Main description:

This book examines a diverse range of community food initiatives in light of their everyday practices, innovations and contestations.

While community food initiatives aim to tackle issues like food security, food waste or food poverty, it is a cause for concern for many when they are framed as the next big "solution" to the problems of the current industrialised food system. They have been critiqued for being too neoliberal, elitist, localist; for not challenging structural inequalities (e.g. racism, privilege, exclusion, colonialism, capitalism) and for reproducing these inequalities within their own contexts. This edited volume examines the everyday realities of community food initiatives, focusing on both their hopes and their troubles, their limitations and failures, but also their best intentions, missions, and models, alongside their capacity to create hope in difficult times. The stories presented in this book are grounded in contemporary theoretical debates on neoliberalism, diverse economies, food justice, community and inclusion, and social innovation, and help to sharpen these as conceptual tools for interrogating community food initiatives as sites of both hope and trouble. The novelty of this volume is its focus on the everyday doings of these initiatives in particular places and contexts, with different constraints and opportunities. This grounded, relational, and place-based approach allows us to move beyond more traditional framings in which community food initiatives are either applauded for their potential or criticized for their limitations. It enables researchers and practitioners to explore how community food initiatives can realize their potential for creating alternative food futures, and generates innovative pathways for theorising the mutual interplay of food production and consumption.

This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical food studies, food security, public health and nutrition as well as human geographers, sociologists and anthropologists with an interest in food.

Contents:

Chapter 1. A critical reparative approach: understanding hopes and troubles in community food initiatives Part 1: CFI addressing social injustices and inequalities in urban food Chapter 2. Caring in unequal worlds: tracing the hopes and troubles of Community Food Initiatives in Sydney Chapter 3. Understanding vulnerability and resilience of urban food initiatives in Morocco Chapter 4. Spaces of hope and realities beyond the fence: Experiences of urban food providers in South Africa Chapter 5. Good Food for All? Navigating tensions between environmental and social justice concerns in urban community food initiatives Part 2: Cooperatives, cooperation and concerns in CFI Chapter 6. Constraint and autonomy in the Swiss 'local contract farming' movement Chapter 7. Sustainability conventions in a local organic consumer cooperative in Norway: Hope and trouble of participants Chapter 8. The Moral Economy of Community Supported Agriculture - Hopes and Troubles of Farmers as Community Makers Part 3: Commensality, social gatherings and food knowledge in CFIs Chapter 9. White natures, colonial roots, walking tours and the everyday Chapter 10. Eating (with) the Other: Staging Hope and Trouble through Culinary Conviviality