Food Leadership

INTERNATIONAL ISSUES IN ADULT EDUCATION

Volume 23

Series Editor: Peter Mayo, University of Malta, Msida, Malta Editorial Advisory Board: Stephen Brookfield, University of St Thomas, Minnesota, USA Waguida El Bakary, American University in Cairo, Egypt Budd L. Hall, University of Victoria, BC, Canada Astrid von Kotze, University of Western Cape, South Africa Alberto Melo, University of the Algarve, Portugal Lidia Puigvert-Mallart, CREA-University of Barcelona, Spain Daniel Schugurensky, Arizona State University, USA Joyce Stalker, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand/Aotearoa Juha Suoranta, University of Tampere, Finland Scope: This international book series attempts to do justice to adult education as an ever expanding field. It is intended to be internationally inclusive and attract writers and readers from different parts of the world. It also attempts to cover many of the areas that feature prominently in this amorphous field. It is a series that seeks to underline the global dimensions of adult education, covering a whole range of perspectives. In this regard, the series seeks to fill in an international void by providing a book series that complements the many journals, professional and academic, that exist in the area. The scope would be broad enough to comprise such issues as ‘Adult Education in specific regional contexts’, ‘Adult Education in the Arab world’, ‘Participatory Action Research and Adult Education’, ‘Adult Education and Participatory Citizenship’, ‘Adult Education and the World Social Forum’, ‘Adult Education and Disability’, ‘Adult Education and the Elderly’, ‘Adult Education in Prisons’, ‘Adult Education, Work and Livelihoods’, ‘Adult Education and Migration’, ‘The Education of Older Adults’, ‘Southern Perspectives on Adult Education’, ‘Adult Education and Progressive Social Movements’, ‘Popular Education in Latin America and Beyond’, ‘Eastern European perspectives on Adult Education’, ‘An Anti-Racist Agenda in Adult Education’, ‘Postcolonial perspectives on Adult Education’, ‘Adult Education and Indigenous Movements’, ‘Adult Education and Small States’. There is also room for single country studies of Adult Education provided that a market for such a study is guaranteed.

Food LeadershipLeadership and Adult Learning for Global FoodSystems Transformation

Edited by

Catherine EtmanskiRoyal Roads University, Canada

SENSE PUBLISHERSROTTERDAM / BOSTON / TAIPEI

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-94-6351-048-6 (paperback)ISBN 978-94-6351-049-3 (hardback)ISBN 978-94-6351-050-9 (e-book)

Published by: Sense Publishers,P.O. Box 21858,3001 AW Rotterdam,The Netherlandshttps://www.sensepublishers.com/

All chapters in this book have undergone peer review.

Cover photograph by Carrie Schlappner

Printed on acid-free paper

All rights reserved © 2017 Sense Publishers

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmittedin any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming,recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with theexception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered andexecuted on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword vii Jennifer Sumner Introduction ix Catherine Etmanski Section 1: Indigenous Food Systems 1. Longhouse to the Greenhouse: The Path to Food Security at Six Nations 3 Adrianne Lickers Xavier 2. Indigenous Knowledge: Informal Learning and Food Security Practices among the Acholi People of Northern Uganda 17 George Ladaah Openjuru 3. Fishing for Change: A Pedagogy of Native Food Sovereignty 37 Tristan Reader and Terrol Dew Johnson Section 2: Leadership in Global Food Systems Transformation 4. Beyond Policy: Race, Class, Leadership and Agenda-Setting in North American Food Policy Councils 55 Lindsey Day Farnsworth 5. Digging in: Food Literacy Communication & Sustainability Advocacy in Community Sharing Gardens 73 Myriam Beaugé 6. Gujarat Agricultural Success: A Case of a Transformational Leader or a Transactional Leader? 93 Sejuti Das Gupta Section 3: Learning in Global Food Systems Transformation 7. Out of the Wild and into the Kitchen: Learning about Sustainability through Wild Food Products 109 Ingrid Kajzer Mitchell, Will Low, Eileen Davenport and Tim Brigham

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8. Maladaptive Learning: Incorporating Institutional Barriers into Nonprofit Community Garden Programming 125 Christopher Langer 9. Conclusion: Emerging Trends and Future Directions for Leadership and Adult Learning in Global Food Systems Transformation 141 Vanessa Goodall and Catherine Etmanski Index 155

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JENNIFER SUMNER

FOREWORD

Food is central to human existence and touches countless aspects of our lives. Reardon (2000) captures this centrality when he points out that food is

sustenance … a symbol, a product, a ritual object, an identity badge, an object of guilt, a political tool, even a kind of money. Food determines how tall we are, how healthy, the extent of our civic peace, the sorts of jobs we hold, the amount of leisure we enjoy, the crowding of our cities and suburbs, what we look for in life, how long we look to live—all of that and much more. (p. 1)

