Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Whilst the coronavirus crisis has presented extreme challenges and hardship for residents and organisations in Leeds, Sonja Woodcock hopes that the experience has strengthened the cities’ movement for fairer, sustainable food.
The powers and resources of city governments must be protected and enhanced to provide proper oversight and governance of new food challenges.
A Europe-wide movement is an opportunity to pool resources and learn from each other. Reaching across national and disciplinary borders is a way to reach a critical mass in terms of size, attracting the attention of regional, national and international policymakers to ensure socially and environmentally ambitious reform.
Starting in the late 1990s, Time started to pass nutritionism by. The modern food movement crystallized around 2007, when the Oxford dictionary declared “locavore” word of the year. After that, “healthfood nut” and “gourmet” were no longer the only words used to describe people who took food seriously.
That’s my topic for this newsletter — why proof is important in today’s social and political environment, what kinds of points need to be proved, and how the process of argumentation and evidence-gathering needs to proceed.
I supervised a university-level food studies class last week that, partly by design and partly by sheer accident, gave me some new insights into the challenges of city-oriented food security policy.
