Retail relations: an interlocking directorate analysis of food retailing corporations in the United States

The US food retailing industry continues to concentrate and consolidate. Power in the agriculture, food, and nutrition system has shifted from producers to processors, and is now shifting to retailers. Currently, only eight food-retailing corporations control the majority of food sales in the United States. Expanding on previous research by Lyson and Raymer (2000, Agriculture and Human Values 17: 199–208), this paper examines the characteristics of the boards of directors of the leading food retailing corporations and the indirect interlocks that bind the food retailers into a corporate community. Rachel Schwartz is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Development Sociology at Cornell University. Her research interests are focused on the relationship between food retailers and food consumers in the United States, especially in regards to the construction of the concept of “choice.” Thomas Lyson was Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor in the Department of Development Sociology at Cornell University. His interests included the relationship of agriculture and food systems on community economic development and population health. His most recent book, Civic Agriculture, developed a problem-solving model for food and agriculture issues. Dr. Lyson passed away in December 2006.     

Governance in the Global Agro-food System: Backlighting the Role of Transnational Supermarket Chains

With the proliferation of private standards many significant decisions regarding public health risks, food safety, and environmental impacts are increasingly taking place in the backstage of the global agro-food system. Using an analytical framework grounded in political economy, we explain the rise of private standards and specific actors – notably supermarkets – in the restructuring of agro-food networks. We argue that the global, political-economic, capitalist transformation – globalization – is a transition from a Fordist regime to a regime of flexible accumulation (Harvey, 1989). We also argue that the standard making process of this new regulatory regime is increasingly moving from the front stage – where it is open to public debate and democratic decision-making bodies – to the backstage – where it is dominated by large supermarket procurement offices. We assert that transnational supermarket chains are increasingly controlling what food is grown where, how, and by whom. We also contend that the decision-making processes of transnational supermarket chains are typically “black-boxed.” The Euro-Retailer Produce Working Group (EUREP) is presented as a case of private governance by transnational supermarket chains. We conclude by examining the limitations and long-term efficacy of a system of private governance in the global agro-food system. Jason Konefal is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University. His interests include environmental sociology, food and agriculture, social movements, and science and technology studies. His dissertation research examines the political economic restructuring of the global agrifood system and the implications for social and environmental movements. Michael Mascarenhas is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University. His interests include political economy, the sociology of science and technology, environmental and rural sociology, and globalization and development. His current research involves a critical analysis of neoliberal water policy reform and indigenous inequalities. As of September 2005, Michael has taken a position in the Department of Sociology at Kwantlen University College in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada. Maki Hatanaka is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University. Her interests include food and agriculture, development, and gender. Much of her recent research focuses on standards and thirdparty certification and their social and environmental implications.     

Learning Democracy Through Food Justice Movements

Over time, the corporate food economy has led to the increased separation of people from the sources of their food and nutrition. This paper explores the opportunity for grassroots, food-based organizations, as part of larger food justice movements, to act as valuable sites for countering the tendency to identify and value a person only as a consumer and to serve as places for actively learning democratic citizenship. Using The Stop Community Food Centre’s urban agriculture program as a case in point, the paper describes how participation can be a powerful site for transformative adult learning. Through participation in this Toronto-based, community organization, people were able to develop strong civic virtues and critical perspectives. These, in turn, allowed them to influence policy makers; to increase their level of political efficacy, knowledge, and skill; and to directly challenge anti-democratic forces of control. Charles Z. Levkoe recently earned a Master’s degree from the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. His research interests focus on alternative responses to urban and rural food security issues and considers the role of grassroots organizations, their connection to place and their ability to organize across scales. He has been active in food security and community gardening movements across Canada. This paper was prepared for the 2004 joint meeting of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society (AFHVS) and the Association for the Study of Food and Society. It was selected as the winner of the 2004 AFHVS Student Essay Contest.     

