Choosing a Food Future: Differentiating Among Alternative Food Options

This article examines the diversity of food networks that fit within the alternative food system of the United States. While farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture schemes, and corporate organic food markets all fit within the alternative food system, they differ greatly in the conventions and beliefs that they represent. The alternative food system has divided into two movements: corporate, weak alternative food networks; and local, strong alternative food networks. The weak corporate version focuses on protecting the environment; however, it neglects issues concerning labor standards, animal welfare, rural communities, small-scale farmers, and human health. Local, strong alternative food networks not only assure environmental protection, but they also address the issues that weak alternatives neglect. Using three case studies from the Washington, D.C. metro area, the author explains that strong alternative food networks are better suited to create social and political change because they challenge the foundations of the conventional food system: standardized and generic products, price-based competition, consolidated power, and global scale. To affect true social and political change in the United States, the author recommends supporting strong alternative food networks by creating the requisite cultural and political space for them to succeed.     

食物垃圾处理器

由湖北环宇美环境工程有限公司开发的食物垃圾处理器,适用于家庭、酒店厨房等区域的食物垃圾清理。主要技术内容一、基本原理采用高速电机,驱动碾磨件碾磨和粉碎食物残余物     

Advancing Food Sovereignty Through Interrogating the Question: What is Food Sovereignty?

The topic of food sovereignty has received ample attention from philosophers and interdisciplinary scholars, from how to conceptualize the term to how globalization shapes it, and several areas in between. This bounty of research informs us about food sovereignty’s practical dimensions, but the theoretical realm still has lessons to teach us, especially how to develop action-based guides to achieve it. This paper is an exploration in that direction. To have that effect, the author interrogates the question, “what is food sovereignty?”, through asking about its motivations, scale, and the answers that will inform solutions. This process reveals that, despite the differences between conceptions of food sovereignties, there is a pattern at play that concerns their nature. The benefit of gaining an understanding of this pattern is to uncover the necessary elements that each solution will require.     

Food, Consumer Concerns, and Trust: Food Ethics for a Globalizing Market

The use of biotechnology in food productiongives rise to consumer concerns. The term ``consumerconcern' is often used as a container notion. Itincludes concerns about food safety, environmental andanimal welfare consequences of food productionsystems, and intrinsic moral objections againstgenetic modification. In order to create clarity adistinction between three different kinds of consumerconcern is proposed. Consumer concerns can be seen assigns of loss of trust. Maintaining consumer trustasks for governmental action. Towards consumerconcerns, governments seem to have limitedpossibilities for public policy. Under current WTOregulations designed to prevent trade disputes,governments can only limit their policies to 1) safetyregulation based upon sound scientific evidence and 2)the stimulation of a system of product labeling. Ananalysis of trust, however, can show that ifgovernments limit their efforts in this way, they willnot do enough to avoid the types of consumer concernsthat diminish trust. The establishment of a technicalbody for food safety – although perhaps necessary –is in itself not enough, because concerns that relatedirectly to food safety cannot be solved by ``pure'science alone. And labeling can only be a good way totake consumer concerns seriously if these concerns arerelated to consumer autonomy. For consumer concernsthat are linked to ideas about a good society,labeling can only provide a solution if it is seen asan addition to political action rather than as itssubstitution. Labeling can help consumers take uptheir political responsibility. As citizens, consumershave certain reasonable concerns that can justifiableinfluence the market. In a free-market society, theyare, as buyers, co-creators of the market, andsocietal steering is partly done by the market.Therefore, they need the information to co-create thatmarket. The basis of labeling in these cases, however,is not the good life of the individual but thepolitical responsibility people have in their role asparticipants in a free-market. Then, public concernsare taken seriously. Labeling in that case does nottake away the possibilities of reaching politicalgoals, but it adds a possibility.     

Is Natural Food Healthy?

Is food’s naturalness conceptually connected to its healthiness? Answering the question requires spelling out the following: (1) What is meant by the healthiness of food? (2) What different conceptual meanings the term natural has in the context of food? (3) Are some of those meanings connected to the healthiness of food? In this paper the healthiness of food is understood narrowly as food’s accordance with nutritional needs of its eater. The connection of healthiness to the following five food-related senses of the term “natural’’ is analyzed: naturalness as nutritive suitability, naturalness as moderate need satisfaction, naturalness as lack of human influence, naturalness as authenticity, and naturalness as familiarity. It is concluded that some very common current uses of the term “natural,” such as naturalness as lack of human influence, are not conceptually connected to the healthiness of food. Nevertheless, the first two senses of naturalness are strongly conceptually connected to healthiness in the food context and the last one may be indirectly related to it. Thus, desire for natural food is not necessarily mistaken and misguided.     

Food Sovereignty and Gender Justice

Food sovereignty asserts the right of peoples to define and organize their own agricultural and food systems so as to meet local needs and so as to secure access to land, water and seed. A commitment to gender equity has been embedded in the food sovereignty concept from its earliest articulations. Some might wonder why gender justice should figure so prominently in a food movement. In this paper I review and augment the arguments for making gender equity a central component of food sovereignty. The most common argument is: if women constitute the majority of the world’s food producers, then agricultural policy is a women’s issue. And insofar as patriarchal social relations continue to dominate the globe, then changing agricultural policies will require explicit attention to gender injustice. I suggest that this is a good argument, but that an ecological feminist perspective can provide additional theoretical reasons for maintaining the centrality of gender justice in food sovereignty discourse. Moreover, ecological feminism can provide a robust theoretical framework that coheres a concept and movement with a wide set of concerns. My critique positions food sovereignty’s call to social justice as embedded in a truly radical re-thinking of dominant conceptual frameworks, and re-envisioning of political and ethical relations.     

