Reform, Justice, and Sovereignty: A Food Systems Agenda for Environmental Communication

ABSTRACT

Food ecologies and economies are vital to the survival of communities, non-human species, and our planet. While environmental communication scholars have legitimated food as a topic of inquiry, the entangled ecological, cultural, economic, racial, colonial, and alimentary relations that sustain food systems demand greater attention. In this essay, we review literature within and beyond environmental communication, charting the landscape of critical food work in our field. We then illustrate how environmental justice commitments can invigorate interdisciplinary food systems-focused communication scholarship articulating issues of, and critical responses to, injustice and inequity across the food chain. We stake an agenda for food systems communication by mapping three orientations—food system reform, justice, and sovereignty—that can assist in our critical engagements with and interventions into the food system. Ultimately, we entreat environmental communication scholars to attend to the bends, textures, and confluences of these orientations so that we may deepen our future food-related inquiries.

KEYWORDS:

• Food system communication
• environmental justice
• food reform
• food justice
• food sovereignty
• ecologies

From cultivation to consumption, food presents contentious environmental and social justice challenges. Humans cannot escape the biological need to eat, and by 2050 there will be an additional 2.5 billion people to feed on this planet (Schade & Pimentel, 2010). Agriculture is one of the most resource-intensive industries (U.S. Department of State, 2010) and a site of longstanding labor abuse (Holt-Giménez, 2017). Food ranks among the top five energy-consuming industries, that together account for 60% of total energy consumption worldwide (U.S. Department of State, 2010). Food sector workers utilize public assistance at twice the rate of the rest of the US workforce (Food Chain Workers Alliance, 2012). Not only are food systems fundamentally communicative, but they exist amidst complicated relations of power, capital flows, and anthropocentric and biopolitical circuits that drive food’s unending demand and need.

In the last decade, food-related communication scholarship has put food cultures and consumption, food media, agriculture, and alternative food movements on our disciplinary table. This work has been forged in environmental communication, as well as critical/cultural studies, critical rhetoric, health communication, and media studies. We are heartened to witness this scholarship gaining traction, but are also cognizant of the more than 40 years of interdisciplinary research on food systems traversing sociology, geography, anthropology, political ecology, and the budding arena of critical food studies that have yet to be thoroughly incorporated. Interdisciplinary research has underscored the ways food is bound up with systemic injustices; yet, without attention to the communicative practices that constitute them, a comprehensive food systems project remains incomplete. Therefore, we put forward an agenda for food systems communication research to bridge these interdisciplinary conversations and better attend to the relations that produce, reinforce, and resist inequities across the food chain.

Given the ways food ecologies and economies galvanize concerns vital to the survival of communities, non-human species, and our planet (Escobar, 1996), environmental communication is well positioned to recenter systemic (in)justice in food system analysis and praxis. By food system, we reference the nexus of practices from seed to fork, including but not limited to, food production, processing, distribution, consumption, and disposal, and the host of human and non-human relations that constitute these processes. Food systems communication also borrows from environmental justice, articulating the intersections of human, ecological, social, and economic relations, and envisions the environment as not only “where we live, work, and play,” but also “where, what, and how we eat” (emphasis added, Gottlieb, 2009). By advancing this agenda in environmental communication, we provide a framework through which we may reconcile food system injustices with the commitments of our discipline of crisis and also care (Cox, 2007; Pezzullo, 2017).

To this end, we chart the current landscape of food scholarship within and beyond environmental communication. From there, we offer an agenda for food systems communication research by grounding this mode of scholarship in the commitments of environmental justice. Finally, we outline three orientations from which scholars might explore and inform the bends, textures, and confluences of our food systems: food system reform, food justice, and food sovereignty. These orientations are not mutually exclusive, but each affords environmental communication perspectives for critiquing and intervening in food-related environmental injustices.

Articulating food and environmental communication

Food is fundamentally communicative: it is both ordinary and profound, signifying shared meanings and narratives, constituting communities and identities, and also nourishing relational bonds through what some have called “foodways” (Alkon et al., 2013; Counihan & Van Esterik, 2008; Cramer, Greene, & Walters 2011; Frye & Bruner, 2012; Young, Eckstein, & Conley, 2015).¹ Because food crosses disciplinary boundaries and “challeng[es] re-conceptions of our environments, our societies, and ourselves,” it is critical that scholars attend to its complexity (Opel et al., 2010, p. 251). Through the study of food cultures and consumption, food in popular media, agriculture, and alternative food movements, scholars in environmental communication and across the field have nuanced the relationship between food and communication, treating food as an important ecological concern. Communication scholarship on these topics, traced below, invites consideration of how food can operate in our intimate, mediated, and political lives. Our agenda builds on and significantly expands this work to catalyze more robust critical engagements with the entangled ecological, cultural, economic, racial, colonial, and alimentary relations that sustain our food system.