Rights-based food systems and the goals of food systems reform

Food security, health, decent livelihoods, gender equity, safe working conditions, cultural identity and participation in cultural life are basic human rights that can be achieved at least in part through the food system. But current trends in the US prevent full realization of these economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCR) for residents, farmers, and wageworkers in the food system. Supply chains that strive to meet the goals of social justice, economic equity, and environmental quality better than the dominant globalized food value networks are gaining popularity in the US. However, achieving important human rights has become conflated with other goals of food system reform over the past decade, such as being “community-based,” local, and sustainable. This conflation confuses means, ends, and complementary goals; and it may lead activists trying to help communities to regain control of their food system choices into less productive strategies. This paper introduces a new concept, rights-based food systems (RBFS), and explores its connection with localization and sustainability. The core criteria of RBFS are democratic participation in food system choices affecting more than one sector; fair, transparent access by producers to all necessary resources for food production and marketing; multiple independent buyers; absence of human exploitation; absence of resource exploitation; and no impingement on the ability of people in other locales to meet this set of criteria. Localization and a community base can help achieve RBFS by facilitating food democracy and reducing environmental exploitation, primarily by lowering environmental costs due to long-distance transportation. Sustainability per se is an empty goal for food system reform, unless what will be sustained and for whom are specified. The RBFS concept helps to clarify what is worth sustaining and who is most susceptible to neglect in attempts to reform food systems. Localization can be a means toward sustainability if local food systems are also RBFS.

Fruit and vegetable access in four low-income food deserts communities in Minnesota

Access to fruits and vegetables by low-income residents living in selected urban and rural Minnesotan communities was investigated. Communities were selected based on higher than state average poverty rates, limited access to grocery stores, and urban influence codes (USDA ERS codes). Four communities, two urban and two rural, were selected. Data were gathered from focus group discussions (n = 41), responses to a consumer survey (n = 396 in urban neighborhoods and n = 400 in rural communities), and an inventory of foodstuffs available at stores located in all the communities and at large grocery stores in neighborhoods adjacent to the urban communities. In the two urban neighborhoods, a significant number of foods (26% and 52%) were significantly more expensive than the Thrifty Food Plan’s (TFP) market basket price (MBP). Additionally, a significant number of foods in the two rural communities were more expensive (11% and 26%). In focus groups, participants identified major barriers to shopping in their community to be cost, quality of food, and food choice limitations. Results of the food inventory show that foods within the communities were costly, of fair or poor quality, and limited in number and type available, supporting complaints verbalized by focus group participants. Through focus groups and surveys, participants expressed concern that healthy food choices were not affordable within their communities and believed that people in their community suffered from food insecurity. The absence of quality, affordable food for low-income residents in these four Minnesota communities prevents or diminishes their ability to choose foods that help maintain a healthy lifestyle. Deja Hendrickson is currently a graduate student at the University of California and working towards obtaining her MS in nutrition in order to become a registered dietitian. Chery Smith, PhD, MPH, RD, is an associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Minnesota with research interests in the dietary behavior of low-income and homeless people, community and international nutrition, and food systems. Nicole Eikenberry is a Registered Dietitian and recently completed her MS in the Department of Food Science and Nutrition, University of Minnesota, with primary research emphasis on food access and food choice for low-income Minnesotan adults.     

Is HACCP Nothing? A Disjoint Constitution between Inspectors, Processors, and Consumers and the Cider Industry in Michigan

The transmission of a product or idea from one culture or point of origin to another and the maintenance of control outside the new locality has been referred to as the distribution and maintenance of “nothing.” This perspective has been used to describe the global marketplace and the influence of large multinational corporations on the politics and cultures of host countries. This paper uses this concept, but within a much smaller context. Using the sensitizing concept of a “disjoint constitution,” we interviewed health inspectors and apple cider producers in Michigan to determine if the implementation of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) program designed to ensure food safety was characterized by a power differential that would favor the inspectors. In addition, a larger survey of processors and an internet survey of apple cider consumers was conducted to supplement this data. It was found that HACCP had characteristics of both “nothing” and “something” and that better communication is needed between these groups to move it further along toward the something end of the continuum. Toby A. Ten Eyck is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and affiliated with the National Food Safety and Toxicology Center at Michigan State University. His work focuses on the development, dissemination, and interpretation of mass media risk messages. Donna J. Thede completed her Ph.D in Food Science partially through this research project and is now a Senior Scientist in Nutrition & Regulatory Affairs with the Kellogg Company.  Gerd Bobe conducts research on nutrition and cancer as a fellow in the Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program, Division of Cancer Prevention, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, Maryland). Previously, he evaluated food safety policies for the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition and the National Food Safety and Toxicology Center at Michigan State University. Leslie D. Bourquin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition and is affiliated with the National Food Safety and Toxicology Center and Food Safety Policy Center at Michigan State University. His research examines factors influencing the effective implementation of food safety standards and the ultimate impacts of these standards on public health.     

