Growing up in poor neighborhoods: how much does it matter?

This article is a review of research on how much the life chances of children are affected by the socioeconomic and racial mix of their schools and neighborhoods. The social mix of a high school has little effect on students' chances of attending college or on white students' academic achievement. Evidence about the effect of the socioeconomic mix of schools or neighborhoods on achievement of elementary school students, on graduation rates of high school students, on teenage crime, and on early labor market experience is weak. Growing up in poor neighborhoods seems to increase black teenage pregnancy rates.     

The federal deficit: how does it matter?

Government deficits and debt are surpluses and assets of the private sector of the economy that stimulate private spending. Official measures of deficits are misleading, however, for failing to distinguish public investment from current spending and for failing to adjust for inflation. Correctly measured real deficits have contributed to the growth of gross national product, consumption, and imports, and to investment as well. Optimal policy consistent with balanced growth calls not for elimination of the nominal deficit but rather for prudent deficit reduction accompanied by and stemming at least partly from sufficient monetary stimulus to achieve and sustain relatively full employment.     

Community food security: Practice in need of theory?

Practitioners and advocates of community food security (CFS) envision food systems that are decentralized, environmentally-sound over a long time-frame, supportive of collective rather than only individual needs, effective in assuring equitable food access, and created by democratic decision-making. These themes are loosely connected in literature about CFS, with no logical linkages among them. Clear articulation in a theoretical framework is needed for CFS to be effective as a guide for policy and action. CFS theory should delimit the level of analysis (i.e., what are the boundaries of community); show how CFS relates to individual, household, and national food security and explain emergent properties, which are important at the community level of analysis; point to the best indicators of CFS or its lack; clarify the determinants of CFS; and clarify the stages of movement toward CFS. This theoretical base would allow researchers to develop valid and reliable measures, and allow practitioners to weigh alternative options to create strategic plans. A theoretical base also would help establish common ground with potential partners by making the connections to anti-hunger work, sustainable agriculture, and community development clear.     

Just where does local food live? Assessing farmers’ markets in the United States

Participation in the local food movement has grown dramatically in the United States, with the farmers’ market being one of its most widespread and heavily promoted forums. Proponents argue that the interactions and transactions that occur at farmers’ markets benefit market participants, but, more importantly, have broader benefits for the neighborhoods they are located in and for society itself. The promise of these benefits raises several important questions, notably: where are farmers’ markets located and who has access to them? While many works have examined the characteristics of individuals who frequent markets, few have examined the areas and inhabitants hosting these markets. Using data from the USDA and US Census, I explore the location of farmers’ markets areas across several geographic measurements, including at the national, census division, and census tract levels. Results reveal the following: (1) Perhaps not being as white of a movement as critics have suggested, farmers’ markets are almost exclusively a middle to middle-upper class phenomenon; and (2) Farmers’ markets are very unlikely to be found in neighborhoods with lower than average socio-economic statuses indicators, in specific divisions of the US, and in rural areas. Results from this research further illuminate our understanding of where farmers’ markets are located throughout United States while presenting some interesting questions for the local food movement as it continues to moves forward.     

Re-localizing ‘legal’ food: a social psychology perspective on community resilience,individual empowerment and citizen adaptations in food consumption in Southern Italy

This paper investigates how Food Security (FS) is enacted in a southern region of Italy, characterized by high rates of mafias-related activity, arguing for the inclusion in the research of socio-cultural features and power relationships to explain how Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) can facilitate individual empowerment and community resilience. In fact, while FS entails legality and social justice, AFNs are intended as ‘instrumental value’ to reach the ‘terminal value’ of FS within an urban community in Sicily, as well as the space where citizens can act their individual and collective political food choices. Building on the social psychology literature and on ecologic-psychopolitical models (Christens and Perkins in J Commun Psychol 36(2):214–231, 2008), we discuss the case of Addiopizzo, a citizen project promoting the legality of their AFNs through the rejection of the payment of the pizzo (the protection money asked by racket) in the local food chain. The aim is to problematize the extent to which FS is able to re-localize ‘legal’ food in the market. This was done by reconnecting citizens to their space and territory in a socio-cultural context at risk where agro-food producers, retailers and consumers are not free to fully enact their citizenship agency because of a widespread illegal structure. The research findings show that Addiopizzo project enables citizens to act their social power: agro-food producers and retailers by subscribing to formal requirements based on values that reject racket; consumers by purchasing Addiopizzo labelled products; individuals and groups by participating further open-to-the-public activities that promote everyday politically oriented behaviour. The citizen empowerment and community resilience can be exerted within AFNs as they are interconnected paths of reflexivity and social learning within social adaptation. The paper concludes by advocating the role of urban communities as a pivotal agent to maintain positive social adaptations, where AFNs work as a socio-cultural synthesis of traditional and alternative producer–consumer ways of interaction, which are embodied in the FS value.     

