Indigenous Peoples in (so-called) Canada face deep and long-standing injustices. Today, many face significantly higher than average rates of food insecurity, lack access to safe drinking water and health services, and have limited control over their traditional territories for cultural food provisioning, thereby limiting capacity for self-determination. At the same time, Indigenous communities have continued to assert their sovereignty and resist settler colonialism. Civil society organizations (CSOs) and academics have sought to establish partnership-based projects that intend to work toward addressing many of these inequities. Despite ‘good intentions’, many of these initiatives have failed to substantially benefit Indigenous people. Barriers to creating meaningful partnerships include power relations that keep decision-making in the hands of settlers, competing values and priorities, conflict over jurisdictional issues, and assumptions inherent in current funding models. Radical food geographies (RFG) praxis offers a promising framework to explore these issues because of its recognition of the relational production of injustice in specific contexts, its valuing of diverse ways of knowing, and its multiscalar approach. The RFG framework guides our collaborative writing project to co-create insights about establishing meaningful partnerships among Indigenous and settler Peoples to advance Indigenous food sovereignty. The authors draw on our collective experiences within four Indigenous-led and Indigenous-serving CSOs that have been working for many years in partnership with communities to support Indigenous food sovereignty. We share stories and learnings from our work with an aim to advance RFG by exploring how organizations and academics supporting Indigenous food sovereignty can create partnerships that operate in ethical space with Indigenous Peoples.
This chapter confronts the making of a city that praises its diversity in food, people, and place, while leveraging that praise to displace its very own residents. How do the culinary, aesthetic, and visceral geographies that make up Asiatown influence land use, placemaking, and taste hierarchies in the city? By analysing how Houston’s Asiatown has transformed over a 40-year period, I examine how gentrification occurs not only through the changes in land use, but also through the consumption of food and the environment in which the food is consumed: physical signage, social media, typography, logos, colour palettes, interior/exterior decor, and visceral memories. In this act of consumption, restaurants and consumers are (re)shaping ideas of the commodification of culture and race, as well as the processes of displacement. Gentrification has a far more pervasive influence on the city than just spatial changes; displacement also has a visceral, visual, and culinary impact.
This chapter re-examines the ‘return to the land’ by the descendants of not only enslaved Africans, but of those who are transplants of the Great Migration, specifically those in post-industrial cities. I call this Black urban agrarianism (BUA), which developed from my 2021 dissertation research concerning Black foodways, land ownership, and land banks. This concept is an extension of Dr Monica White’s Collective Agency and Community Resilience (CACR) framework as introduced in her 2018 book, Freedom Farmers. Highlighting action-oriented and collective pursuits in two Ohio cities, Toledo and Dayton, BUA reassesses the ethos of Black Americans’ relationship to the land, their autonomy, urban space, and systemic inequality in the food system. This act of resistance and refusal supports radical food geographies (RFG) as it emphasizes self-sufficiency by centring Blackness in the often White-dominated food/land sovereignty movement, while serving as a guide for Black-led agrarian sustainability efforts.
This chapter serves as a conclusion to Radical Food Geographies: Power, Knowledge, and Resistance. Along with summarizing the key themes, it suggests four ways to grow radical food geographies within and beyond the bounds of this book.
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon suffer from colonial occupation over their lands, and from socio-economic exclusion in their host community. This chapter explores how collective cooking within camp sisterhoods is a means of resistance in the face of double injustice restricting Palestinian refugees, both in homeland and in exile. Using ethnographic and auto-ethnographic recordings of growing up in Bourj Albarajenah refugee camp in Lebanon, I analyse how food-making and food-sharing practices within my mother’s sisterhood has enabled us to attain food self-sufficiency and food sovereignty for decades. The food-making practices weave friendship and stories into alternative food networks across the camp space. These networks promote justice in local food systems by sharing culturally relevant food among food-insecure families, and foster food sovereignty by safeguarding the relationship with the colonized land in settings of forced displacement. I conclude that alternative food networks, in this case established by sisterhoods, can be a radical tool developed and used by forcefully displaced communities to rearrange food geographies, and establish channels of access to the homeland and its culinary traditions. Ultimately, I argue for the need to address the peculiarity of radical food geographies in settings of displacement.
