From food regimes to food sheds - the case of Southern Ontario
In her second talk, Harriet Friedmann talks about how – drawing on the example of South Ontario – in today’s rapidly urbanising world, food systems need to be reconfigured on agro-ecological grounds. She draws an analogy with watersheds to describe what is happening in S Ontario in terms of foodsheds, but ones linked as part of a biospherical whole.
It is possible to think about how the mixing of cultures through migration can include how to adapt agricultures to each region, and how food and farming can reconnect society with the ecosystem at every scale. Embracing diversity and interconnection at once suggests a biological model for how the human species inhabits the earth. Such a change in all ways of living and governing requires a change of thinking, one best captured by a sailing metaphor - we know we need to move to a distant shore, but will need to weave and tack about to get there - it is not a journey in a straight line.
Photo: The World Crops Project with Ahmed Bilal of Vineland Research and Peter Mitchell of Toronto Food Policy Council and collaborative breeders and gardeners of FarmStart
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The running order for the podcast is as follows:
Introduction: 0 - 1min 33 sec
Labour and territory: 1' 31" - 3' 09"
Farmers and peasant cuisines: 3' 09" - 5' 50"
Losses and gains: 5' 50" - 8' 47"
Reconnecting people, farmers and territories: 8' 45" - 11' 50"
Southern Ontario: 11' 50" - 19' 20
Renewing a territory, changing farming, creating new businesses, new metaphors: 19' 22" - 26' 04"
From watersheds to food sheds: 26' 04 - end (32' 26")
Further reading
Baker, Lauren. 2013. Corn meets maize : food movements and markets in Mexico. /Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield.
Carney, Judith and Nicholas Rosomoff. 2009. In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s botanical legacy in the Atlantic World. Berkeley : University of California Press.
Cronon, William. 1983. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang.
Cordain, L., et.al., 2005. “Origins and evolution of the Western diet: health implications for the 21st century,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 81(2), pp. 341-54 http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/81/2/341#F4
Friedmann, H. “Food Sovereignty in the Golden Horseshoe Region of Ontario,” Food Sovereignty in Canada, Annette Desmarais, Nettie Wiebe and Hannah Wittman, eds. Fernwood, 2011.
Friedmann, H. 2005 ‘From colonialism to green capitalism: Social movements and the emergence of food regimes’, In Buttel, F. and McMichael, P. (eds) New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development. Research in Rural Sociology and Development, Volume 11, Elsevier, Amsterdam 227-264
Kloppenburg, Jack, John Hendrikson, and G.W. Stevenson, 1996. Coming in to the foodshed, Agriculture and Human Values 13:3.
Kloppenburg, J.R., and D. Kleinman, eds. Seeds and Sovereignty: The use and control of plant genetic resources. Duke University Press, 1988.
Mintz, Sidney. 1985. “Eating and Being,” Chapter 5 of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking.
Steel, Carolyn. 2009. Hungry City: How Food Shapes our Lives. London: Vintage.
Toledo, Victor M. Eckart Boege and Narciso Barrera-Bassols, The Biocultural Heritage of Mexico: An Overview, available at http://www.terralingua.org/bcdconservation/?p=1120 Accessed December 22, 2013.
Van Esterik, P. 1986. “Feeding Their Faith: Recipe Knowledge Among Thai Buddhist Women,” Food and Foodways 1.
Weis, Tony. 2007. The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming. London: Zed
Weis, Tony. 2013. Ecological Hoofprint: The Global Burden of Industrial Livestock. London: Zed.
Winson, Anthony. 2013. Industrial Food. Vancouver : UBC Press.
Westley, Frances, Brenda Zimmerman and Michael Patton. 2007. Getting to Maybe: How the World is Changed. Toronto: Viking Canada.
Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, 2008 . Using Emergence to take social innovations to scale
http:margaretwheatley.com/articles/using-emergence.pdf
Wright, Erik Olin. 2010. Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso.
For those who can read French, an interesting argument about the discourse of “peasant” and “seed sovereignty”: DEMEULENAERE É., BONNEUIL C., 2010, « Cultiver la biodiversité. Semences et identité paysanne », in Hervieu B., Mayer N., Müller P. Purseigle F., & J. Rémy (dir.), Les mondes agricoles en politique. De la fin des paysans au retour de la question agricole, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po : 73-92.
Links
La Via Campesina http://viacampesina.org/en/
World crops:
http://greenbelt.ca/news/greenbelt-blog/world-crops-exciting-year-review
http://vinelandresearch.com/Default.asp?id=1&l=1
Farmstart http://www.farmstart.ca
Arvinda’s Healthy Gourmet Indian Cooking http://www.hgic.ca
Everdale Environmental Learning Centre www.everdale.org
FoodShare http://www.foodshare.net
The Stop Community Food Centre: http://thestop.org
Golden Horseshoe Food and Farming Alliance http://www.foodandfarming.ca
YU Ranch http://www.yuranch.com/
Toronto Food Policy Council http://tfpc.to
Sustain Ontario: Alliance for Healthy Food and Farming http://sustainontario.com
Journals to Begin With
Journal of Peasant Studies
Journal of Agrarian Change
Food and Foodways
Agriculture and Human Values
Rural Studies
Sociologia Ruralis
About
Harriet Friedmann, food systems analyst, author, and speaker, is Professor Emerita of Sociology, Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto, based at the Munk School of Global Studies. She participates in international research and policy on food and agriculture, including with Centre International en Recherche Agronomique pour le Developpement (CIRAD), the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD) and serves on several editorial boards of journals related to food and agriculture. She is a member and former chair of the Toronto Food Policy Council, a pioneer in linking civil society and municipal governments in comprehensive food strategy. She has published on many dimensions of agriculture and food, including family farms, corporate strategies in the food sector, food policies, changing patterns of diet and consumption, and social movements to change the food system, focusing on trans-scalar dynamics. Harriet is currently preparing a book on the Political Ecology of Food with Tony Weis. She was awarded the 2011 Lifetime Achievement award by the Canadian Association of Food Studies.
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