First, the study of food cultures and consumption underscores the intimacy of eating as an articulation of cultural relations. What and how we eat, as well as practices of procurement and cooking, operate, as de Certeau and Giard (2008) note, “at the most necessary and the most unrespected level” (p. 71). A significant body of scholarship has rejected the banality of our consumption habits by exploring ties between food, culture, and identity, and charting how food production, distribution, and consumption co-constitute spatial, temporal, and cultural senses of belonging (Baptista, 2009; Tipa, 2009). The topic of food cultures illustrates how food—or its lack—plays a key role in our everyday lives, nourishing, or starving, social groups and broader cultural bonds.

In this way, eating (or not) is a political act, connecting human with other-than-human (Retzinger, 2008). Producers use natural resources and consumers make dietary choices, articulating our ethics—environmental, political, social, economic, and nutritional—with food (Katz, 2010). Refraining from eating certain foods such as meat (Laestadius, Neff, Barry, & Frattaroli, 2016; Singer, 2017), or not eating at all (Anderson, 2010; Cooks, 2009), performs embodied politics. Ethical consumption, conservation, and advocacy practices have wedged food politics into environmental discourse, even as they demonstrate the limits of consumption as a form of intervention (Doyle 2016; Freeman, 2010; Jeffreys, 2016). Studies of food cultures illuminate just how intimate our relations with food are. A food systems perspective also recognizes the contentious relationship between consumption and cultural politics, but emphasizes the matrices of power, history, and ongoing forms of domination that affect food systems and how communities may transgress them.

Second, analyses of food media demystify the ways food is articulated to reflect and (re)constitute consumers through written texts and cookbooks (Kelly, 2015; West, 2007), nutrition guides and advertising (Cozen, 2010; Mudry, 2010; Rogers, 2008), television (Retzinger 2010), and both fictional and documentary films (Lindenfeld, 2010; Rahman, 2011). Food imagery, food shows, and food-related performances like cooking are coded by gender (Parasecoli, 2011; Swenson, 2009), sediment race-based ideologies and contain/consume ethnic “otherness” in problematic ways (Kelly, 2017; Lindenfeld, 2007; Shugart, 2008; Vats, 2015), and produce new public figures such as the “public chef intellectual” (Eckstein & Young, 2015). Food media play a powerful role in articulating health (Hahn & Bruner, 2012; Singer, 2011) and naturalizing inequitable forms of labor and unsustainable modes of production. Popular documentaries, such as Food, Inc. and Fresh, often mobilize the power of sustainable consumption through appeals to “voting with your fork” (Lindenfeld, 2010; Pilgeram & Meeuf, 2015) which may elevate individual choice over systemic environmental action. A food systems perspective recognizes how ideology is mediated, yet helps expand the reach of these critical engagements, prompting inventive thinking about what discursive and material interventions are possible to change the food system.

Third, agriculture has been a leading theme in extant food-related communication scholarship, complicating the human and non-human relations of sustenance with which we participate. The ramifications of agro-industrial food production manifest in debates about genetic modification (Clancy & Clancy, 2016; Maeseele, 2010), policies governing the transparency (or protection) of animal agriculture interests (Broad, 2016b), as well as the complexities of sustainable agriculture (Motter & Singer, 2012; Spurlock, 2009; Van Gorp & Van der Groot, 2012). Agricultural practice can localize food system relationships, cultivating intimacy with ecosystems and communities. For example, community gardens can function as educational sites for instilling a “producer” ethic in those removed from agricultural production (Hayden-Smith, 2007), instigating intergenerational learning (Mayer-Smith, Bartosh, & Peterat, 2007), and performing powerful intersectional advocacy.² Spaces of distribution and consumption are latent with semiotic and somatic dynamics that can act as gathering spaces for consumer-citizens (Eckstein & Conley, 2012), or can be taste driven and aesthetically constituted (Conley, 2015). Scholarship in this area often holds that when we eat we are bound up with agriculture, whether we direct our attention to the grocery store, industrial farm, community garden, farmers market, or other such places of production, consumption, and waste (Berry, 1990/2010). A food systems perspective can offer ways to more fully engage both agricultural practices and non-agricultural foodways as they enfold political-economic, colonial, and racial relations, thereby expanding the scope of our analysis and substantiating a more critical and interventionist project.

