Reconsidering the retail foodscape from a posthumanist and ecological determinants of health perspective: wading out of the food swamp

Abstract

A growing body of literature explores the connection between the retail environment and diet in North America. Scholars have coined the term ‘food swamp’ to describe neighbourhoods that are dominated by retail food outlets selling processed foods. As a metaphor, food swamp evokes the unhealthiness of the food found there, speaking to notions of disease that have been associated with the swamp for centuries. However, considering the discourse of the retail environment from a posthumanist perspective and applying the ecological determinants of health, the term food swamp is unable to offer insight into the problems underlying the industrial food system’s failure to connect with its ecological base and promote population health. Rather than being a threat to health, swamps – also known as forested wetlands – are natural features that perform ecological functions upon which human health is fundamentally dependent. The article argues that avoiding the use of the term ‘food swamp’ can lead to a better understanding of food-related public health crises associated with the global industrial food system, thereby altering the discourse. It proposes a swampy notion of food systems and health and takes an ecosystem approach, considering nonhuman nature and the ecological determinants of health. This means evaluating the health of the food by examining it from its agricultural beginnings, to the processing, production and consumption stages as well as looking at its waste. The article suggests that such an ecosystem approach could shift focus from consumer behaviour and the retail environment to much-needed transformative solutions.

Keywords:

• Food
• environment
• diet
• food security
• ecosystem approaches to health

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Dr Donald Cole for commenting on an early draft of the article as well as the reviewers for their insightful suggestions.

Notes

1. Alternatives to the corporate, industrial food system are explored in the community food systems literature such as by Hamm and Bellows (2003), Blay-Palmer, Sonnino, and Custot (2016) among others, as well as through the notion of food sovereignty (for example, Edelman et al., 2014).

2. This swampy notion is inspired by Todd's (2016) ‘fishy place.’