As such, food is an endlessly exciting field of inquiry—a dynamic interdisciplinary area and an entrée into larger issues of global importance. And since we all need to eat, we all have a stake in the food systems we find ourselves in. Add the field of adult education, and food becomes the subject of, and a catalyst for, learning of every kind. We all learn to eat—for better or for worse—and this pedagogical project lasts a lifetime. As young adults, we learn to prepare food for ourselves as we leave the security of the family home. As parents, we learn to cook for a family and share these skills with our children. As seniors, we learn to eat to promote healthy aging. Combine all of this with a focus on leadership studies and the possibilities tantalizingly unfold. Food movements, community projects, Indigenous initiatives and municipal governance suddenly take on new significance and strategic importance. Learning leadership through food can have lasting repercussions, both for individuals and for society as a whole. Finally, mix this all together with global food systems transformation and you have an unbeatable recipe for cutting-edge scholarship. Race, class, gender, governance, advocacy, literacy, food security, food sovereignty and public institutions all come into sharper focus at a time of ongoing food system failure. This is the genius of Catherine Etmanski’s edited book, Food Leadership: Leadership and Adult Learning for Global Food Systems Transformation. In an era of intertwined social, environmental and economic challenges, this timely volume takes the nascent study of food leadership and puts it to the task of learning our way out of deeply unsustainable food systems and learning our way in to more sustainable approaches to food production and consumption. In so many different ways, it is a generative work that addresses real-life issues. Fittingly, the book begins with a look at Indigenous food systems. The time has come for settlers of all types to step back and consider the traditional food systems that their ways of life have displaced. These food systems, although crippled by colonization, represent living alternatives to the corporate food regime. Whether

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we look to central Canada, northern Uganda or the Sonoran Desert that straddles the U.S. and Mexican borders, Indigenous food systems are poised for resurgence and can provide a pedagogical opportunity for all of us to learn to live with each other within the limits of the planet. The middle section of the book looks at food leadership within a variety of contexts. One of these is food policy councils, which can promote inclusive leadership development activities aimed at food system change. Another is community gardens, where leadership can take many forms and support food system transformation. A final context is government and the development of political leadership. Here we learn about the negative aspects of leadership: how it can be used to serve elite interests, all the while professing common interests. The last section of the book attends to adult learning in different contexts, with an emphasis on transformative learning and maladaptive learning. One chapter illustrates how the transformative learning potential of wild foods enables them to become a powerful symbol in the struggle to find a more sustainable path. The other chapter foregrounds the concept of maladaptive learning to illustrate the perils facing those who run nonprofit food programs. In the course of negotiating institutional regulatory environments, coordinators of these cash-strapped social enterprises learn to sacrifice clients’ needs in order to carry out their programming. This pioneering book speaks to all of us at a time of overwhelming confusion and debilitating despair. Food leadership takes many forms and, as this book illustrates, breaks open the narrowed “politics of the possible” (Guthman 2008, p. 1180) and invites us to learn to navigate global food systems transformation.

REFERENCES

Guthman, J. (2008). Neoliberalism and the making of food politics in California. Geoforum, 39, 1171–1183.

Reardon, P. T. (2000, June 11). We are what we ate. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2000-05-11/entertainment/0006170192_1_hunger-food-french-revolution

Jennifer Sumner Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

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CATHERINE ETMANSKI

INTRODUCTION

Leadership and Adult Learning for Global Food Systems Transformation

Food. So much more than a human necessity, food is an entry point into culture and tradition, health and well-being, small and large-scale business, ecology and politics, science and the arts, poverty and land use, civil society, global trade, and more. As such, from seed to table, the policies and practices related to all aspects of the food cycle create rich sites for learning and multiple opportunities for leadership. The purpose of this book is to deepen our understanding and knowledge about leadership and adult learning in food-related movements worldwide. With contributing authors representing four countries and various Indigenous groups, this book examines the diverse ways in which food activists, scholars, students, and practitioners are already demonstrating, debating, and documenting leadership and learning in the context of global food systems transformation. Furthermore, it documents how these actions are supporting the innovation needed to address the increasingly complex and interconnected socio-economic and environmental challenges associated with food and agriculture. As the editor of this collection, I come to food leadership and adult learning as an educator, researcher, and engaged citizen with a special interest in food. For the past six years, I have approached this topic from various angles: As a classroom educator inviting adult learners out to the farm to enhance their learning and leadership development (Etmanski & Barss, 2011); from the perspective of critiquing the racialised and classed elements of the organic farming movement (Etmanski, 2012a), while also arguing that small-scale organic farming is an important site for social movement learning (Etmanski, 2012b). In 2015, I had the opportunity to edit a special edition of the journal, Studies in the Education of Adults, on the topic of food and adult learning. This special topic issue highlighted the diverse works of adult educators in five articles. More recently my colleague and I have documented the ways in which farmers have identified learning in the context of alternative food networks (Etmanski & Kajzer Mitchell, in press 2017), as well as the transformative learning experiences on behalf of participants in a course taught by renowned food leader, Dr. Vandana Shiva (Etmanski, in press 2017). Using these earlier works as a foundation, this book expands the conversation around food and adult learning into the field of leadership studies. As will be discussed below, although food has been emerging as a topic of interest in the field of adult education, it has been relatively underexplored in leadership studies. Therefore, this book makes a timely contribution to this series on International Issues in Adult Education insofar as the emphasis on both learning

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and leadership helps to bridge the gap between theory and practice, thereby opening new opportunities for praxis. This book can support the scholarship and leadership actions of diverse audiences, including: – Adult and lifelong learners and scholars, especially those focused on food

pedagogies (Flowers & Swan, 2015), intergenerational learning, transformative learning, non-formal or informal learning and mentorship, as well as the social movement learning dimensions of global food-related social movements;

– Students, scholars, practitioners, and activists interested in food security, Indigenous food systems, food sovereignty, food justice, sustainable/ urban/ biodynamic agriculture, small-scale organic farming, SPIN (small plot intensive) farming, rooftop gardening, Permaculture, biodiversity, seed saving, heritage grains/breeds, wild food harvesting, and other alternative food systems; and

– Leadership scholars, educators, and practitioners interested in the emerging forms of leadership in global food-related movements.