Finally, in addition to food cultures, food media, and agriculture, analyses of food movements elevate ways to mobilize political concerns in the food system. Ranging from the study of individually oriented alternative food movements, such as food preservation (Click & Ridberg, 2010) and vegetarian advocacy (Singer, 2017), to those that link injustices across the food chain such as farmworker justice solidarity networks (Gordon, 2015), studies like these highlight the possibilities and constraints of food activism. Other scholarship has centered voices of those critiquing and transgressing food economies, including peasant farmer protests and narratives of hunger (Frye, 2012; Dutta, 2012). Inasmuch as there can be contradictions and tensions within food movements (Hahn & Bruner, 2012; Katz, 2010), the various tactics and strategies operationalized by food movements are inevitably impure (Pezzullo, 2011). While this topic area seemingly aligns with a food systems agenda, more can be done to conceptualize the political concerns undergirding particular campaigns and movements as systemically entrenched.

As this brief review illustrates, our field has begun to engage in a robust discussion of food as cultural, mediated, agricultural, and political and environmental communication scholars have been central to this effort. Yet, by not attending to the centrality of power and the complexity of food systems, our theorization of food politics remains incomplete, thereby limiting our critical and interventionist aims. Therefore, grounded in the nexus analytic of environmental justice, food systems communication invites conversations about power, resistance, and transgression, bridging systemic analysis with daily life to build on, expand, and nourish future scholarship on food systems in our field. The remainder of this essay outlines this agenda and offers pathways for scholars to engage in this research.

Food system reform, justice, and sovereignty

Emphasizing the communicative dynamics of food-related injustices, we put forward food systems communication as a viable framework for environmental communication scholars to speak to, learn with, and even exceed an environmental justice (EJ) agenda. We anchor this framework with the tenets of EJ and a core commitment to equitable distribution of the risks and benefits of environmental practices (Bullard, 1990, 1993; Cole & Foster, 2001; Gottlieb, 2009). EJ productively broadens conceptions of “environment,” emphasizes systematic exploitation of marginalized groups, and galvanizes strategies for community empowerment (Agyeman 2007; Pezzullo, 2007; Sandler & Pezzullo, 2007). Our agenda is indeed a dynamic one and the orientations we outline below—food system reform, justice, and sovereignty—deepen and complicate engagement with food-related injustices and the diversity of interventions communities might enact.

Food systems communication necessarily begins with the recognition that food (from cultivation to consumption and disposal) is a critical environmental justice issue (Benford, 2005; Cozen, 2010). Cole and Foster’s (2001) metaphor of “tributaries” that “nourish” EJ (p. 20), from indigenous resistance to colonization, anti-toxics movements, farmworker struggles against pesticides, and many others, aptly links injustices across urban, suburban, and rural spaces through a shared commitment to health, justice, and structural change (Pezzullo & Cox, 2017). Like EJ, food systems communication highlights the myriad ways the environment (disparately) transects our lived conditions, interweaves humans and non-humans, and affects the uneven processes and outcomes of environmental planning and decision-making. It is by engaging “the entire set of activities and relationships that make up various food pathways from seed to table” (emphasis added, Gottlieb & Joshi, 2010, p. 5) that this agenda foregrounds an ecological perspective to recognize the interconnected links across the food chain.

The experiences and voices of frontline communities are integral to EJ’s recentering of race, class, gender, and colonialism in environmental discourses. Proximity to hazardous waste (DeLuca, 1999; Endres, 2009; Peeples, 2013), or exposure to toxins (Pezzullo, 2007; Schwarze, 2007), are not simply local injustices but are representative of systematic exclusion and marginalization. Mapping the various modes of inequities across food chains enacts the social justice imperative of environmental communication (Cox, 2007), while also expanding the scope of what normatively constitutes “environmental” injustice to account for food access and insecurity, labor regimes, nutrition and health, food policy and trade, sovereignty and immigration, and much more. A food systems-focused agenda entreats environmental communication scholars to engage local and grassroots efforts as they articulate resistance to intersectional, systemic, and lived forms of oppression within and beyond the food system.

