food security, and the
following beliefs:
 Every Toronto resident should have access to an adequate supply of
nutritious, affordable and culturally-appropriate food.
 Food security contributes to the health and well-being of residents while
reducing their need for medical care.
 Food is central to Toronto’s economy, and the commitment to food
security can strengthen the food sector’s growth and development.
 Food brings people together in celebrations of community and diversity
and is an important part of the city’s culture.

Toronto a Food Secure City

 Canada’s National Action Plan for Food Security states that “Food security exists
when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient,
safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an
active and healthy life.
 In May 2000,Toronto City Council voted unanimously to become a food-secure
city that would strive to ensure:
 the availability of a variety of foods at a reasonable cost
 a ready access to quality grocery stores, food service operations, or
alternative food sources
 a sufficient personal income to buy adequate foods for each household
member each day
 the freedom to choose personally- and culturally-acceptable foods
 legitimate confidence in the quality of the foods available
 easy access to understandable, accurate information about food and
nutrition
 the assurance of a viable and sustainable food production system.

Ten Reasons Why Toronto Supports Food Security

1) Food security means no-one in the city goes to bed hungry
  International studies show that people from all income groups are
healthier when people from low-income groups are also healthy
2) Food security makes the city more affordable
 Food banks, created as a short-term stopgap during the 1980s,became
permanent fixtures in the city
3) Food security means every child gets a head start
 Canada is the only western industrialized country that does not have a
national child nutrition program.
4) Food security saves on medical care
 To protect Canada’s health care system, especially as the population ages
and chronic diseases peak, nutrition needs to be treated as a first line of
defence.
5) Food security means more local jobs
6) Food security is environmentally friendly.
7) Food security reduces traffic pollution
8) Food security is good business
 Toronto could create even more jobs by supplying more of its own food
needs. It has a diverse and cosmopolitan populace that isn’t always
served by mass market products. Some people require halal or kosher
meats.
9) Food security means waste not, want not
 What we waste could be turned into any number of resources, including
methane for clean fuel, livestock feed, or compost to enrich gardens. A
city that is food-secure knows the difference between waste and the
feedstock for another business or project.
 Food security is about not throwing opportunities away
10) Food security is neighbourly
 Toronto is the name its original inhabitants used for “meeting place.”
Food honours that tradition, and helps keep Toronto a place where
people of many cultures and values enrich the city with their distinctive
variations on our common human needs.

Reading #2: National Student Food Charter

 As a national vision for the future of food on campus, the national student food
charter is intended to help students engage stakeholders in discussions,
collective actions, and the development of strategies for food systems’ change
 Given that citizens, governments of all levels, and industry leaders have
recognized the need for coordinated food systems* planning, and the need to
establish principles to govern decisions regarding food production, distribution,
access, consumption and waste management; We, post-secondary students,
believe that our institutions have an opportunity to exercise leadership in
 communities and throughout society by developing food systems that support
social justice, healthy individuals and communities, the environment, local
economies, democratic governance, and celebration.