The following sections provide an overview of why food systems transformation is relevant at this point in human history and then introduce readers to the foundational scholarship at the intersection of food leadership and adult learning. To orient readers to the contents of this edited collection, it concludes with a summary of each chapter.

THE CALL FOR GLOBAL FOOD SYSTEMS TRANSFORMATION

I have elsewhere documented many of the social, economic, and environmental challenges—indeed crises—associated with the dominant agricultural paradigm (Etmanski, 2015, 2012a, 2012b). However, they bear repeating here as context for this book’s call for global food systems transformation. The list of challenges includes damages associated with growing mono-crops, cash crops, agro-fuels, and cereals intended for grain-fed beef; contamination of genetically modified (GM) seeds into non-GM crops; depletion of soils and rainforests, as well as groundwater pollution leading to oceanic dead zones; displacement of Indigenous peoples and other unethical treatment of both people and animals; dumping of subsidised grains in the Global South; and the multiple ways in which industrial agriculture contributes to climate change. As Holt-Giménez (2011) described, “industrial agriculture and the global transport of food produce 20 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases and use up 80 percent of the planet’s water” (p. 315). Moreover, at a food waste awareness event in Bangkok, Thailand, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEAP) reported that the equivalent of one in every five shopping bags of food is thrown in the trash (UNEP, personal communication, December 3, 2015). This is the equivalent of “1.3 billion tonnes of food wasted globally each year. … The total carbon footprint of food produced but not eaten is 3.3 Gt of carbon dioxide equivalent” (UNEAP, Asia Pacific, para. 4). In addition to food waste, the increase

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in fast food outlets has caused some urban inner cities to become known as food deserts, that is, impoverished neighbourhoods which are “a long car ride from the nearest supermarkets and sources of healthy food” (Walter, 2012). It is little wonder that the UN is calling for a paradigm shift in global agriculture (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development/UNCTAD, 2013, p. i; see also, Altieri, 2013; Heinemann, 2013). Many of the above challenges stem from the technological and chemical changes to agriculture during the so-called Green Revolution, which marked a dramatic shift to large-scale industrial farms that were machine and fertiliser dependent. This shift ultimately “proved to be unsustainable as it damaged the environment, caused dramatic loss of biodiversity and associated traditional knowledge, [favoured] wealthier farmers, and left many poor farmers deeper in debt” (Altieri, 2009, p. 102; see also, Shiva, 2010). Kesavan and Malarvannan (2010) suggested that “today, it is widely acknowledged that the ‘yield gains’ associated with the green revolution of the 1960s and 1970s have tapered off largely because of deterioration in the structure, quality and fertility of the soil” (p. 908). In addition, the spread of patent-protected, fertiliser-dependent seeds through neo-liberal globalisation policies has created debt and dependency on foreign aid amongst poor farmers around the world (Altieri, 2009, p. 103). The use of certain pesticides in treating seeds has been linked to the worldwide decline of the honeybee population (Krupke, Hunt, Eitzer, Andino, & Given, 2012), and scientists have been calling for further investigation into links between the general use of pesticides or herbicides and the occurrence of cancer in both children (Hoar Zahm & Ward, 1998) and adults (Dich, Hoar Zahm, Hanberg, & Adami, 1997). The list goes on. In response to these challenges, people in many parts of the world have been taking leadership at both local and global levels to resist and transform the dominant industrial agricultural system. In turn, adult educators and a handful of leadership scholars have been paying attention to the range of ways in which people are learning about, and engaging with, the issues above.

FOOD LEADERSHIP AND ADULT LEARNING

This section provides an overview of literature related to the intersection of food and adult learning, as well as an introduction to food leadership.