Food systems communication engages with the host of relations that (re)produce and contest the ecosystems within which we are enmeshed. It builds on and expands nascent food-related inquiries, but centralizes the role of history, power, positionality, and possibilities for critical interventions that favor a more equitable, just, and community-focused food system. In what follows, we present three avenues through which food systems communication scholarship might travel: food system reform, food justice, and food sovereignty.³ While these orientations are not mutually exclusive, they offer concepts that environmental communication scholars can mobilize for critical inquiry, analysis, and praxis.

Food system reform

It is true that “every day we eat the world” (Opel et al., 2010, p. 251), yet the privilege and power imminent to our food systems engenders hunger and inequitable food access (Cherry-Chandler, 2009; Hunt, 2016). Global flows of comestible capital, (re)directed through neoliberal development policies modulate food security in ways that bolster and obscure relations of economy and ecology (Dutta, Hingson, Anaele, Sen, Soumitro, & Jones, 2016; Ivancic, 2017). For example, the US Farm Bill regulates how food is produced, processed, traded and transported, and ultimately consumed, entailing significant environmental impacts at each point in the economic circuit (Hunt, 2015). A reformist orientation to food system change thus opens space for environmental communication scholars to problematize the environmental impacts of industrial agriculture, engage the intersections between the food and energy sectors, and otherwise re-imagine discourses of food access, public policy, and modes of public participation.

Broadly, food system reform seeks to “strengthen existing links between different sectors of the food chain, or create new links” (Anderson, 2008, p. 602) to increase food security, contribute to sustainability, and promote community engagement. Tactics such as lobbying, boycotting, and mobilizing to call upon organizations—from non-profits, government institutions, and corporations—to remedy food-related inequities typify this approach. Promoting engagements across the food chain can empower food producers and consumers to craft healthier ways of participating in the food system and engaging decision-makers. Additionally, advocating for democratic and resilient agrifood policies, adopting sustainable production and consumption practices, and retooling supply chains can help shift food systems away from the powerful interests that exacerbate social and ecological challenges.

This first approach emphasizes food system equity. By leveraging political, economic, and cultural channels, food system reform initiatives may range from, for example, creating local food hubs, lobbying Congressional representatives to implement school breakfast programs, or grassroots volunteer initiatives rescuing “ugly” produce for donation to food pantries, among others. Reform can be organized at various scales, which necessarily requires navigating diverse interests while remaining open to the ways compromise is communicatively enacted. For example, these efforts can reveal constructions of space and place (Galt, Gray, & Hurley, 2014; Harris, 2010), and by investigating how nodes in the food chain are linked, this orientation can also problematize taken for granted economic categories such as labor (Hunt, 2016; Sbicca, 2015) and surplus food distribution (Poppendieck, 2008; Tarasuk & Eakin, 2005).

To be sure, food system reform can be complicated, particularly as it articulates with individualistic discourses of food security and donation politics (Guthman, 2008a; Cooks, 2015) that can fetishize localization (DeLind, 2011; DuPuis & Goodman, 2005; Trivette, 2015), and direct action toward the market (Goodman, DuPuis, & Goodman, 2012; Holt-Giménez & Wang, 2011). For example, although farmers markets increase access to locally grown foods, can reduce food miles, and shift relations between consumers and producers, they can also (re)inscribe racist conditions of capitalism (Alkon & McCullen, 2011), and foreclose more meaningful forms of social and political activism (Feagan, 2007). Furthermore, food reform efforts can be vulnerable to market co-optation or accommodation—see DeLind’s (2011) critique of locally grown produce at Wal-Mart, for example—potentially hindering systemic change.

This is not to suggest that the impure politics (Pezzullo, 2011) of food system reform negates the significance of this type of advocacy, the social inequities and environmental impacts these efforts challenge, or the real change they can affect. Although reform may fall short of radical food system transformation (Holt-Giménez & Wang, 2011), we recognize that this approach can provide meaningful benefits by meeting communities where they are, a key tenet of EJ. For example, using familiar and accessible tools or political processes may make food reform actions more feasible for local groups with limited resources. Advocating for shifts in individual behaviors may be more palatable for some stakeholders, particularly local governments or other organizational decision-makers. Finally, reform initiatives can work synergistically with other efforts toward longer-lasting change as well as engage emerging scholarship on climate and energy communication.