This chapter examines the Good Food Buffalo Coalition (GFBC)’s efforts to leverage public institutional food procurement through the Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP) to foster racial justice in Western New York. Tracing the coalition’s adoption of shared values and a decision-making structure, this chapter examines the coalition’s shift from campaign-bound advocacy to a values-guided approach that centres racial justice and the resulting impacts on the coalition’s potential to build towards transformative change in food systems at multiple scales. Using social movement theory, this chapter explores how the GFBC’s explicit focus on racial justice in food systems guides the coalition through: (1) identifying limitations of the GFPP as a programme situated within neoliberal market mechanisms and one that does not currently explicitly emphasize racial justice; (2) understanding the root causes of racial injustice in food systems; (3) engaging in multiscalar networks to advance the coalition’s advocacy to address these root causes; and (4) understanding the benefits of continuing to advocate for the GFPP despite its limitations. Radical food geographies praxis undergirds this chapter through its focus on transformative food systems change and the interplay between scholarship and activism resulting from the author’s role as a GFBC member.
This chapter introduces radical food geographies (RFG) praxis at the intersection of radical geographies and food systems scholarship and action. Building on these connected, yet divergent, fields, RFG is rooted in the intersections of active resistance to structures that (re)produce power inequity and oppression in food systems in specific places and across spaces, and an ongoing process of critical and theoretical reflection about these structures and geographies. RFG has three interconnected elements: (1) theoretical engagement with power and structures of oppression both inside and outside the academy; (2) action through academic, social movement, and civil society collaborations; and (3) analysis through a broadly defined geographic lens. The chapter situates RFG as growing out of intersections between radical geographies and critical food systems scholarship, thought, and action, including but reaching beyond academic literature. Grounded in feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial approaches, the chapter discusses historical and contemporary tributaries to RFG.
This chapter provides an introduction to the edited volume Radical Food Geographies: Power, Knowledge, and Resistance. It begins with the story of Josué de Castro, a Brazilian geographer, physician, diplomat, and activist, whose influential writing on the geopolitics of hunger critically engaged with power structures in the food system in the mid-20th century. de Castro’s story serves as a segue to the introduction to the concept of radical food geographies by setting a context for historical and contemporary scholarship and activism towards social and environmental justice. The chapter then explains the book’s structure and provides details of the three parts – Scale, Spatial Imaginaries, and Human and More-than-Human Relations – along with a description of each chapter and how they strive to demonstrate and enrich radical food geographies through an interplay of theory and practice. The Introduction also includes a discussion of the process of creating the book that involved numerous conference sessions, workshops, and a multi-year collaboration between chapter authors as part-and-parcel of radical food geographies praxis. The Introduction serves as an invitation to a shared project for radical praxis in pursuit of justice and sustainability in food systems across spaces and places.
This chapter explores the possibilities of using geopoetics for growing radical food geographies praxis through the lens of a settler ethics of responsibility. Such an ethics calls on settler scholars, activists, and artists to honour ancestral land rights and title and respect the jurisdiction of Indigenous legal systems, systems that are foundationally life-affirming, and which protect and sustain sovereign foodways. The authors draw on their own lived experiences of witnessing Indigenous governance in action and related struggles for asserting sovereign jurisdiction in Indigenous lands, waters, and foodways to discuss their responsibilities to further act in ways that support Indigenous food sovereignty. Geopoetics is used to disrupt and unsettle taken-for-granted systems of land tenure and, through acts of witnessing, to lay a foundation for (re)generating relations of solidarity that support the flourishing and thriving of Indigenous communities and lands, and the reclamation of sovereign foodways. Integral to this praxis is the understanding that settler–Indigenous solidarity cannot be decoupled from solidarity with broader struggles for Indigenous legal land governance and environmental justice, including land rematriation.