Food and Adult Learning

The field of adult education has prepared the ground for an investigation of food and adult learning through its concern for marginalised people and knowledges, its systematic critical analysis of the link between the personal and political, and its attention to the sites of learning where these people, knowledges, and socio-political structures intersect (Sumner, 2013). Canadian scholar, Jennifer Sumner, is a pioneer in this area and the 2006 annual conference of the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education (CASAE) is cited as one of the first explorations

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of food and adult education (Sumner, 2013). Since then, food as a topic of investigation has gradually been gaining momentum in adult education communities in different parts of the world. In 2011, for example, Australian scholars Flowers and Swan contributed to this dialogue through a critique of the 2008 activist documentary film, Food, Inc. They highlighted how this film revealed an ongoing tension in popular education between lay and scientific knowledges, that is, whose knowledge is valued or devalued, and who is constructed as being in need of new or different knowledge. They reminded readers that “knowledge in social movements is messy, polychrome, and dynamic and involves twists and turns around who and what is an expert and what can be learned from science” (Flowers & Swan, 2011, p. 246). Building on this work, Flowers and Swan (2012) went on to edit a special issue of the Australian Journal of Adult Learning on the topic of food pedagogies, which featured eight reviewed articles from authors in the UK, Germany, Canada, and Australia. In 2015, Flowers and Swan subsequently released an edited book that expanded on the topic of food pedagogies. Likewise, Canadian scholar Jennifer Sumner (2016) released an edited volume on the topic of learning, food, and sustainability as sites for resistance and change. The authors in the 2015 special edition of, Studies in the Education of Adults, broached many topics already familiar to adult educators, including: self-directed, informal, and transformative approaches to learning (Everson, 2015; Smith, 2015); learning in social movements and in communities of practice (Quintana & Morales, 2015); and literacy (Sumner, 2015). They interwove their writing with critical analyses from the perspective of race (Kepkiewicz, 2015), class, and gender and identified neoliberal policies, practices, and narratives currently impacting how food relates to adult learning. Together, the authors demonstrated how since food is essential to human existence, its everyday presence (or absence) in the lives of adult learners and their families, coupled with the global politics surrounding control of food production, processing, procurement, transportation, distribution, consumption, and disposal, provides an integrated entry point to explore many interconnected issues of interest to adult educators worldwide.

Food Leadership

Meanwhile, food has been relatively underexplored in the field of leadership studies. To date, the leadership scholars who have addressed this topic have primarily documented positional leadership strategies in food related industries (e.g., Dooley & Luca, 2008; Hennessy, Roosen, & Miranowski, 2001). Likewise, Ng and Kelloff (2013) sought to inspire managers and leaders to wean their staff members off fast food and encourage healthier alternatives. Looking at leadership from a different perspective, Quintana and Morales (2015) documented some of the distributed approaches to leadership and the role of listservs, blogsites, and other social media in the leadership and learning strategies employed by people involved in alternative food systems.

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Food leadership has gained a small foothold with the International Leadership Association (ILA). At the October 2015 annual global conference of the ILA, three presentations addressed the confluence of leadership and food. One was a case study of leaders in food banks. Another demonstrated how educators were endeavouring to introduce the concept of food security into mainstream agricultural science programming. The final presentation explored how community-based and academic leaders collaborated through a partnership between Oklahoma State University and ‘Growing Power,’ an urban farming and education initiative (A. Kaufman and B. Crosby personal communication, October 16, 2015). Although these presenters problematised the notion of dependence on a charismatic leader, they nevertheless noted the catalytic power of Growing Power’s visionary CEO in mobilising his community around issues related to food. Paul Kaak (2012) is one author who has provided a more comprehensive overview of food leadership, noting in particular the challenges associated with the increasing centralisation of control of food systems away from farmers and consumers toward industry-related corporations (p. 763). Given this centralisation of control, he called for courageous leadership among industry leaders while recognising the potential for transformational leadership in the global food system overall. He suggested that the food system is a “system of interconnected systems” (p. 762) and that it is an “open system in which change is possible” (p. 766). He subsequently identified a matrix of various types of leaders who can work toward food systems transformation. The leaders Kaak (2012) identified (pp. 766–770) include both formal and informal educators who promote food-related advocacy and community empowerment. He suggested that informal educators outside of Universities include farmer-educators who teach through experiential methods of inviting people to work alongside them on their farms. Kaak also called for researchers who focus on food and intentionally make their work available to multiple audiences, including the educator-leaders mentioned above. He identified that visionary leaders are those individuals who articulate a compelling vision that a more sustainable food system is possible and innovator-leaders work to apply this vision in practice. Mobiliser and networker-leaders generate interest in food and use collaborative or distributed approaches to leadership to build social movements through decentralised control. Finally, Kaak (2012) called for domain-based leaders, such as doctors, scientists, or religious leaders who take up the mantle of food systems transformation in their specific contexts. An example of this might include Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical letter, which created a buzz by virtue of its focus on human-caused climate change and his call to action to protect the planet. This letter was critical of pollution, waste, and throwaway culture, suggesting that there is “pollution that affects everyone, caused by transport, industrial fumes, substances which contribute to the acidification of soil and water, fertilisers, insecticides, fungicides, herbicides and agrotoxins in general” (p. 16, section 20). Taken together, Kaak (2012) argued that these various leaders and leadership strategies can serve to transform the food system.

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These nascent efforts around food leadership suggest that this is an area where further scholarship is needed. This is particularly so given that leadership itself is an essentially contested concept (Grint, 2005) with little agreement around what leadership means. As such, Kaak’s (2012) matrix of leaders and leadership strategies provides a useful starting point for understanding leadership for global food systems transformation. As Gallagher (2012) argued, this transformation truly is possible if we can appreciate that “food leadership embodies the pledge for life and well-being … [and] is leadership that brings joy” (p. 770). In the chapters that follow, readers will recognise the educator-leaders, farmer-educators, visionary leaders, innovator-leaders, mobilisers, and networker-leaders described above, who are leading the way toward much needed food systems change.

