| Nonhuman Labor and Food Many, if not all, of the foods humans consume on a daily basis (from kimchi to yogurt and beer) are the result of both human and nonhuman labor. Nonhuman labor refers to “work” that is done by nonhuman actors to produce food and other valuable products. This labor can take many forms, including living, eating, growing, reproducing, and metabolizing nature to meet one’s biophysical needs. Although labor is a social and relational process that cannot be understood outside of human economies, there are merits to extending this concept to nonhumans, whose labor is often rendered invisible, natural, or instinctual. Even the ability to digest food is a more-than-human accomplishment, realized in collaboration with gut bacteria. Humans depend on a menagerie of microbes, mycelia, worms, insects, pollinators, farm animals, and other creatures to help grow and process food, but also to digest food and recycle food waste. In food systems, human and nonhuman labors never take place in isolation; they are deeply intertwined—and often mediated by dominant cultural and economic logics of accumulation, efficiency, violence, and extraction. |
| Food Commons This entry introduces the concept of food commons in the context of scholarship and activism on commons, commoning, and food systems transformation. I then draw out some key tensions and issues that have surfaced in research on food commons related to questions of materiality, scale, and urban-rural relations. I close with recommendations for approaches that future research can take to address these issues. |
| Community Food Initiatives: A Critical Reparative Approach This book examines a diverse range of community food initiatives in light of their everyday practices, innovations, and contestations. While community food initiatives aim to tackle issues like food security, food waste, or food poverty, it is a cause for concern for many when they are framed as the next big "solution" to the problems of the current industrialised food system. They have been critiqued for being too neoliberal, elitist, and localist; for not challenging structural inequalities (e.g. racism, privilege, exclusion, colonialism, capitalism); and for reproducing these inequalities within their own contexts. This edited volume examines the everyday realities of community food initiatives, focusing on both their hopes and their troubles, their limitations and failures, but also their best intentions, missions, and models, alongside their capacity to create hope in difficult times. The stories presented in this book are grounded in contemporary theoretical debates on neoliberalism, diverse economies, food justice, community and inclusion, and social innovation, and help to sharpen these as conceptual tools for interrogating community food initiatives as sites of both hope and trouble. The novelty of this volume is its focus on the everyday doings of these initiatives in particular places and contexts, with different constraints and opportunities. This grounded, relational, and place-based approach allows us to move beyond more traditional framings in which community food initiatives are either applauded for their potential or criticized for their limitations. It enables researchers and practitioners to explore how community food initiatives can realize their potential for creating alternative food futures and generates innovative pathways for theorising the mutual interplay of food production and consumption. This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical food studies, food security, public health, and nutrition as well as human geographers, sociologists, and anthropologists with an interest in food. 
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| A critical reparative approach towards understanding community food initiatives: Acknowledging hopes and troubles Community food initiatives (CFIs) bring people together to reconfigure their relations with food, place, and one another. Such initiatives are driven by the specific needs, values, and concerns of people in different places who take collective action to re-design and challenge systems of food provisioning. They span the rural and urban, consumption and production, alternative and mainstream, charity, mutual aid, and (social) entrepreneurship. While agri-food scholars use different theoretical lenses, concepts, and ways of knowing as entry points to study CFIs, such initiatives have largely been described in terms of their hopes and possibilities or troubles and failures. In this chapter, we transcend the polemic of hope and trouble and introduce our critical reparative approach, which consolidates multiple understandings of CFIs. Our approach invites both a reparative stance oriented towards hope and possibility and a critical gaze oriented towards trouble and failure in CFIs. In this introduction, we sketch such a critical reparative approach through the theoretical conceptualisations and empirical research that compose the chapters in this volume. A critical reparative way of knowing emphasises that CFIs are realised through collective actions addressing the place-specific needs and available resources of different communities. |
| Governing and Commoning Activities around Urban Food Commons Reframing both the city as commons and food as commons changes how we think about urban food governance. Food is currently governed as both a privately owned and traded commodity and a public good that should be healthy, safe, and accessible to everyone. This public/private or state/market binary is insufficient for governing the diverse ways in which people provision food; it can also stand in the way of achieving more just and sustainable food systems. The commoning activities of community food initiatives, activists, policymakers, growers, sharers, and eaters – have the potential to create, share, and care for urban food commons as collective public goods. Yet, these commoning activities are rarely examined as urban food governance practices. At the same time, commoners often lack access to the legal and policy tools that govern the urban food commons they are creating and caring for. This chapter explores how community gardens have used technology, mapping, and community organizing to make urban food governance visible and accessible to urban food commoners. In doing so, they have transformed legal and zoning tools around land use, land trusts, and the public trust doctrine into tools for commoning. |
