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

30/09/2025

Fostering innovation in Arctic food industries

Lisa F. Clark
Andrey Mineev
David Natcher

This Field Report describes the stages in the development of the Arctic Food Innovation Cluster (AFIC). Motivation for AFIC arose during research supported by the Arctic Council’s Sustainable Development Working Group, which found the development of Arctic food industries was constrained by a general absence of innovation in primary and secondary product development. Through a series of iterative stages—scoping, consultations, design—a vision for AFIC emerged. This involved the establishment of a central AFIC hub that would promote strategic coordination, direction, and knowledge mobilization between stakeholders. The High North Centre (HNC) for Business and Governance at Nord University in Norway has assumed this central role and will guide the development of the AFIC initiative. The AFIC strategy assumes development of a network of regional pan-Arctic food hubs that will serve as aggregation points for knowledge sharing and strengthening the interconnectivity between local food producers and other value chain actors in the Arctic food system. Ultimately, the goal of AFIC and its associated regional hubs is to help instill a sense of pride, empowerment, health, and wellbeing in Arctic communities through the sustainable development of Arctic food industries.



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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/725

29/09/2025

Toward a national school food program in Canada
Understanding current landscape and context

Dr. Katerina Maximova
Dr. Julia Dabravolskaj
Ms. Trudy Tran
Dr. Scott T. Leatherdale
Dr. Karen A. Patte
Dr. Paul J. Veugelers

Introduction: In Canada, there is a growing commitment to developing a national school food program (SFP) to improve children’s diet and address existing and widening health inequities. Having an understanding of the current landscape of SFP offerings and context is essential to inform the national SFP development.

Results: Secondary schools reported a decrease in SFP availability, while the opposite trend was observed in elementary schools, particularly those with a whole-school health promotion intervention in place. Elementary schools with an active health promotion intervention also demonstrated improved awareness, incorporation, and compliance with provincial nutrition guidelines. Barriers to SFP included funding constraints and infrastructure challenges, and these remained consistent over the years.

Conclusion: Given the complexity of factors that impact SFP availability, there is an urgent need for a national SFP and harmonized school food policy to help improve Canadian children’s diet, ensure lifelong healthy eating habits, and promote health equity.



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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/708

26/09/2025

News from Canadian Food Studies / La R***e canadienne des études sur l’alimentation

David Szanto
Alexia Moyer
Charles Z. Levkoe
Laurence Godin
Rachel Engler-Stringer

Over the course of 2025, the Canadian Food Studies / La R***e canadienne des études sur l'alimentation (CFS/RCÉA) Management Team has been working on two important projects: a new podcast, Digesting Food Studies / Concentré d’études sur l’alimentation (DFS/CÉSA), that draws on journal articles and issues, and a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) policy aimed at addressing the effects of this transformational technology and offering guidance on its use throughout the editorial process.



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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/758

25/09/2025

Water and Climate Resilience Across Generations
Community Research Participants Needed
Wednesday, October 1, 2025
9:30 AM – 1:00 PM (lunch at 12:00 PM)
Toronto Metropolitan University – Centre for Urban Innovation, Room CUI 219
(44 Gerrard St. E.)

Light refreshments & lunch provided
$100 grocery gift card in appreciation of your time
Register and/or learn more:
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 289-395-3053

24/09/2025

We are so excited to share with you our plans for 2026. Don’t miss our announcement!

Sign up for the CAFS listserv by entering your email at the bottom of our website.

https://foodstudies.info/

23/09/2025

Choux Questionnaire

Bryan Dale Bryan Dale

A riff on the well-riffed Proust Questionnaire, the CFS Choux Questionnaire is meant to elicit a tasty and perhaps surprising experience, framed within a seemingly humble exterior. (And yes, some questions have a bit more craquelin than others.) Straightforward on their own, the queries combined start to form a celebratory pyramid of extravagance. How that composite croquembouche is assembled and taken apart, however, is up to the respondents and readers to determine. Respondents are invited to answer as many questions as they choose.

The final question posed—What question would you add to this questionnaire?—prompts each respondent to incorporate their own inquisitive biome into the mix, feeding a forever renewed starter culture for future participants.

Our Choux Questionnaire respondent for this issue is Bryan Dale. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environment, Agriculture, and Geography at Bishop's University, located on Abenaki Territory in Sherbrooke, QC. Before Bishop’s, Bryan was a postdoctoral fellow at the Culinaria Research Centre at U of T Scarborough. His research and teaching cover a range of topics, including food sovereignty, agroecology, climate change, environmental justice, social movements, agriculture, food security, and labour and equality in the food system.