Food systems communication scholarship can make valuable contributions to the analysis and practice of food reform by investigating the relationships between discourse and the political-economic structures that (re)produce our food systems. Engaging food reform from this perspective can build on existing research and praxis related to public participation, decision-making, and advocacy at various scales, such as ethical consumption (Singer, 2017), anti-hunger campaigns (Ivancic, 2017), public policy, as well as how food systems contribute to and are impacted by climate change. A reformist orientation to food systems communication thus opens space for environmental communication scholars to critique and renegotiate the discursive dimensions of food system change.

Food justice

Although food access, policy reform, and both ethical and equitable consumption are important food system concerns, a food justice perspective urges us not to approach these issues in a vacuum. In other words, food politics spans well beyond food itself connecting social and environmental justice. Just as the “foodie” culture of alternative food movements (AFMs) gains popularity in critical food studies, so has a body of scholarship on food justice, a perspective that critiques the homogeneity and whiteness of AFMs (Alkon & Agyeman, 2011; Guthman, 2008a; Guthman 2008b; Harper, 2010; Slocum, 2007). Emphasizing not only the need for more just outcomes, but equities in participatory processes of advocacy, food justice posits intersectional thinking about the raced, classed, gendered, anthropocentric, and colonial dimensions of food systems.

Food justice scholarship straddles orientations of both reform and transformation while challenging the food movement to better center power, history, and positionality in their advocacy. Food justice takes the position that injustices within the food system continue to disproportionately impact poor and working-class communities of color. Therefore, focusing on the symptoms of these crises alone (food insecurity, nutrition, and affordability) can neglect more structural criticisms of poverty, uneven decision-making, and systemic racism. While food justice often invokes a commitment to “communities exercising their right to grow, sell, and eat healthy food” that is “fresh, nutritious, affordable, culturally-appropriate, and grown locally with care for the well-being of land, workers, and animals” (Just Food, n.d.), it also emphasizes that these tenets should be led by the peoples most marginalized in the food system (Alkon & Agyeman, 2011). For example, Cadieux and Slocum (2015) argue that a food justice position advocates for intervention into the food system along four axes: trauma/inequity, exchange, land, and labor. How food justice is mobilized differs across communities, spaces, and time while maintaining its emphasis on structures of power.

Food justice presents productive openings for food systems communication research to explore how power nuances the role of voice, storytelling, and positionality in narrations of food-related problems and their solutions. For example, while many food scholars can agree that industrial agriculture presents key environmental and social challenges, the voices and experiences of those on the frontlines of food systems injustices—from farmworkers to the food insecure—are often relegated to the margins of what has been called the “dominant food movement narrative” (Alkon & Agyeman, 2011, p. 4). Although food justice is an orientation to the food system, it is also an orientation to the people, places, non-human animals, and the economic and ecological relations by which the food system is organized.

One of the risks and opportunities of engaging food justice as a conceptual category for food-related struggles is that the term is itself a “relatively unformed concept, subject to multiple interpretations” (Gottlieb & Joshi, 2010, p. 6). The many groups organizing under this diffuse umbrella term—from fast food laborers and farmworkers to fence-free gardeners and ethical consumers—often describe their work in ways that recognize the distinct (although related) issues of injustice. For example, labor justice, economic disparities, gentrification, housing, transportation, immigration, and climate change are often essential components of food justice, although individual movements or campaigns may organize via different tactics and with diverse goals in mind.

Although a food justice orientation approaches food systems critically, how its aims are communicated offers both possibilities and constraints alongside an environmental justice agenda. For example, Bradley and Herrera (2016) notably caution that some food justice efforts continue to “re-inscribe white, patriarchal systems of power and privilege” (p. 97) or can potentially re-fetishize food production through whitewashing (McCullen, 2011). Additionally, Guthman (2014) argues that some food justice advocates pathologize low-income communities and people of color through frames of “poor health” in relation to obesity and diabetes, instead of situating their advocacy alongside critiques of environmental racism and toward environmental justice (p. 1165).

Food systems communication research can significantly contribute to our understanding of food justice as a concept, orientation, and rallying cry for greater participation, equity, and justice within and beyond the food system. Food justice is as much about grassroots tactics, policy, and action as it is about the cultural and communicative shifts needed to tackle all forms of injustice that intersect with food systems. Engaging food justice communicatively builds on the in-roads already made by scholars advocating for just sustainabilities (Agyeman, 2007), bridging social and environmental justice concerns (Opel et al., 2010), and nuancing competing visions of justice across communities (Broad, 2016a). Not only does a food justice perspective help us critically interrupt (Pezzullo, 2001) dominant food movement paradigms, but it also allows us to engage communities on the frontlines—from farm to food bank—in their struggles for more just futures.