OVERVIEW OF THE CHAPTERS

This book is divided into three sections. The first section explores Indigenous food systems in three countries: Canada, Uganda, and the United States. Chapter 1, written by Adrianne Lickers Xavier, provides a narrative account of her work with the Our Sustenance program in the Six Nations (Haudenosaunee) community of Ontario, Canada. Using a conversational, storytelling approach to decolonise her research process (Tuhiwai-Smith, 1999), Lickers Xavier recounts how agricultural practices based on traditional Haudenosaunee teachings are beginning to support a cultural resurgence in her community, along with an increased focus on food security. Based on his work in a different continent, in Chapter 2 George Openjuru likewise recounts the traditional food practices associated with the Acholi people of Northern Uganda. Many of these practices have been lost due to colonisation, including the religious teachings that ran contrary to traditional beliefs and market-driven approach to food that accompanied the adoption of Western ideologies. Nevertheless, Openjuru suggests that a return to traditional teachings through community-based research and knowledge democracy can support food security among the Acholi people. Returning to North America, in Chapter 3, Tristan Reader and Terrol Dew Johnson, describe a set of pedagogical principles and processes drawn from the New Generation program of the Tohono O’odham Community Action (TOCA) group. They suggest that these principles and processes can potentially be adapted and used in Indigenous communities across North America and beyond. Their chapter describes how the Tohono O’odham people were almost entirely food self-sufficient until the second half of the 20th century, but as in other Indigenous communities, colonisation dramatically altered this reality. Building on that traditional knowledge as a foundation, they suggest that contemporary formal and informal educational programs that are culturally appropriate and can empower both individuals and whole communities can offer a way forward. Together, these first three chapters provide a window into the food leadership and educational efforts in Indigenous communities worldwide.

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The next three chapters are particularly focused on food leadership in different contexts. Chapter 4, by Lindsey Day Farnsworth, explores leadership in North American food policy councils (FPCs), both in terms of the leadership FPCs provide in setting the food agenda for their communities, but also the people who lead those FPCs. Building on critical food studies literature and drawing from interview data, Day Farnsworth found that interviewees mostly spoke favourably of their FPCs. However, she did encounter concerns about their diversity and inclusivity, which raised questions about the composition, culture, and agenda-setting practices of FPCs. These questions present a leadership dilemma for FPCs: can they advance their social, ecological, and economic goals while actualising the very diversity they champion? Chapter 5, by Myriam Beaugé, draws from an ethnographic case study of the Edible Garden Project in Vancouver, Canada. Beaugé explores leadership in terms of advocacy for food literacy and sustainability. Through her research, she sought to better understand how volunteers in Edible Garden Project sharing gardens used the multisensory experience of group gardening to enhance the processes of teaching and acquiring food literacy skills. She also documents how these volunteers established and articulated the connection between their own actions to become networked leaders in an emerging knowledge-based micro-economy and the nurturing of a healthy, sustainable community. The final chapter in this section, Chapter 6, by Sejuti Das Gupta, explores the contradictory realities of Gujarat’s 10 percent growth rate in agriculture during a time where food insecurity in that very state is amongst the top three worst affected states in India. Since the transformation of Gujarat’s economy is attributed to Narendra Modi (who has since become Prime Minister of India), his leadership has likewise been described as transformational. However, since only large-scale capitalist farmers can take advantage of the infrastructure gains, subsidies, and other government policies, Das Gupta argues that this is a clear departure from any association with social justice ideals that could have a positive effect on more than half the population, as might be expected of a transformational leader. Section three includes two chapters that specifically broach the topic of adult learning in diverse food contexts. Drawing on empirical research conducted in Victoria, Canada, in Chapter 7, Ingrid Kajzer Mitchell, Will Low, Eileen Davenport, and Tim Brigham illustrate the potential of the wild food networks to act as catalysts for transformative learning. They argue that learning about and consuming wild food is a particularly important consciousness-raising activity that invites us to revisit our Western human-nature separation. Given that the study of wild foods presents a new contribution to the intersection of adult learning and food—and since their study was predominantly focused on the individual perspective and individual learning and transformations—these authors suggest that future scholarly work would benefit from a more explicit focus on theories of collective learning. In Chapter 8, Christopher Langer describes a process of what he calls maladaptive learning, where nonprofit garden programme coordinators inevitably learn to supplant clients’ particular food needs with institutional regulations. Such

