Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation (2025)

14/07/2025

A review of The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

Johanna Wilkes

In a world that feels overwhelmed by crisis and change, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World offers glimmers of hope and connection with the natural world. Through narratives of the delicate and delicious serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer presents a compelling case for creating more place-based connections in an increasingly disconnected world. The stories of farmstands, neighbours, and care for the commons, Wall Kimmerer offers illustrations of how economies of care and reciprocity operate as a form of governance and ways of life. Overall, the Serviceberry offers ways to navigate the complex webs of care and relations between the earth, community, food systems, and ourselves.

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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/732

11/07/2025

Milk & Bread
A found object collage series

Susan Goldberg

The found-object collage series Milk & Bread was inspired in large part by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women and mothers in particular, who bore the brunt of increased domestic duties and childcare during lockdowns and school closures, and who left the workforce in far greater numbers than fathers. The relentless domesticity and unchanging nature of family life under lockdown is mirrored in the repetitive, sometimes obsessive, arrangement of the tags, identical, with only minor variations to mark the time. Milk & Bread was created with milk and bread tags donated by individual households, daycare centres, and community organizations with the mission of providing food to vulnerable populations.

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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/593

10/07/2025

Exploring the inter-connections between Alternative Agrifood and Seafood Networks for building food systems resilience

Kristen Lowitt
Charles Z. Levkoe
Sarah-Patricia Breen Selkirk Innovates
Lindsay Harris
Hannah L. Harrison
Jon MacDonald
Phoebe Stephens
Joshua S. Stoll
Bruna Trevisan Negri
Connor Warne
Philip A. Loring

In the context of intensifying threats to food systems and a growing need for resilience, Alternative Agrifood Networks (AANs) and Alternative Seafood Networks (ASNs) have emerged as notable bright spots across North America. Collectively, AANs and ASNs comprise Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) - the micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises which are important, but often overlooked, actors in food systems. However, a critical limitation for food system resilience is that agriculture and fisheries remain chronically siloed in research, legislation, regulation, and advocacy. In this field report, we explore the opportunities and challenges of linking ASNs and AANs to build more resilient food systems. To do so, we draw on our experiences as an interdisciplinary group of food systems researchers and practitioners that came together in 2022 through the Agrifish Resilience project. Based on a series of reflective collaborative conversations that we held as a team, we share our key insights for building resilience across agriculture and fisheries focusing on three main themes: the role of ASNs and AANs in food system resilience, our perspectives on what resilience in food systems means, and prospects for collaboratively building resilience. We conclude by proposing the idea of boundary objects as a way of bringing ASNs and AANs together, with some examples of what this looks like in practice, and the role for interdisciplinary teams like ours.

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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/689

09/07/2025

Strengthening democratic governance in times of crisis
Lessons from the Canadian Food Policy Advisory Council

Johanna Wilkes
Charles Z. Levkoe
Peter Andrée
Jill K. Clark

Democracy, including processes that govern food systems, are under threat of erosion. Contextualizing and articulating governance challenges is an essential first step. However, it is valuable to look to practices that provide more meaningful ways of engaging non-state actors in government processes. In this commentary, we look at the establishment and activities of the Canadian Food Policy Advisory Council (the Council) which has been “learning-by-doing” participatory governance. The Council offers insights into both the strengths and challenges that face participatory governance as well as highlights ways these processes can be strengthened. In such a critical time, it is important to strengthen mechanisms of engagement that both bolster meaningful engagement and accountability between the government and rights holders.

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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/738

08/07/2025

“You want my money? Dance!”
Consumers, the state, and a just transition in the food system

Bryan Dale Bryan Dale

An understanding of the role of consumers will be essential to academic and practical efforts to contribute to a just transition in the food system. In this article, I argue for the importance of examining consumers’ role, not only in terms of individual or household behavioural change, but also with respect to broader potential political-economic developments. By providing a schema for possible consumption-related approaches that would feature varying degrees of state involvement, I encourage reflection on the extent to which justice may be realized as climate change is addressed through food system interventions. I emphasize that hybridized approaches may be possible, and that initiatives that may be constrained within a capitalist political-economic framework nevertheless hold the potential to showcase trajectories toward longer-term post-capitalist food futures. On balance, some restraints on individual freedoms regarding food consumption habits may be inevitable if structural transformations are to be achieved that will adequately support climate-change mitigation, yet justice-oriented considerations will need to be weighed in terms of how such restraints would be pursued. I base these observations on research that included interviewing farmers and representatives of alternative food organizations in Ontario and Québec. Themes covered include public and government views on local food and ecological agriculture, challenges related to initiatives such as Community Supported Agriculture, the complexity of dietary transitions, and various possibilities for the state to help reshape producer-consumer relations.

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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/705

07/07/2025

Fishing amongst industrial ghosts
The challenges of green sea urchin diversification in Eastern Canada

Charlotte Gagnon-Lewis

This article examines the Wolastoqiyik Wahsipekuk's green sea urchin fishery to explore the long-term implications of diversification strategies in response to ecological and economic precarities in the Canadian fishing industry. Framing diversification as a creative practice developed by commercial fishermen to navigate these vulnerabilities, it highlights how institutional frameworks shape and constrain such efforts. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Eastern Quebec during the summer of 2021, the article focuses on the specific regulatory context in which this initiative unfolds. Unlike some other First Nations in Canada, the Wolastoqiyik fishery remains closely tied to the models and oversight of Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO). An ethnographic analysis of the fishery's sociomaterial entanglements reveals both the promise and the limitations of diversification. Grounded in political ecology, the article argues that while expanding into emerging species may offer short-term relief, it cannot constitute a viable long-term response to the structural dimensions of the current ecological crisis. This calls for more transformative approaches to fisheries governance—approaches that challenge inherited management systems and engage with an era increasingly defined by socio-ecological unpredictability.