Responsibility and agency within alternative food networks: assembling the “citizen consumer”

With “consumer demand” credited with driving major changes in the food industry related to food quality, safety, environmental, and social concerns, the contemporary politics of food has become characterized by a variety of attempts to redefine food consumption as an expression of citizenship that speaks of collective rights and responsibilities. Neoliberal political orthodoxy constructs such citizenship in terms of the ability of individuals to monitor and regulate their own behavior as entrepreneurs and as consumers. By contrast, many proponents of alternative food networks promote the idea that food citizenship is expressed through participation in social arrangements based on solidarity and coordinated action rather than on contractual and commoditized relationships between so-called “producers” and “consumers.” This paper thus focuses its analysis on the strategies used to mobilize people as consumers of particular products and the ways, in turn, in which people use their consumption choices as expressions of social agency or citizenship. In particular, the paper examines how the marketing, pricing, and distribution of foods interact with food standards to enable and constrain specific expressions of food citizenship. It is argued that narrow and stereotypical constructions of the “ethical consumer” help to limit the access of particular people and environmental values, such as biodiversity, to the ethical marketplace.

食品安全领域食药物质的认定探究——以丁香叶为例

《食品安全法》第38条规定：“生产经营的食品中不得添加药品，但是可以添加按照传统既是食品又是中药材的物质。”但是由于食品、中药材边界不够明晰，当食品中的“某物质”或某农产品载于《中国药典》或其他中药材标准时，其是否符合食品安全标准在司法实践中存在争议。本文介绍了食药物质及相关概念含义，分析了中国裁判文书网上关于丁香叶的案件，建议有关行政部门完善相关食品标准，执法或司法部门统一食药物质认定标准，地方加强农产品安全性研究，全力保障舌尖上的安全。     

Maize,food insecurity,and the field of performance in southern Zambia

This paper explores the interrelationship between maize farming, the discourse of modernity, and the performance of a modern farmer in southern Zambia. The post-colonial Zambian government discursively constructed maize as a vehicle for expanding economic modernization into rural Zambia and undoing the colonial government’s urban modernization bias. The pressures of neo-liberal reform have changed this discursive construction in ways that constitute maize as an obstacle to sustained food security in southern Zambia. Despite this discursive change, maize continues to occupy a central position in the farming systems of the region. I argue that the continued prevalence of maize in southern Zambia can be understood as a performance that allows farmers to maintain their identities as modern rural subjects. The paper concludes with the policy implications of the field of performance on two contemporary debates in Zambian food security: the use of GMO crops and the promotion of cassava as a drought tolerant alternative to maize. Nicholas Sitko is a doctoral student in the geography department at the University of Colorado. His research interests include multi-disciplinary approaches to food studies, critical development, and Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper presents initial findings from field work conducted in Zambia in 2006. His dissertation research will further develop the relationship between neo-liberalism, food security, and agricultural production by employing analytical concepts derived from political-economic and cultural studies.     

Scaling up: Bringing public institutions and food service corporations into the project for a local,sustainable food system in Ontario

