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Feeding the City, Pandemic and Beyond: A Research Brief
Abstract
In this overview of a COVID-19-related food system project underway from Toronto, we relate our research questions, methodologies, and initial findings. We focus here on two of the key questions we are asking: (1) How are food supply chains and food insecurity rates being affected within this pandemic context?, and (2) How are different actors—from newcomer urban gardeners and those involved with farmers’ markets to BIPOC groups—responding to food system-related constraints and opportunities during this time? Preliminary results from this public-facing project (www.feedingcity.org) show that the city’s food system is not highly resilient in the face of crisis, although many grassroots initiatives are compensating for this lack of resiliency—from the coordination of food security initiatives, to modified approaches to food production and marketing. Over the span of the project we are also exploring: (3) What experiences from other jurisdictions (nationally and globally) should be considered in informing local food system strategies?, and (4) What policy outcomes, and community and civil society responses, are needed to address identified challenges in both the near term and the longer term?
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The global food crisis has pushed the U.S. food movement to a political juncture. A sixth of the world's population is now hungry—just as a sixth of the U.S. population is “food insecure.” These severe levels of hunger and insecurity share root causes, located in the political economy of a global, corporate food regime. Because of its political location between reformist calls for food security and radical calls for food sovereignty, food justice is pivotally placed to influence the direction of food-systems change. This placement subjects the concept of food justice to multiple claims, definitions, and practices that tend either to affirm a structural focus on resource redistribution, or to dilute its political meaning by focusing on food access. How issues of race and class are resolved will influence the political direction of the food justice movement's organizational alliances: toward reform or toward transformation. How the food justice movement “pivots” may determine the degree to which it is able to bring about substantive changes to the U.S. food system.
In this article, we explore the role of self-reflexivity in the understanding of positionality in human geography to argue that self-reflexivity in and of itself does not offer researchers sufficient opportunities to question and critique their fluid, ever-changing positionalities. Drawing on the work of feminist scholars, critical race scholars, and experiences carrying out qualitative research, we argue that formal and informal conversations with colleagues and mentors affords the opportunity to deeply engage with positionalities. This article draws on concepts of ‘everyday talk’ to encourage researchers to explore their positionalities through kitchen table reflexivity – an exploration of an individual's positionality and its relationship to their research carried out through formal and informal conversations with others. We demonstrate how everyday talk with each other furthered our understandings of our fluid identities in relation to our research participants. Through these conversations, we were able to more critically interrogate our identity and not simply reduce identity to a laundry list of perceived similarities and differences between research participants and us. In conclusion, we encourage all researchers to use everyday talk as one way to complicate their positionalities and to reflect on how this process relates to the broader societal and academic environment within which they carry out their research.
Using recent criticisms and suggestions regarding the multi-level perspective as stepping stones, the article aims to enhance the reflexivity in transition debates regarding social theories. To that end, the article discusses seven social science ontologies (rational choice, evolution theory, structuralism, interpretivism, functionalism, conflict and power struggle, relationism), their assumptions on agency and causal mechanisms, and their views on socio-technical transitions and environmental sustainability. The second goal is to position the multi-level perspective on transitions with regard to these ontologies and to identify directions for theoretical extensions. The MLP is characterized not as a grand or unifying theory, but as a middle range theory that makes crossovers to some ontologies and not to others.
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