Vol. 11 No. 3 (2024): Pathways to decolonial governance and planetary health

The cover image is a nod to the season and also to seventeenth-century still life painting, in which the lemon was a favoured object of study. Its placement in such scenes can be read variously. It is a symbol of luxury and longevity, pride and decay. It is also a souring agent.

The articles in this issue are equally attentive to the bitter and the sweet—the “pervasive and destructive […] colonial approaches to food system governance” that CFS editor Shailesh Shukla describes in his editorial, as well as the modes of resistance, the innovation, the (un)learning and relationship building that are happening concurrently as we work to change the way we regulate food production and distribution.

We open with a field report that reports on small fields. Richard Bloomfield and Deishin Lee address the current and looming farmer shortage by seeking to understanding the experiences of first-generation, small-scale vegetable farmers—this in view of informing policy changes that support and encourage more farmers of this kind who contribute directly to local food systems. From Southwestern Ontario, Séraphin Balla and Caroline Hervé take us up to Cambridge Bay to examine two major and thoroughly imbricated concerns of Inuit communities: food insecurity and the housing crisis, requiring, as they emphasize, Inuit involvement in the related decisions. Rotz et al. examine the role of food as a weapon of colonization and a tool of liberation, with a primary focus on Gaza under Israeli settler-colonial rule. They also direct our attention to similar patterns of historical colonial land theft and environmental devastation in Canada.

In the context of Toronto’s food sovereignty movement, Seidman-Wright et al. argue that food activists have a responsibility to let go of settler claims to authority over food and knowledge systems on stolen lands, and to advocate for deeper systemic changes that redistribute power and resources to Indigenous peoples and Indigenous-led initiatives. Mary Coulas and Gabriel Maracle examine the government of Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples and how this relationship has, and could, affect national food policy development. Beyond stakeholdership, they are discursively carving out a space for Indigenous partnership.

Sarah Marquis has her eye on digital agriculture (DA) technologies (like robotic machinery, big data applications, farm management software platforms and drones) and the language used to describe them in the Canadian political and media landscape. And Nil Alt offers us a review of Maria Luisa Mendonça’s The Political Economy of Agribusiness: A Critical Development Perspective.

We conclude with our Choux Questionnaire, in which Lenore Newman has offered, among other responses, her choice for a word or concept that describes an admirable food system. Hint: it’s not “colonial.” And in the spirit of reciprocity, she invites us to consider the worst meal we’ve ever had.

Bonne dégustation.

Photo by Alexia Moyer