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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/680

04/07/2025

Partnerships and knowledge sharing for sustainable school food systems in Saskatchewan

Kaylee Michnik
Hannah Blischak
Clara Castro-Zunti,
Alex McGreavey,
Ester Kang
Chelsea Brown
Mark Thomas
Rachel Engler-Stringer

School food program (SFP) delivery that uses a sustainable food systems approach has the potential to provide comprehensive health and nutrition benefits for students and communities. SFPs may be best supported through engagement with multiple sectors and partners, including agriculture, health, and education. This study aims to understand the readiness and priorities of partner organizations from across the food system to work towards sustainable SFP development in Saskatchewan (SK).

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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/703

03/07/2025

Punishment and waste
Family meals in Correctional Services of Canada’s Private Family Visits

Else Marie Knudsen

While families of prisoners in Canada are often allowed to visit their loved one inside, they can face significant challenges in accessing and navigating the conditions of these visits. One such challenge is the food available to them as they seek to take part in a key aspect of family life and relationship, the family meal. Families’ experiences of the limited options, poor quality, and high costs of food echo those of the prisoners living in the institution. The prized Private Family Visit (PFV), during which family members spend a weekend with a prisoner in a small house on the grounds of a CSC institutions, do present a rare opportunity for a true family meal. However, institutional policies render the costs and waste of the food so high that partners in this study (primarily women living in poverty) experience this as yet another ‘painful’ penal power. While these policies are minor in scope, impact, and importance to all but a few hundred Canadian families a year, I argue that families’ experiences of carceral food systems contribute insights into the way food is used as a tool of penal power and as one of the mechanism through which families of prisoners become carceral subjects.

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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/704

02/07/2025

Between community and contempt
Narratives of carceral food provisioning

Amanda Wilson

This narrative piece presents eight vignettes from formerly incarcerated individuals, reflecting on their experiences of food and food provisioning within federal prisons in Canada. The stories and insights shed light on the negotiation and dynamic interplay between the imposition of unjust policies and the everyday creativity and persistence of those subject to its harmful carceral logic. In reading these vignettes we can also see how one might create greater moments of freedom and autonomy for incarcerated individuals, as part of a broader project of dismantling and re-imagining responses to harm and trauma.

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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/693

30/06/2025

Contesting through food
Tracking hunger strikes in carceral food systems

Julie Courchesne
Amanda Wilson

In highly regulated environments such as prisons, food-related practices seem to be one of the only activities that can be controlled by incarcerated people, although this control is very limited. Drawing on a media review conducted as part of the research project, we explore collective hunger strikes in Canadian prisons, highlighting the demands made by incarcerated individuals between 2016 and 2022, as well as the institutions’ response. Since these hunger strikes have been used to challenge various inhuman conditions of detention, we will reflect on them, and food more broadly, as a tool to resist authority, its ability to foster a sense of autonomy and identity for incarcerated folks as well as to forge a bond of solidarity through collective mobilization, both inside and outside prison walls. This paper shows how food is a space of contestation where incarcerated folks and Canadian carceral institutions fight with disproportionate means to gain power.

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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/694

27/06/2025

Protest pizzas
Resisting carcerality with storytelling, community building, and an array of toppings

Kelsey Timler

How and when can pizza be a protest? The potentials of food-in-action for cultural resurgence and community building amongst criminalized peoples are significant. That being said, attention to the ways carceral logics divide and isolate us is needed to avoid romanticizing food-based research and programming and perpetuating harmful power structures within and beyond prison walls. In a nutshell, activist research in and against carceral contexts is complicated, and adding food can make it even messier. Thankfully, getting our hands dirty and later cleaning up together after are important processes across food justice contexts. Based around a recent pizza party held as part of my ongoing doctoral Participatory Action Research, these notes from the field (or, in this case, the community kitchen) will trace the complexities of community building through cooking circles. I will share possibilities of sharing food as a radical act and the sticky parts of anti-carceral research and community organizing. Using a day spent with my co-researchers - women on parole - rolling out dough, building our pizzas, and dreaming the next phases of this project, I will share reflections on how the making and sharing of food is an apt site for disruption and resistance, the importance of centering the wisdom of people with lived and living experience and expertise of incarceration (while doing the ongoing work to confront power hierarchies and mitigate the potentials for harm), and how food justice can help harness the privilege of academic research to support resistance against the carceral state.

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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/696

26/06/2025

Exploring carceral food systems
Tensions, experiences and possibilities

Ami Stearns
Amanda Wilson

There is growing recognition of the inextricable relationship between food and punishment, a relationship buttressed by hyper-capitalism, colonialism, racism, and other harmful approaches to social control. This is abundantly clear in the context of carceral systems, where food is a tool of violence and control. Yet, in prison, food is also a tool of contestation and resistance, and a means of building community and solidarity. A critical examination of prison food is uniquely positioned to lay bare the failings of the prison system, and advance broader conversations on abolition, social justice, racism, colonialism, and capitalism. It forces us to reconsider and expand our understandings of food justice, and calls on us to include the lives, perspectives and experiences of incarcerated individuals in our visions of food system transformations and imaginaries.

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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/736

Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation

14/07/2025

11/07/2025

10/07/2025

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08/07/2025

07/07/2025

04/07/2025

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