This paper reports on a relationship between the University of Toronto and a non-profit, non-governmental (“third party”) certifying organization called Local Flavour Plus (LFP). The University as of August 2006 requires its corporate caterers to use local and sustainable farm products for a small but increasing portion of meals for most of its 60,000 students. LFP is the certifying body, whose officers and consultants have strong relations of trust with sustainable farmers. It redefines standards and verification to create ladders for farmers, Aramark and Chartwells (the corporations that won the bid), and the University, to continuously raise standards of sustainability. After years of frustrated efforts, other Ontario institutions are expressing interest, opening the possibility that a virtuous circle could lead to rapid growth in local, sustainable supply chains. The paper examines the specificities of the LFP approach and of the Toronto and Canadian context. Individuals in LFP acquired crucial skills, insights, experience, resources, and relationships of trust over 20 years within the Toronto “community of food practice,” located in a supportive municipal, NGO and social movement context. Harriet Friedman PhD, is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga and at the Centre for International Studies University of Toronto. Her research is in international and local politics of food and agriculture, focusing on contested transitions between food regimes. Her current research is on politics of standards and certification. Thanks to Lori Stahlbrand, Mike Schreiner, and Rod MacRae of LFP and Debbie Field and Zahra Parvinian of FoodShare for sharing time and insights at length, and to Wayne Roberts of TFPC, David Clandfield of New College, Josee Johnston, and Amber McNair for helpful conversations about our “community of practice.” Thanks to Yossi Cadam for the ladder metaphor.     

Victual Vicissitudes: Consumer Deskilling and the (Gendered) Transformation of Food Systems

A considerable literature addresses worker deskilling in manufacturing and the related loss of control over production processes experienced by farmers and others working in the agri-food industry. Much less attention has been directed at a parallel process of consumer deskilling in the food system, which has been no less important. Consumer deskilling in its various dimensions carries enormous consequences for the restructuring of agro-food systems and for consumer sovereignty, diets, and health. The prevalence of packaged, processed, and industrially transformed foodstuffs is often explained in terms of consumer preference for convenience. A closer look at the social construction of “consumers” reveals that the agro-food industry has waged a double disinformation campaign to manipulate and to re-educate consumers while appearing to respond to consumer demand. Many consumers have lost the knowledge necessary to make discerning decisions about the multiple dimensions of quality, including the contributions a well-chosen diet can make to health, planetary sustainability, and community economic development. They have also lost the skills needed to make use of basic commodities in a manner that allows them to eat a high quality diet while also eating lower on the food chain and on a lower budget. This process has a significant gender dimension, as it is the autonomy of those primarily responsible for purchasing and preparing foodstuffs that has been systematically undermined. Too often, food industry professionals and regulatory agencies have been accessories to this process by misdirecting attention to the less important dimensions of quality. JoAnn Jaffe teaches rural, environmental, and development sociology, the sociology of gender, and theory in the Department of Sociology and Social Studies of the University of Regina. Michael Gertler teaches rural sociology, the sociology of communities, and the sociology of agriculture in the Department of Sociology at the University of Saskatchewan. He holds a cross appointment in the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives.     

Attitudes,beliefs, and prevalence of dumpster diving as a means to obtain food by Midwestern,low-income,urban dwellers

Dumpster diving is a term generally used for obtaining items, in this case food for consumption, from dumpsters. This study evaluates the prevalence of dumpster diving in two low-income urban communities in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Additionally, attitudes and beliefs of adults who engage in this behavior are reported. Surveys (n=396) were used to collect data including individual dumpster diving behavior, food security, health, and demographic data. Nearly one-fifth of those surveyed had used dumpster diving as a means to obtain food. Focus groups (n=17) were conducted to further evaluate dumpster divers attitudes and beliefs about dumpster diving, use of food assistance programs including benefits and barriers, and other strategies used to obtain food such as stealing. Focus group participants were primarily homeless and most were high school educated. Ways to improve delivery of food assistance are suggested. In conclusion, more research on the use of dumpsters as a source of food is needed. Utilizing more of the 96 billion pounds of food wasted each year in the US through food recovery and donation programs could help to provide socially acceptable means for low-income urban dwellers to obtain food.     

