Dumpster diving and apple picking

Dialoguing food justice and food sovereignty in Ontario, Canada

Abstract

This dual narrative and digital art submission is formatted around a transcript of a Zoom conversation (or co-interview) between the article’s co-authors: food justice activist-scholars Dr Jade Crimson Rose Da Costa and Naty Tremblay. The conversation is structured by the same interview guide that Da Costa and Tremblay used for their research project Exacerbated Hunger, in which they interviewed racialized and Indigenous food aid users in Central Southern Ontario, alongside food justice activists and food aid providers, about their experiences with racialized food insecurity in the era of COVID-19. As members of their research population, they decided to co-interview each other to reflect on the findings of the project while also exploring their own experiences with food justice and food sovereignty, two salient themes within the research. In the first part of the transcript, featured below, Da Costa and Tremblay respond to three questions in particular: 1) What is your first memory of food, or the first memory that comes to mind; 2) when, how, and why did you get involved in food justice, with the follow-up question: 3) how do you define food justice (and food sovereignty)? Interspersed throughout the transcript is digital artwork created by Tremblay, both for the transcript specifically and Exacerbated Hunger more generally, underscoring the project’s multidisciplinary design. We have also attached a glossary with definitions for bolded Food Studies terms within the transcript, but our foci, “food justice” and “food sovereignty,” are defined within the transcript itself and through collective dialoguing.