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regulations include boss texts, such as official city plans, and discourse related to ‘Creative City Development.’ It also includes equating poverty with hunger and then subsuming hunger within the work of nonprofit programmes. In conclusion, Langer contemplates how adult educators can encourage organisations and their workers to critically reflect on how their own practices and priorities inadvertently reproduce structural inequality. As a whole, the chapters in this book present multiple perspectives on leadership and learning in global food systems. The final chapter, by Vanessa Goodall and Catherine Etmanski, presents some of the emerging trends and future directions in this ever-growing field. Please contact us should you wish to continue the conversation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people have helped with the development of this book. In particular, I would like to thank Lila Linell and Roberto Melfi for their assistance in coordinating and formatting this manuscript. Carrie Schlappner shared her beautiful photography for the cover. Special thanks to Helen Kelsey, Rachel Fisher, Carly Escott for teaching me about growing food and to Vandana Shiva and Jennifer Sumner for their inspiration. Neil Galliford has provided unwavering support throughout, as has the Royal Roads University (RRU) Research Office. Funding provided by RRU grants RPD 12-11, RPD12-42, RPD15-15, IGR15-10, and IGR16-09 helped to deepen my knowledge about and passion for this topic. Darlene Clover, Budd Hall, Peter Mayo, and Jim Crowther offered initial encouragement for the book idea and Peter de Liefde at Sense Publishers made it possible. I would like to express my deep appreciation to all.

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Dooley, L. B., & Luca, E. (2008, February 18–22). The role of inter-organizational leadership in agri-food value chains. Paper prepared for the 110th EAAE Seminar ‘System Dynamics and Innovation in Food Networks’ Innsbruck-Igls, Austria. Retrieved from: Retrieved from: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.royalroads.ca/docview/1467438421?pq-origsite=summon

Etmanski, C. (2012a). A critical race and class analysis of learning in the organic farming movement. Australian Journal of Adult Learning, 52(3), 484–506.

Etmanski, C. (2012b). Inch by inch, row by row: Social movement learning on Three Oaks organic farm. In B. L. Hall, D. E. Clover, J. Crowther, & E. Scandrett (Eds.), Learning and education for a better world: The role of social movements (pp. 155–167). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense.

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Etmanski, C. (2015). Guest editorial: Introduction to adult learning and food. Studies in the Education of Adults, 47(2), 120–127.

Etmanski, C. (2017). Seeds and stories of transformation from the individual to the collective. Journal of Transformative Education (in press).

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Etmanski, C., & Kajzer Mitchell, I. (2017). Adult learning in alternative food networks. In A. M. Dentith & W. Griswold (Eds.), Ecojustice adult education: Theory and practice. New Directions in Adult and Continuing Education (in press).

Everson, C. (2015). Growing opportunities: CSA members, CSA farmers, and informal learning in the USA. Studies in the Education of Adults, 47(2), 176–184.

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Gallagher, D. R. (2012). A Metaphorical Paradigm for Food Leadership. In D. R. Gallagher (Ed.), Environmental leadership: A reference handbook (p. 770). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

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Hennessy, D. A., Roosen, J., & Miranowski, J. A. (2001). Leadership and the provision of safe food. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 83(4), 862–874.

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Holt-Giménez, E. (2011). Food security, food justice, or food sovereignty?: Crises, food movements, and regime change. In A. H. Alkon & J. Agyeman (Eds.), Cultivating food justice: Race, class, and sustainability (pp. 310–330). Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Sumner, J. (2013). Adult education and food: Eating as praxis. In T. Nesbit, S. M. Brigham, N. Taber, & T. Gibb (Eds.), Building on critical traditions: Adult education and learning in Canada (pp. 194–203). Toronto, Canada: Thompson Educational Publishing.

Sumner, J. (2015). Reading the world: Food literacy and the potential for food system transformation. Studies in the Education of Adults, 47(2), 127–141.

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Catherine Etmanski School of Leadership Studies Royal Roads University

SECTION 1

INDIGENOUS FOOD SYSTEMS

C. Etmanski (Ed.), Food Leadership, 3–16. © 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

ADRIANNE LICKERS XAVIER

1. LONGHOUSE TO THE GREENHOUSE

The Path to Food Security at Six Nations

Six Nations is another name for the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; Haudenosaunee means ‘people of the Longhouse’ (Ramsden, 2006). The Haudenosaunee people are a major Indigenous group in North America, who are commonly known as the Iroquois. The six Haudenosaunee nations included in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy are the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora nations. Although Six Nations territory spans what is now called Canada and the United States, this chapter focuses specifically on the Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario, Canada, one of the largest reserves in Canada. The Our Sustenance program at Six Nations brings the past and the present into the future. Through programs such as this, the issues of food security and food sovereignty are becoming front and centre. The research I completed with the Our Sustenance program as part of my Master’s degree (Lickers, 2015) showed positive change and increasing success. I examined Six Nations’ people’s beliefs about food traditions and sustainability and in what ways their current practices are being affected or enhanced by the programming. This chapter tells the story of my journey as a researcher and a member of the Six Nations community. It begins with a brief overview of the Our Sustenance program and then is organized in three general sections. The first section introduces the concept of food security, describing what food security means in Six Nations in the context of traditional Haudenosaunee knowledge. The next section reveals the path to food security by outlining specific Haudenosaunee food security teachings grounded in the value of interdependence. The third section demonstrates that hope for the future of food security can be found by looking to the traditional teachings and applying them in a contemporary context. The chapter concludes with reflections on the research process, a process that has enabled Our Sustenance to take its place in the community by facilitating not only food security, but also cultural resurgence.