Luxus Consumption: Wasting Food Resources Through Overeating

In this paper, we redefine the term luxus consumption to mean food waste and overconsumption leading to storage of body fat, health problems, and excess resource utilization. We develop estimates of the prevalence of luxus consumption and its environmental consequences using US food supply, agricultural, and environmental data and using procedures modeled after energetics analysis and ecological footprint analysis. Between 1983 and 2000, US food availability (food consumption including waste) increased by 18% or 600 kcal (2.51 MJ) per person. This luxus consumption required 0.36 hectares (ha) of land and fishing area per capita, 100.6 million ha for the US population, and 3.1% of total US energy consumption. Luxus consumption increased more for particular foods, such as high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), 22% of which was used in carbonated beverages. As an example, the luxus consumption of sweetened soda, 31.8 l per capita, used 0.8% of the US corn crop (230,555 ha of land); 33.6 million kg of nitrogen fertilizer; 175,000 kg of Atrazine herbicide; 34 million kg of nitrogen fertilizer; 2.44 trillion kcal (10.2 PJ) for production inputs and post-harvest handling; and led to 4.9 million metric tons of soil erosion. Diet soft drink luxus consumption was 43.9 l/capita. Assuming half of US soft drink luxus consumption was bottled in plastic, the energy cost for plastics would have been 2.49 trillion kcal (10.4 PJ) in 2000. Total HFCS availability above baseline in 2000 required 4.6 times the resources used for soft drinks alone. This analysis suggests the utility and applicability of the concept of luxus consumption to environmental analysis and for estimating the effects of excess food utilization. Dorothy Blair, PhD, received her master’s and doctoral degrees in Human Nutrition from Cornell University and is currently a faculty member in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Pennsylvania State University. Her research and teaching focus on food ecology, food and culture, and the food system both nationally and internationally. She has published articles on obesity, energy expenditure, agriculture and food system issues, and community food security. Jeffery Sobal, PhD, earned a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a faculty member in the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University. His research and teaching focus on the application of social science theories and methods to food, eating, and nutrition. He has published material on social patterns and consequences of body weight, the conceptualization of the food and nutrition system, and the process of making food choices.     

Cuisines of poverty as means of empowerment: Arab food in Israel

This paper suggests looking at cuisines of poverty as practical and political systems practiced by urban and rural Palestinian citizens of Israel. It is an important and interesting case study within which political and economical considerations govern and enhance the development, change, and acceptance of culinary knowledge. Cuisines of poverty operate in two simultaneous arenas. As systems of practical knowledge, they repeatedly center on the ability to maintain the traditional kitchen, turning it into a tool-kit out of which information is recruited upon need. Simultaneously, cuisines of poverty reveal the inter-connection between the culinary discourse and the political one. It is where issues such as access to land, national and ethnic identity, and means to participation in the dominant culture are of major concern. The analysis of cuisines as operating on two complementary discourses contributes to the understanding of the relationship between food and the arena of power. Liora Gvion, PhD, is a qualitative sociologist. She studied at SUNY Stony Brook, USA and is currently a senior lecturer at the Kibbutzim College of Education in Tel Aviv, Israel and at the Department of Clinical Nutrition at the Hebrew University. Her major interests are the sociology of food, second-generation immigrants, eating disorders, and the relationship between food and ethnicity.     

Food assistance through “surplus” food: Insights from an ethnographic study of food bank work

In Canada, food assistance is provided through a widespread network of extra-governmental, community-based, charitable programs, popularly termed food banks. Most of the food they distribute has been donated by food producers, processors, and retailers or collected through appeals to the public. Some industry donations are of market quality, but many donations are surplus food that cannot be retailed. Drawing on insights from an ethnographic study of food bank work in southern Ontario, we examined how the structure and function of food banks operate to facilitate the distribution of foods not marketed through the retail system. Our findings indicate that the handling of industry donations of unsaleable products is a labor-intensive activity, made possible by the surfeit of unpaid labor in food banks, the neediness of food bank clients, and clients lack of rights in this system. The marshalling of volunteer labor to serve a corporate need might be construed as a win-win situation because the work of salvaging edible foodstuffs from among industry surplus helps to feed the hungry while also diminishing the amount of refuse deposited in landfill sites, sparing corporations disposal costs and landfill tipping fees, and helping them forge an image of good corporate citizenship. However, the reliance of food banks on industry donations means that food assistance becomes defined as that which the corporate sector cannot retail. Moreover, the intertwining of food bank work with corporate needs may function to further entrench this ad hoc secondary food system and mitigate against initiatives to develop more effective responses to problems of hunger and food insecurity in our communities.     