Food sovereignty

Thus far we have argued that efforts toward food system reform and food justice require exceeding the boundaries of traditional “food” studies, to engage in intersectional, historical, and transformative analysis. Although the most understudied of the three orientations we present here, food sovereignty offers a different way to trace historical and ongoing power differentials in the food system. Interestingly, some argue that food sovereignty itself has been overdefined, especially as different actors leverage it across varied geographic scales (Cadieux & Slocum, 2015; Clendenning et al., 2016; Patel, 2016). Its most widely recognized articulation emerged from La Vía Campesina, a transnational movement of peasants, small and medium-scale farmers, farmworkers, and Indigenous agrarian communities, to underscore rights and control as a “precondition to genuine food security” (Vía Campesina, 1996, p. 1). Though the definition of food sovereignty has shifted over time, it remains a “big tent,” as Patel (2016, p. 666) argues, under which multiple groups may find affinity.

As declared in the 2007 Nyéléni Declaration,⁴ food sovereignty broadly supports the right for “all peoples, nations and states” to be “able to determine their own food producing systems and policies” in addition to emphasizing women’s roles, rights, and representation in food production and decision-making, the protection of a living wage, conservation and rehabilitation of ecosystems, traditional knowledge systems, agrarian reforms that defend Indigenous peoples’ territories, land, and waterways, among others (Declaration of Nyéléni, 2007). Food sovereignty extends beyond an affirmation of social justice and stands firmly against “imperialism, neo-liberalism, neo-colonialism and patriarchy, and all systems that impoverish life, resources and eco-systems” (Declaration of Nyéléni, 2007). Though there are discrepancies between particular food sovereignty efforts, advocates broadly argue, “the centralization and globalization of agriculture undermines the abilities of agrarian people to produce food for self-reliance” (Alkon & Mares, 2012, p. 349). Desmarais’s (2007) work on Vía Campesina reveals that while the food sovereignty movement is varied and complex, it has been powerful to give voice to concerns extending across geo-spatial regions and diverse economies.

Food sovereignty, even more than food justice, emphasizes autonomy and control. Given the globalization of food systems, decrease of subsistence farming, and the increasing threats posed by climate change, the need for comprehensive interventions is more pressing than ever. A food systems communication framework can advance connections between the communicative dynamics of authority, governance, and local/global ecosystems. From this position, environmental communication scholars are well positioned to clarify how food sovereignty is expressed, and by whom, including how the perspective can challenge neoliberalism and colonialism and actively construct new social relations (Coté, 2016; Shiva, 2016; Whyte, 2017). Additionally, how we narrate efforts to transform food systems, which voices we choose to privilege in the process, and which practices of intervention we elevate are all important to our projects. Although food sovereignty shares social justice concerns, its emphasis on land and self-determination often differentiates it from other food justice movements, connecting it with calls for agroecological interventions, community control, and land justice (Cadieux & Slocum, 2015; Peña et al, 2017; Williams & Holt-Giménez, 2017).

Tracing frames of control, intervention, and self-determination illustrates the critical nuances of these movements. For instance, a food sovereignty orientation can highlight how peasant or Indigenous farmers’ efforts to protect their territory, ecosystems, and means of food production may intersect with, but also differ from urban food security efforts. Moreover, scholars have recently begun to highlight overlaps between food justice and food sovereignty both in how they voice their principles (Gottlieb & Joshi, 2010; Holt-Giménez, 2011) and how they function in practice, particularly with the rise of urban food advocacy (Alkon & Mares, 2012; Cadieux & Slocum, 2015; Clendenning et al, 2016). However, we recognize the need to be historically and spatially specific when “sovereignty” is invoked. Food sovereignty may take shape and be communicated differently across various settler and postcolonial contexts (Grey & Patel, 2015; Peña et al, 2017), both utilizing and rejecting rights-based frameworks (Coté, 2016; LaDuke, 1999; Vía Campesina, 1996; U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance, n.d.). Therefore, food sovereignty can build on environmental communication scholarship committed to the decolonial possibilities of gardening (Enck-Wanzer, 2011) and decarbonization (de Onis, 2017), among others, and allow for a critical examination of how history, power, voice, agency, and knowledges are bound up with resurgence and control in the food system.