Values of National Student Food Charter

Food Sovereignty: The heart of food sovereignty is reclaiming decision-making power
in the food system. This means that people have a say in how their food is produced
and where it comes from. Food sovereignty seeks to rebuild the relationship between
people and the land, and between those who grow and harvest food and those who eat
it.
Food Charter: A collaboratively created set of values and principles created to guide
food policy development.
Access: Physical and economic availability of healthy and culturally acceptable food,
for all people at all times.
Animal welfare: Freedom from hunger and thirst; pain, injury and disease; distress and
discomfort; freedom to express behaviours that promote well-being.
Democratic Governance: Democratic governance within food systems involves
diverse participation of various stakeholders (consumers, producers, distributors, cooks,
servers, etc.) in decision-making processes about how these systems are organized,
what food policies will look like, and what food contracts are signed.
Ecologically sound food production: Food production that reduces on-farm energy
consumption and greenhouse gas emissions; conserves soil and water, and reduces or
eliminates synthetic pesticides and fertilizers; avoids the use of hormones, antibiotics,
and genetic engineering.
Fair: Fairness within food systems relates to the quality of life of all people within the
food system. This means that producers, processors, distributors, salespeople, and
servers all deserve safe working conditions and living wages.
Food Literacy: Understanding the impact of food choices on health, the environment,
and community.
Food System: The food system comprises all processes that are involved with
supplying and disposing of food. This includes: growing, harvesting, hunting, gathering,
packaging, transporting, processing, marketing, selling, purchasing, consuming and
disposing of food.
Healthy food: Healthy food includes personal, environmental, economic, and
community factors. Food need be nutritious, in order to support human growth,
development, and activity. Healthy food systems can improve community health by
contributing to personal, environ mental, social, and economic well-being. Healthy food
systems are also closely related to the environment and economy, including sustainable
practices, fair wages for workers, affordable food prices, and increasing support for local
businesses and producers.
Social Justice: Social justice generally refers to the idea of creating an egalitarian
society or institution that is based on the principles of equality that understands and
values human rights, and that recognizes the dignity of every human being.
Transparency: Open and transparent decision-making processes are those that are
accessible and clear.
Reading 3: Chapter 19 – Municipal Governance and Urban Food Systems

Introduction
 Over the course of the 20th century, global changes placed unprecedented
pressure on cities and their food systems, including intensive rural-to-urban
migration, los of farmland, the rise of technologies such as intensive mechanized
farming and refrigeration allowing for long-distance food transportation.
 A food system includes all the activities and processes by which people
produce, obtain, consume and dispose of their food. It also includes the inputs
and outputs that make the system run

Feeding 21st Century Cities

 Municipal governments in cities worldwide are increasingly developing food
policy commitments.
 Cities in the Global South take an equally active interest in food systems; many
of these have emerged as global leaders and innovators in municipal food policy.
 A food policy is “any decision, program or project that is endorsed by a
government agency, business or organization which affects how food is
produced, processed, distributed, purchased, protected and disposed.
 Food policies are an interconnected set of subsystems ranging from the
household to the global level.
 The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations describes
urban food policy as: a set of goals, objectives, strategies or programs
designed to improve access of urban households to stable supplies of good
quality food through efficient, hygienic, healthy and environmentally sound food
supply and distribution systems.

 Urban food policies are those decisions and actions that fall within the
jurisdiction of municipal governments, whether addressed through zoning,
bylaws, or through partnerships with other levels of government.
  Land use planning (sometimes called
“urban planning” or “town planning”) is
relatively new.
 Planners use tools
including zoning; bylaws;
building codes and other
standards for housing;
transportation, sanitation,
water supply and sewage
systems and public-health
policies.
 The American Planning Association
(APA) encourages APA members to help build stronger, sustainable and self-
reliant local food systems.
 Food system planning should be understood as one “ingredient” in more
comprehensive policies and plans to create healthier, more resilient cities.
 For example, improving access to nutritious, locally produced food
through farmers’ markets can be one aspect of broader strategies for
alleviating poverty and improving the health of urban populations
 Promoting urban agriculture can form part of more encompassing policies that
aim to “green” the city, protect urban biodiversity and provide vibrant public
gathering spaces and opportunities for recreation.
Table 19.1 provides a helpful illustration of the interactions between elements of the
urban food system and areas of responsibility of local governments (land use and
growth management, transportation, urban design, energy and infrastructure, buildings
and housing, parks and open space, waste management, and social/economic
development).
  

What Does Municipal Governance Have to Do With It?