OVERVIEW OF THE ‘OUR SUSTENANCE’ PROGRAM

To the community at Six Nations, the meaning of success is a program that asks: “What is our sustenance?” Our Sustenance is a concept and a name used to encompass people’s relationship to food. Our Sustenance staff members are reviving traditional cultural practices related to food and leading their program and their community toward a more holistic picture of food. Their culture includes the traditional teachings of the Longhouse. Our Sustenance leaders are integrating

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these teachings in a modern way, right inside the greenhouse. As such, the teachings are moving from the Longhouse to the greenhouse. I work as the Coordinator of the Our Sustenance program. This program encompasses a farmers’ market, a community garden, and the Good Food Box Program. It also includes a greenhouse where food is grown, seeds are saved, and food growing and food preparation workshops are offered. The goal of Our Sustenance is to teach or perhaps remind people what we once knew in our culture: that what we put in our bodies can help keep us healthy. Each facet of this program relates to feeding the community. Our Sustenance is not aimed at any specific income level or education level. Our goal is to provide access and education surrounding our ability to provide for ourselves. We offer access to fresh produce at a reasonable cost and education on how to grow those same foods at home. Through every part of the program we show how growing our own food helps us holistically. As a Coordinator with Our Sustenance, one of the ongoing questions I have is, “In what ways can community-based education programs contribute to increasing food security in this community?” When I began looking at this as a research idea, I understood that there was a need for more and better food options. I saw the desire in the community for access to reasonably priced, locally available, and also locally produced food. What I initially saw as a food choice issue became one of food availability and, eventually, a food security concern. What I wondered was: “What is being done, by the community or by individuals to make changes to food on the reserve?” That question, along with countless hours of conversations with others in my community, led me to this research. What began as a desire to know more about how we could make change at Six Nations became a goal to see and help implement those changes.

WHAT FOOD SECURITY MEANS IN SIX NATIONS

Food security and access to healthy food options are not synonymous. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations stated:

Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2003, Section 2.2)

Sufficient safe and nutritious food may be a worldwide definition, but does not fully take into account First Nations people’s (and, more generally, Indigenous people’s) circumstances as people whose identity is intimately linked to the land and the food it provides. The key to this concept is that food can only be said to be secure if it is both accessible and culturally relevant. Moreover, the concept of food security as it relates to Indigenous communities has shown, time and again, that there is a lack of sustainable options, a lack of food, and a lack of information that shows community members how to make change.

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Food security in the Six Nations of the Grand River, my own community, is therefore both a cultural and social issue. Therefore, the need for food security in our community is a socio-cultural as well as a physiological need. As will be discussed below, I have observed that culture is ingrained in food and how it is perceived. Given the centrality of traditional agricultural and hunting practices to our cultural identity as Six Nations people, food availability is only one part of the equation. In fact, the needs of a relatively small community seem rather daunting when one considers the reality that comes with feeding a community, and, more importantly, how to feed people well with healthy, affordable food. When I applied this more holistic definition of food security to Six Nations, I saw that we were not meeting those food needs. In response, the Our Sustenance program and other programs like it take our cues from what is around us. That includes food, culture and—possibly—the integration of the two. In addition to cultural and social issues, food security in the Six Nations community can also be related to education. Due to a history that is as rich and complex as that of the Haudenosaunee, the ability to unify and make changes to food security at Six Nations will require a larger level of organization. Food security as it relates to food initiatives shows that combining exercise and cultural activities of some sort actually work to improve not just health, but brain function and social action (Hume, 2010, p. 18). That means that programs where people (and children in particular) incorporate movement and physical activity in a cultural experience result in program participants being more apt to be clear minded and learn better. This linking of exercise to culture relates to the idea of both the research contained here, but also to food initiatives. Being outside on the land, outside, is good for physical, mental, spiritual, and cultural bodies. The inclusion of programs that stimulate physical activities open the door for gardening and food-based programs, which are at the heart of the Our Sustenance program and how it combines knowledge, physical activity and a harvest of healthy foods that bring people together. The link between exercise and culture is related to good health, yet obesity relating to fast food is rife in First Nations communities in Canada; surely there must be a way to make change. The fact that this study focuses specifically on the Six Nations community is a key to its importance for the hopeful outcome of one day increasing food security—and a healthier community—through the action of growing food. To better understand what food security means in Six Nations, the following section describes how the concept of food security relates to Haudenosaunee traditional knowledge. Following that is a discussion of what choice (as an aspect of food security) means in Six Nations where there are limited food options on reserve. Finally, there is a brief overview of why Haudenosaunee people are concerned about genetically modified foods, as well as the implications related to advocacy, education, and policy.