绿色食品与农业环境保护

“绿色食品”，是出自最佳生态环境，带来最强生命活力的无公害健康食品。本文从介绍我国开发“绿色食品”的概况入手，阐述了保护农业生态环境对开发“绿色食品”的重要性和必要性。结合四川实际，从农业环境保护的角度，提出了加快发展“绿色食品”，必须抓好“四个结合”的对策措施，供有关部门领导参考。     

What Price Cheap Food?

This paper is the report of a meetingthat gathered many of the UK's most senioranimal scientists with representatives of thefarming industry, consumer groups, animalwelfare groups, and environmentalists. Therewas strong consensus that the current economicstructure of agriculture cannot adequatelyaddress major issues of concern to society:farm incomes, food security and safety, theneeds of developing countries, animal welfare,and the environment. This economic structure isbased primarily on competition betweenproducers and between retailers, driving foodprices down, combined with externalization ofmany costs. These issues must be addressed by acombination of legislation, restructuring ofthe market, and use of public funds. Themeeting included workshops that made otherrecommendations for research and education. Themost urgent requirement is recognition thatchange is needed and development of a visionfor what that change must achieve.     

谁制造了食源性危机?

造成长江渔业资源极度匮乏原因众多。安庆市农委副主任、市渔业局局长周锦云认为,长江沿岸许多湖泊本来就是不少长江鱼类的产卵场,但如今江湖河流闸坝林立,阻断了许多洄游性鱼类去内河产卵繁殖通道,这对野生种群是毁灭性打击。     

From Food Justice to a Tool of the Status Quo: Three Sub-movements Within Local Food

The local food movement has been touted by some as a profoundly effective way to make our food system become more healthy, just, and sustainable. Others have criticized the movement as being less a challenge to the status quo and more an easily co-opted support offering just another set of choices for affluent consumers. In this paper, we analyze three distinct sub-movements within the local food movement, the individual-focused sub-movement, the systems-focused sub-movement, and the community-focused sub-movement. These movements can be combined within any particular campaign or within the goals of any particular organization or individual activist, but they are nevertheless quite different from each other, and come out of different conceptualizations of what food, people, and locality are. We argue that most of the critiques leveled against local food are actually directed against the individual-focused sub-movement, which is most compatible with the current industrial food system, and perhaps not surprisingly receives the most mainstream attention. Further, we argue that while each movement has its own strengths and weaknesses, it is the community-focused sub-movement that has the most potential to radically transform the global food system.     

Operationalizing Ethics in Food Choice Decisions

There is a large gap between attitude and action when it comes to consumer purchases of ethical food. Amongst the various aspects of this gap, this paper focuses on the difficulty in knowing enough about the various dimensions of food production, distribution and consumption to make an ethical food purchasing decision. There is neither one universal definition of ethical food. We suggest that it is possible to support consumers in operationalizing their own ethics of food with the use of appropriate information and communication technology. We consider eggs as an example because locally produced options are available to many people on every continent. We consider the dimensions upon which food ethics may be constructed, then discuss the information required to assess it and the tools that can support it. We then present an overview of opportunities for design of a new software tool. Finally, we offer some points for discussion and future work.     

Food: From Commodity to Commons

Our food and farming system is not socially, economically or ecologically sustainable. Many of the ills are a result of market competition driving specialization and linear production models, externalizing costs for environmental, social and cultural degradation. Some propose that market mechanisms should be used to correct this; improved consumer choice, internalization of costs and compensation to farmers for public goods. What we eat is determined by the path taken by our ancestors, by commercialization and fierce competition, fossil fuels and demographic development. Based on those, governments and the food industry are the choice architects who determine what we eat; consumer choice plays a marginal role. Using market mechanisms to internalize cost and compensate farmers for public goods has been proposed for decades but little progress has been made. There are also many practical, ethical and theoretical objections to such a system. The market is not a good master for a sustainable food system. Instead we need to find new ways of managing the food system based on food as a right and farming as a management system of the planet Earth. The solutions should be based on relocalization of food production and de-commodification of food and our symbionts, the plants and animals we eat.     

Food and hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa is by far and away the most disadvantaged of the world's three main developing regions. Worse, its situation has mostly been deteriorating for much of the past several decades. Its agriculture is severely under-productive, and per capita food supplies have been steadily dwindling. Its environments and natural-resource base, characterised by water deficits, soil erosion, fuelwood shortages, rudimentary agro-practices, and grossly inadequate infrastructure, are generally unfavourable for sustainable agriculture. The population has expanded until it far exceeds carrying capacity, yet its growth rate is the highest in the world. The region also suffers from more disease than any other region. There is widespread and deepening poverty. As a result of these and other problems, and despite major food imports, two-thirds of the people are malnourished, one-quarter of whom endure outright hunger, even semi-starvation. Both these proportions appear set to keep on increasing both relatively and absolutely. Were these problems to persist with their decades-long trends, there could eventually arrive a stage when much larger numbers of people would succumb to terminal malnutrition, precipitating a human tragedy of unprecedented proportions. Fortunately, success stories demonstrate that solutions are available, on the part of both governments concerned and international agencies. Because of ignorance, or rather ignore-ance of the potential mortality disaster ahead, however, not nearly enough has been done to address the challenge with the energy and urgency to match its scale.