Conclusion

Our food system is both abundant and complex. A host of relations—including the ecological, cultural, economic, racial, colonial, and alimentary—enfold and sustain our food system, instantiating significant environmental and social justice challenges that are ripe for future investigation. With this in mind, our aim has been to encourage a food systems agenda for environmental communication. We seek to expand engagements with food in our field by bringing into focus nascent and interdisciplinary approaches to food-related research and praxis. A food systems perspective invites us to consider the complexities of our food environments (per Gottlieb, 2009) and centralizes power to help more fully account for the processes that engender disparities. This agenda not only expands the scope of what “environment” constitutes, but also extends our commitment to environmental justice with intersectional and systemic analysis. We therefore see this as a framework that can help reconcile food system injustices with our disciplinary commitments to crisis and care (per Cox, 2007; Pezzullo, 2017).

Food systems communication is an interdisciplinary project that foregrounds the communicative co-constitution of the food system and our relations with(in) it. The agenda we have outlined affords scholars of environmental communication space to explore the normatively “environmental” contradictions of food systems, including the material impacts of food production on local environments and environmental quality, uneven consumption and waste patterns, and its intersections with energy sectors, global and local economies, and climate change mitigation and adaptation. In addition, food systems communication expands opportunities to critique, analyze, and intervene into systemic food-related inequities, and creates new pathways for environmental communication scholars to contribute to growing interdisciplinary engagements while still emphasizing constitutive processes of meaning-making. As a critical project, food systems communication refocuses how power and history shape our food system and concerns itself with the complexities of public participation and the myriad forms interventions might take.

The agenda we stake here is a dynamic one. Food system reform, food justice, or food sovereignty offers environmental communication scholars invigorating approaches for critically engaging the discursive dynamics of and responses to food systems. Through a food system reform orientation, for example, scholars may foster alimentary equity by participating alongside advocates’ campaigns or partnering with university cooperative extension programs and contribute to conversations with policy-makers legislating the Farm Bill or other food policy. A food justice orientation allows scholars to study the intersectional politics of food advocacy while engaging how frontline communities articulate harms that intersect with and span beyond food itself, including issues related to economic, housing, transportation, labor, and racial justice. A food sovereignty orientation moves scholars to consider the transformative potential of redefining, organizing, and governing new food systems as well as how control, autonomy, and self-determination are discursively articulated by farmers, peasants, and Indigenous peoples. These are only points of departure. The unsettled nature of these terms offers openings for scholars to study the communicative processes that mark their intersections, differences, and the ways they gain purchase in everyday life.

The web of contradictions that is our food system, one that we navigate every day, presents openings for environmental communication inquiry. Food systems communication is a conceptual framework for critically engaging a range of these tensions further, including the ways ecosystems, humans and non-humans, consumers, advocates, farmworkers, food service workers, laborers of all sorts, farmers, peasants, landowners, technology and chemical companies, distributors, grocery stores and retail chains, governments, regulatory, legal, and international institutions, and so many others, both constitute and contest the food system itself. The complexities presented here, while expansive, not only provide new avenues for future scholarship, but underscore the need for intersectional analysis as we analyze, critique, intervene, and ultimately re-imagine the food system and our roles within it.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers as well as Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Jennifer A. Peeples for their comments on this essay, which is a revised and extended version of a WSCA 2017 conference presentation entitled Food Ecologies and Food Economies: Why Food Chains Matter to Environmental Communication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Kathleen Hunt http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2625-6429

Notes

1. Alkon et al. (2013) reference foodways as “the cultural and social practices that affect food consumption, including how and what communities eat, where and how they shop and what motivates their food preferences” (p. 127). Young, Eckstein, and Conley (2015) operationalize three categories from which foodways can be studied: production, circulation, and access.

2. See, for example, Praxis articles by Retzinger; Singer; Foust; LeGreco & Leonard; and Enck-Wanzer on The Garden in Environmental Communication 5(3).

3. Relatedly, Holt-Giménez (2011) uses “food security” to engage an in-depth analysis of the political orientations to food regime change: reformist, progressive, and radical.

4. The Nyéléni Declaration (also known as the Declaration of the Forum for Food Sovereignty) was drafted out of a 2007 forum in the Nyéléni Village in Sélingué, Mali, where more than 500 representatives from 80 countries gathered to discuss food sovereignty.