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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/755

22/09/2025

Review of Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity

Ethan Shapiro

Jeffrey M. Pilcher’s Hopped Up serves up a finely crafted global history of beer, uncovering how transnational flows of people, knowledge, and technology have continually shaped and re-shaped beer’s meanings and material forms. With a keen eye for invented tradition, the book uncovers contemporary beer styles as ever-evolving products of capitalist development. Pilcher weaves a remarkable narrative spanning centuries and continents, allowing his historical account to avoid several pitfalls of previous synchronic and national-level analyses. This book will appeal to a wide audience across the social sciences and humanities, and will be especially valuable to those interested in cultural and political economy, imperialism and nation-building, and social distinction. In providing an expansive yet concise history of a ubiquitous commodity, Hopped Up serves as a shining reminder of how everyday articles of food and drink have participated in the making of the modern world.



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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/747

19/09/2025

Review of Serving the public: The Good Food Revolution in Schools, Hospitals and Prisons

Jennifer Sumner

This book explores the good food revolution in public institutions: schools, hospitals and prisons. Noting that the provision of food in these institutions is an index of the public duty of care, the author puts forward ideas and provides examples of institutions that are harnessing the power of purchase to not only overcome the damage caused by the neoliberal narrow-mindedness of ‘value for money’ but also contribute to a fairer, healthier and more sustainable food system.



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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/744

18/09/2025

Review of Eating Like a Mennonite

Aqeel Ihsan

Marlene Epp's Eating Like a Mennonite: Food and Community Across Borders is a compelling study of how food mediates cultural, religious, and communal identities. Drawing from personal reflection, Epp reorients the reader's attention from "what" Mennonites ate to what food has meant for them throughout their historically migratory and diverse religious tradition.



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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/743

16/09/2025

Announcing the launch of the new Canadian Food Studies podcast, “Digesting Food Studies”! Episodes range from to to intercultural identity, from the technologies of to the relationships embedded in .

The first six episodes are now available on most major podcasting platforms, and new episodes will be released every two weeks. (You can also go to https://rss.com/podcasts/digesting-food-studies/ to listen on your computer.)

1.00 – Welcome to Food Studies (teaser episode with Alexia Moyer and Ellen Desjardins)
1.01 – Introducing Meat Studies (with Ryan Phillips, Élisabeth Abergel, and Emma Paisley)
1.02 – Teaching about Food Systems (with Michael Classens, Jennifer Sumner, and Eric Schofield)
1.03 – Food Art & Material Practice (with Susan Goldberg and Caylie Warkentin)
1.04 – Infant Food Insecurity (with Lesley Frank and Natalia Alaniz-Salinas)
1.05 – Indigenous Food Sovereignty (with Kaylee Michnik and Courtney Vaughn)
1.06 – School Food Programs (with Rachel Engler-Stringer and Penelope Stam)

Digesting Food Studies is a podcast that helps break down research on food systems into manageable portions. It’s for listeners who are learning and teaching about food studies, for those working in fields and factories, and for people in policy and politics, making the rules that govern and guide...

16/09/2025

Creating learning alliances for flourishing food environmental futures

Deborah Dutta Deborah Dutta
Miwa Takeuchi
Anita Chowdhury
Sonder Edworthy
Chantal Eves
Syma Habib
Anika Haroon
Sophia Thraya
Liana Wolf Leg

This article emerged from a community-based symposium held in a public library, aimed at synthesizing reflections on the connections between climate actions, food security, and (im)migration. The authors, representing diverse positionalities and professional backgrounds explore the generative entanglements offered through food justice discourses and land-based pedagogies. Through channelling personal and professional experiences and disciplinary expertise, we sought to open up intersectional imaginaries of food and environmental justice, while actively seeking spaces for learning alliances. Emergent themes include challenging the settled imagination of integration in a community and on the land, finding ways of healing and placemaking through attending to the soil, plants, and other more-than-human beings that support collective well-being, and affirming the emancipatory potential of art-based learning entangled with land-based pedagogies. In foregrounding these voices, the article contributes to the ongoing efforts to support pluralistic forms of knowing and being, through exploring trajectories of transformative educational experiences centering food/environmental justice.



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https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/709