 While government can be understood to refer to the exercise of authority over a
political jurisdiction by the “state” (whether a municipality, region or country),
governance broadens this understanding to refer to a more transparent and
participatory process of decision making, involving not only the formal institutions
of the state (“government) but equally those in civil society.
 The shift from government to governance signals a recognition that multiple
groups and interests are meaningfully involved in identifying a community’s
concerns and proposing solutions to address them
 Issues of governance and participatory decision making are particularly important
where urban food systems are concerned, because decisions about food
systems often involve many stakeholders with varying interests.
  The “food movement” draws together a wide range of perspectives from citizen
groups, including public-health advocates who focus on nutrition education and
community-based strategies to address food insecurity; sustainable agriculture
activists who express concern about food safety, the disappearance of
productive land, increasing distances between producer and consumer,
environmental degradation and much more.
 Urban food initiatives lead the way in innovation in municipal governance with
strong citizen participation, inclusiveness, broad accountability and cross-cutting
approaches to food system issues that simultaneously benefit the economy,
environment and public health.
 Examples of the principles of participatory decision making and new forms
of governance being expressed through urban food system policies and
programs include : 1) municipal food charters and food strategies, 2) food policy
councils, and 3) neighbourhood food networks

Municipal Food Charters and Food Strategies

 Municipal food charter – specific to cities and their food systems
 A food charter is a municipally endorsed policy document that expresses key
values and priorities for improving a city’s food systems.
 it combines vision statements, principles, and broad action goals
supporting a municipal government’s food strategy.
 Food charters are a good example of participatory governance because they
are often created through community-based processes involving a local food
policy council and other citizen groups in partnership with a municipal
government
 A municipal food charter can embody a range of food system goals
 Example, Toronto’s food charter identifies a host of commitments
including “championing the right of all residents to adequate amounts of
safe, nutritious, culturally-acceptable food without the need to resort to
emergency food providers” and encouraging community gardens that
increase food self-reliance, improve fitness, contribute to a cleaner
environment and enhance community development.
 A municipal food charter can be a powerful statement used to justify and
legitimize further policy development or it can be a building block for more
encompassing policy on specific food system issues.
 Independent of food charters are comprehensive city-wide food strategies that
bring together a range of food policy goals under one umbrella, along with a
vision, goals and targets for a city’s food system.
  A municipals food strategy is an official plan or road map that helps city
governments integrate a full spectrum of urban food system issues within a
single policy framework.

Food Policy Councils

 A food policy council (FPC) is one of the most common citizen-led vehicles for
influencing urban food polices and embodying a more participatory approach to
municipal governance.
 It’s an officially sanctioned voluntary body made up of stakeholders
from various segments of a state/provincial or municipal food system.
 One of the defining functions of an FPC is to create working collaborations
between citizens, community agencies and government officials that give voice to
food-related concerns and interests. An FPC is asked to examine the operation
of an urban food system and provide ideas or recommendations on improving it.
 FPC is uniquely positioned to contribute directly to policy development and
municipal governance, to increase the capacity of the city to act on sustainability
principles.
 Unique positioning of FPCs stems from a number of elements including
strong citizen participation, broad accountability and active working
committees.
 What makes FPC so compelling is that it claims to represent a
reconfigured approach to food issues drawing from the expertise of
both governmental and non-governmental actors.

Neighbourhood Food Networks

 Food system initiatives often originate from the local communities they serve.
 The localization of food system issues is thought to provide “deep social
benefits” to communities as a whole.
 The rationale for creating larger networks is often that food system strategies
and solutions must move beyond single organizations or groups of residents.
This approach has the double benefit of taking a more encompassing systems
approach to food issues while building social networks and community capacity.
 Neighbourhood food networks tend to share some characteristics in their
composition and broad mandates. They are typically made up of coalitions of
individual residents, community leaders, workers from health and other social
agencies, municipal staff, and representatives from faith-based organizations,
with a goal of identifying and addressing food system priorities in their
representative communities.
 In Vancouver, Neighbourhood food networks are moving beyond the boundaries
of their respective neighbourhoods by creating a “network of neighbourhood
food networks” that not only connects the existing NFNs with each other to share
 knowledge and ideas, but equally help guide the development of new NFNs in
parts of the city where they do not yet exist.
 NFNs offer a more participatory form of municipal governance that combines
grassroots citizen-led initiatives, city-wide citizen advisory groups, municipal
planning departments and health or social agencies.