| Care, commoning and collectivity: from grand domestic revolution to urban transformation Given profound urban challenges amplified by COVID-19, we need to center anti-racist feminists’ lenses on care, commoning, and collectivity in our cultivations and analyses of urban change. We join a chorus of feminists who critique the devaluation, erasure, and isolation of care in the cities that we build and the stories we tell about them. But this is well-traversed territory, the ‘me too’ tale of every feminist who dreamsa different city or kind of urban theory. So, we outline a research agenda rooted in intersectional feminist imaginations and transformations that live around us. Neither nomadic nor confined to the home, care, commoning and collectivity can be aspirational, spatial, and practical. Inspired by Dolores Hayden and intersectional feminists, we ask: What kinds of socio-spatial imaginations can produce just, sustainable cities and who makes them? What material practices enable social change and improve everyday life, and at what scales might struggles for just cities be waged? |
| Community Self-Organizing and the Urban Food Commons in Berlin and New York Food sharing and food commons have both been raised as possible solutions to unsustainable and unjust urban food systems. This paper draws upon ethnographic research conducted in Berlin and New York to examine self-organizing in community food initiatives that are to varying degrees creating urban food commons by opening up urban space and its fruits to community use, sharing, and governance. In New York, the organization 596 Acres has developed an interactive map of vacant land to help community members self-organize to gain access to, steward, and protect the “lots in their life” for urban growing. In Berlin, the organization foodsharing.de has developed an interactive web platform to decentralize and democratize the logistics of food rescue and redistribution through peer-to-peer gifting and community fridges. The paper examines the possibilities and limitations of socio-technical innovations as “tools for commoning,” for self-organizing imagination, access, care, and governance in urban food commons. The paper contributes to debates on the role of socio-technical innovation in urban food sharing and practices of self-organizing in urban food commons. |
| Community Economy This short essay is one of 50 keyword essays published online by the Antipode Foundation to celebrate 50 years of the radical geography journal, Antipode. The essay overviews the idea of community + economy, and outlines various ways that community economies might be further activated.
The Community Economy essay can be downloaded here.
The full e-book of 50 keywords can be downloaded here.
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| Sharing food and risk in Berlin’s urban food commons Public fridges are open-access community-stewarded spaces where food can be freely and anonymously shared. As such, they are fertile ground for understanding the obstacles and opportunities for governing food as a commons. This paper examines the governance strategies that have developed within and around Foodsharing.de, a grassroots food-rescue network in Berlin, to manage food as a commons. Analyzing the commoning of food in Foodsharing.de provides a novel entry point into the multi-scalar and multi-stakeholder governance processes that shape our broader food system. In this paper, I further develop the concept of urban food commons to specifically analyze the governance of food and risk. In particular, I draw on qualitative research to analyze a conflict between Foodsharing.de and the Berlin Food Safety Authority over the potential health and safety risks of public fridges. Building on this, I show how different governance practices, informed by different risk ontologies and understandings of the common good/hazard of food, come into tension through the everyday practices of sharing food. This paper departs from previous research that has focused on how the benefits of food commons are shared and regulated at various scales, to also explore how their risks are managed, or could be managed, within an urban food commons framework. |
| The Diverse Economy: Feminism, capitalocentrism and postcapitalist futures This book chapter outlines the basics of diverse economies and the idea of capitalocentrism for an audience in international political economy. |
| More-than-Capitalist Landscapes of Communist Becoming This commentary responds to Jodi Dean's call to bring back the Communist party and Stephen Healy's call to practice communism as a mode of life, as seen in their exchange at the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference. Employing Gibson-Graham's diverse economies perspective, we reframe communism as abundant and everyday rather than the property of a particular party. Drawing on examples of collective self-provisioning in our activist and research practices, we argue that everyday communist practices are critical for creating a better world in the present as well as for sustaining oppositional struggles for a better future. |
| Enacting post-capitalist politics through the sites and practices of social reproduction In this book chapter, we consider what it would mean to see the sites and practices of 'life's work' as potential areas that spark change in economies and subjectivities. |
| Diverse Economies and Dwelling In this paper I explore how notions of dwelling might be adapted to explain how diverse economic practices produce new economic spaces and subjectivities within and beyond the home. |
| Book Review: The Affect Theory Reader The book review explores how a range of authors engage with the political possibilities and limitations of affect theory. |