Including growers in the “food safety” conversation: enhancing the design and implementation of food safety programming based on farm and marketing needs of fresh fruit and vegetable producers

Experts identified water quality, manure, good handling practices (including personal hygiene and equipment sanitation), and traceability as critical farm problem areas that, if addressed, are likely to decrease risk associated with microbial contamination of fresh produce from all scales of agriculture. However, the diverse nature of production strategies used by produce farmers presents multiple options for addressing foodborne illness issues while simultaneously creating potential complications. We use a mental models methodology to enhance our understanding of the underlying factors and assumptions of small, medium, and large produce growers that influence their decision-making processes for contamination prevention and control. This empirical evidence demonstrates how challenges and opportunities to food safety are related to the scale of production and marketing strategies. We believe that refining the development of standards and existing extension and outreach food safety programs are important to both consumer protection and supporting agricultural communities. Additionally, this approach will help develop and refine food safety programs that will result in empirically grounded recommendations based on identified grower information needs.     

Organic matter in a coal ball: peat or coal?

Chemical analyses of morphologically preserved organic matter in a Carboniferous coal ball reveal that the material is coalified to a rank approximately equal to that of the surrounding coal. Hence, the plant tissues in the coal ball were chemically altered by coalification processes and were not preserved as peat.     

Consumer perceptions of food safety risk：Evidence from a segmentation study in Albania

Albania is facing serious problems with the national food safety control system in terms of legislation, control and enforce-ment. The objective of this paper is to analyse consumer perceptions about s...     

When is an island community in equilibrium?

To determine whether the number of species in a biota is in equilibrium requires a colonization model. In a simple Markov model, each species' extinction and immigration probabilities are estimated independently from available data. For one inland and two island avifaunas, a simulation with these probabilities shows that the trajectories of species richness through time do not manifest the regulatory tendencies expected if species interactions cause species richness to be continuously redressed toward an equilibrium.     

Seven samurai to protect “our” food: the reform of the food safety regulatory system in Japan after the BSE crisis of 2001

Using the case of food safety governance reform in Japan between 2001 and 2003, this paper examines the relationship between science and trust. The paper explains how the discovery of the first BSE positive cow and consequent food safety scandals in 2001 politicized the role of science in protecting the safety of the food supply. The analysis of the Parliamentary debate focuses on the contestation among legislators and other participants over three dimensions of risk science, including “knowledge,” “objects,” and “beneficiaries.” The metaphor of “seven samurai” and the relationally situated roles of “samurai,” “bandits,” and “beneficiaries” are used to show that in the process of policy making certain moral and ethical expectations on a new expert institution for food safety were contested and negotiated to frame responsibilities and commitments of social actors for creating the food system based on trust.

Transitions to sustainability: a change in thinking about food systems change?

In the present context of intertwined and intensifying economic, environmental and climate challenges and crisis, we need to enlarge our thinking about food systems change. One way to do so is by considering intersections between our longstanding interdisciplinary interest in food and agriculture and new scholarship and practice centered on transitions to sustainability. The general idea of transition references change in a wide range of fields and contexts, and has gained prominence most recently as a way to discuss and address sustainability challenges. To explore connections to food systems change, I highlight two broad approaches in the sustainability transitions research field. First is a multi-level perspective that examines sustainability innovation pathways and second is a social practices approach that illuminates the possibilities (or not) for shifts in normal everyday routines and practices. Taken together, these approaches offer different and useful ways to think about the dynamics, durability and significance of innovations in food and agriculture, and the part they play in transitions to sustainability. Numerous opportunities exist to forge more productive links between work on food systems change and the broad and growing sustainability transitions field. First, our research and practice insights about the importance of politics, governance, values and ethics in food and agriculture could help to strengthen the sustainability transitions field, which initially underplayed such questions. Second, the sustainability transitions field’s implicit systems sensibility and its futures orientation could help to widen the scope of inquiry and the contribution to policy and planning of research and practice on food systems change.     