Discomforting comfort foods: stirring the pot on Kraft Dinner<Superscript>®</Superscript> and social inequality in Canada

This paper contrasts the perceptions of Canadians who are food-secure with the perceptions of Canadians who are food-insecure through the different meanings that they ascribe to a popular food product known as Kraft Dinner^®. Data sources included individual interviews, focus group interviews, and newspaper articles. Our thematic analysis shows that food-secure Canadians tend to associate Kraft Dinner^® with comfort, while food-insecure Canadians tend to associate Kraft Dinner^® with discomfort. These differences in perspective partly stem from the fact that Kraft Dinner^® consumption by food-secure Canadians is voluntary whereas Kraft Dinner^® consumption by food-insecure Canadians frequently is obligatory. These differences are magnified by the fact that food-insecure individuals are frequently obliged to consume Kraft Dinner^® that has been prepared without milk, a fact that is outside the experience of, and unappreciated by, people who are food-secure. The food-secure perspective influences responses to food insecurity, as Kraft Dinner^® is commonly donated by food-secure people to food banks and other food relief projects. Ignorance among food-secure people of what it is like to be food-insecure, we conclude, partly accounts for the perpetuation of local food charity as the dominant response to food insecurity in Canada.     

本科生食品化学课程教学内容的新分类

本文根据本科生食品化学课程教学经验和现有教材体系,基于食品中各种成分的化学反应和变化,以及相关化学理论和具体食品生产运用,对食品化学课程的教学内容进行新的分类。此分类体系不仅有利于学生在食品化学学习过程中对重点、难点问题的了解与应用,更有利于授课教师讲授时强化食品化学的重要性以及教学内容的关联性。     

School food environments and the obesity issue: content,structural determinants,and agency in Canadian high schools

To understand the phenomenon of the rapidly increasing prevalence of overweight and obese children and youth, it is especially important to examine the school food environment, the role of structural factors in shaping this environment, and the resulting nutrition and health outcomes. The paper examines research on school food environments in the US and Canada. It notes evidence of widespread availability of poor nutrition products in both environments and delineates reasons for the situation, and examines initiatives presently being undertaken in a number of jurisdictions in both countries to encourage healthy eating in schools. Empirical data are presented from a pilot study of high schools in the Canadian province of Ontario. The study documents the extent of student purchasing of nutrient-poor foods and beverages, and the structural factors internal and external to the school that appear responsible for the availability of such products in food environments in this critical institutional sphere. The paper also examines positive local initiatives in high schools that seek to encourage healthy eating in schools.

食品质量与安全专业“食品原料学”教学改革与实践

食品质量与安全专业的＂食品原料学＂教学目标和任务,有别于传统的食品科学与工程专业,其侧重点在于分析检测、质量控制和安全管理,因此,应调整教学内容,更新知识体系;协调运用多种教学手段,提高课堂教学效果;拓展实验实践教学方式,提高学生的专业能力。     

Eating Outside the Box: FoodShare’s Good Food Box and the Challenge of Scale

The concept of scale is useful in analyzing both the strengths and limitations of community food security programs that attempt to link issues of ecological sustainability with social justice. One scalar issue that is particularly important but under-theorized is the scale of social reproduction, which is often neglected in production-focused studies of globalization. FoodShare Toronto's good food box (GFB) program, engages people in the politics of their everyday lives, empowering them to make connections between consumption patterns and broader political-economic, cultural, and political-ecological issues. Community food security (CFS) projects such as the GFB are currently limited in their scope and reach and have been criticized for their inability to deliver food to a larger segment of marginalized, hungry people. A central dilemma for CFS projects is how to engage the majority of urban consumers who still eat “inside the box” of the industrial food system. We argue that the concept of scale helps clarify how CFS projects must “scale out” to other localities, as well as “scale up” to address structural concerns like state capacity, industrial agriculture, and unequal distribution of wealth. This requires the state and the third sector to recognize the importance of multi-scaled food politics as well as a long-term pedagogical project promoting ecological sustainability, social responsibility, and the pleasures of eating locally. Josée Johnston is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She is interested in the radical potential of food politics in the context of neo-liberal globalism. Lauren Baker is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her research interests include food politics, alternative food networks, and place-based social movements. Lauren worked with FoodShare Toronto as a program coordinator for five years and continues to be active in the community food security movement.