Signals for food: reinforcers or informants?

Ring doves pecked one of two keys for food. Pecks at the chosen key then stopped being reinforced, and the signals that normally preceded food were either present or absent. In the presence of signals for food, the dove switched to the second key more quickly. When only one key was used, the same signals acted, as expected, to keep the bird pecking the extinguished key.     

Particle dark matter in the universe: at the brink of discovery?

The nature of dark matter is one of the central problems of cosmology, particle physics, and gravity. It may be made of still unknown particles produced in the early universe. Much progress has been made in attempts to detect these particles and in the development of the required experimental techniques. Results from direct searches, the Large Hadron Collider, and the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope offer promising opportunities within the next decade to find the missing dark matter.     

Food justice or food sovereignty? Understanding the rise of urban food movements in the USA

As world food and fuel prices threaten expanding urban populations, there is greater need for the urban poor to have access and claims over how and where food is produced and distributed. This is especially the case in marginalized urban settings where high proportions of the population are food insecure. The global movement for food sovereignty has been one attempt to reclaim rights and participation in the food system and challenge corporate food regimes. However, given its origins from the peasant farmers' movement, La Via Campesina, food sovereignty is often considered a rural issue when increasingly its demands for fair food systems are urban in nature. Through interviews with scholars, urban food activists, non-governmental and grassroots organizations in Oakland and New Orleans in the United States of America, we examine the extent to which food sovereignty has become embedded as a concept, strategy and practice. We consider food sovereignty alongside other dominant US social movements such as food justice, and find that while many organizations do not use the language of food sovereignty explicitly, the motives behind urban food activism are similar across movements as local actors draw on elements of each in practice. Overall, however, because of the different histories, geographic contexts, and relations to state and capital, food justice and food sovereignty differ as strategies and approaches. We conclude that the US urban food sovereignty movement is limited by neoliberal structural contexts that dampen its approach and radical framework. Similarly, we see restrictions on urban food justice movements that are also operating within a broader framework of market neoliberalism. However, we find that food justice was reported as an approach more aligned with the socio-historical context in both cities, due to its origins in broader class and race struggles.     

Breaking new ground in food regime theory: corporate environmentalism,ecological feedbacks and the ‘food from somewhere’ regime?

Early food regimes literature tended to concentrate on the global scale analysis of implicitly negative trends in global food relations. In recent years, early food regimes authors like Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael have begun to consider the sites of resistance, difference and opportunity that have been emerging around, and into contestation with, new food regime relations. This paper examines the emerging global-scale governance mechanism of environmental food auditing—particularly those being promoted by supermarkets and other large food retailers—as an important new dynamic in our understanding of the politics and potentials of food regimes. Commencing with an examination of Friedmann’s corporate environmental food regime, two key dynamics are identified as being pivotal in the rise and decline of global-scale regimes: securing social legitimacy for food relations and the importance of ecological dynamics in global food relations. By extending McMichael’s notion of ‘Food from Nowhere’ versus ‘Food from Somewhere’, the paper interrogates the emergence of a cluster of relations that comprise ‘Food from Somewhere’ and examines whether this cluster of relations has the potential to change some of the constituent ecological dynamics of food regimes. These ecological dynamics have historically been problematic, amply demonstrating Marx’s metabolic rift as the early food regimes solidified relationships between ‘ecologies at a distance’. By using socio-ecological resilience theory, ‘Food from Somewhere’ is characterized as having denser ecological feedbacks and a more complex information flow in comparison to the invisibility and distanciation characterizing earlier regimes as well as contemporary ‘Food from Nowhere’. The conclusion of this article is that while ‘Food from Somewhere’ does provide one site of opportunity for changing some key food relations and ecologies, the social legitimacy of this new form of food relations does rely on the ongoing existence of the opposite, more regressive, pole of world food relations. The key question for resolving this tension appears to be whether new food relations can open up spaces for future, more ecologically connected, global-scale food relations.