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Food Security and Haudenosaunee Traditional Knowledge

When speaking of traditional knowledge there is a tacit understanding that traditional knowledge is based on cultural beliefs and practices (Simeone, 2004). A tradition, however, is something more akin to a family tradition such as a recipe passed on for generations. My research examined ways in which the traditional knowledge of Six Nations food practices was integrated into formal band policies that aim to increase the level of food security and health in the community. I also explored whether community members were making the connection themselves between growing healthy food and their Haudenosaunee identity. What I found is that food security can and is being addressed at Six Nations on a cultural, social, and community level, but that it will take time for this momentum to grow sufficiently to reach the entire community. There is a lot of mystery and a sense of duty attached to certain aspects of our traditional knowledge. Within the community, traditional knowledge is something perceived to be associated only with the Longhouse and the teachings coming from that tradition. The Haudenosaunee are known for certain staple foods and very specific gardening techniques, which Doxtater (2001) maintains are the foundation for culture and good health for the people. Historically, we once hunted and cultivated our food on a large scale. The traditional Longhouse calendar of the Six Nations actually follows the seasons of nature. The word Longhouse is used in this context to refer to any of the actual locations of traditional knowledge and ceremony. It does not refer to a specific nation within the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, but more a generally held belief system. Many of the ceremonies that occur throughout the Longhouse calendar are based on what plants and foods are growing at that time of year (Ceremonies, 2012). Those ceremonies still happen today, yet the cultivation of the food that is associated with the ceremonies is not often done. What I needed to find out was where the disconnect or difficulty was with this knowledge, which was once so central to our health and lives. Food insecurity is an issue that is global, local, and spreading. Food in our community is a cultural reality, a social activity, a spiritual connection, and a physical need. Food security is a concept that shaped this research because the community initiatives, and their creation, were based not just on a desire for health and change, but for a community reality where food is available.

Food Options and Choice in Six Nations

Today, the traditional cultural knowledge of growing food and hunting is no longer at the forefront of providing food for the community. From time to time, economic impact leakage studies are conducted to investigate how much money leaks out of a local community through spending on goods and services. A 2010 leakage study found that 75.5 per cent of overall food purchases were made outside of the Six Nations community, including 98.5 per cent of all groceries purchases (Aboriginal Investment Services, 2010, p. 11). The lack of access to food options reported in this study was a factor in the creation of the Our Sustenance program.

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Although this study indicated that food is being procured from off the reserve, this shift in food procurement habits cannot be attributed to a single cause or effect. Generations of people experiencing colonialism, residential schools, and the reservation system have served to change the living and eating habits of our whole community. Members of the community have identified that they hope to find the knowledge and skills needed to locally grow our own food for ourselves and our families. Even though it may be easier to go to the local store and buy something in a can, it is not always affordable or desirable because it is not our way of feeding ourselves. As Socha, Zahaf, Chambers, Abraham, and Fiddler (2012) have articulated,

Traditional food is at the core of indigenous cultures and economies. Practices regarding harvesting, preserving and preparing food reinforce indigenous culture and identity. (p. 6)

However, it must be acknowledged that our current food practices exist in both traditional and modern contexts. As Siri Dammana (2008) described, “Indigenous economies are often dual in nature, depending partly on the market and partly on subsistence production and natural resources” (p. 138). All of my conversations with and questions to community members were aimed toward gaining a sense of what could enhance participation in culturally-grounded community food and gardening initiatives. As well, by observing and taking part in the local food production activities, I gained further understanding of the current choices available. Throughout the research, I held out hope that if, together, we can find a link between choice and action, perhaps we can feed healthy food to more people in our community. Perhaps members of my community can learn to feed themselves and their families with the knowledge being shared at Our Sustenance. The concept of agriculture as a form of sustainable subsistence is part of what once made our culture and people so influential in history (Johansen, 2000). For the Haudenosaunee, the growing of food is therefore a logical and traditionally healthy approach to having food security. Yet, often this option is unavailable either due to physical constraints (such as a lack of viable land) or due to a lack of knowledge. Our community’s economy has become so similar to the rest of the country it is difficult to teach something else. This lack of cultural food knowledge—or perhaps limited application of that knowledge where it does exist—contributes to social dysfunction and cultural knowledge gaps for people of all ages. It used to be out of necessity that people gardened. They subsisted by growing their own food. What changed were the attitudes related to growing food. Older generations often describe gardening as an action that goes along with being poor. Now poverty is not being adequately addressed and it results in lack of food choice or coincides with the consumption of junk food, rather than consuming foods grown in one’s own garden. One of my interview participants had been a gardener for most of her life (82 years). She was the oldest of twelve children and her family worked in food production, picking food for canneries and processing. However, their family did not get to keep much of what they picked, so she started gardening at an early age.

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She grew enough food to feed her siblings first, and eventually her own family. What was practical at the time turned out to be her lifelong passion for gardening. She still has a small kitchen garden, which the Our Sustenance program helped her to work up and prepare, but has now officially retired from gardening. Prior to that she was a seed saver for the Six Nations community—a living resource and a born teacher. She has spent decades growing, promoting, teaching and living a life surrounded by fresh grown healthy foods. She is the epitome of Our Sustenance. She spent the better part of eighty years growing food, and hoping her family would step in and take part, or perhaps one day take up where she had left off. Her siblings, and even her own children, had no desire to take part in her garden. Yet every year, they faithfully showed up to reap the harvest—after it was canned and preserved of course and preferably at low or no cost to them. She does not comment on these things as if they are bad, or unfavourable to her family. They are a statement about the community as a whole. She could see that people were rarely willing to learn how, or put in the work to sustain themselves and their families as she did. This included her own family. What I discovered in my research is that this fact is slowly changing. Our people are now opening up to participating in their own food growing and food making, including this woman’s own grandchildren. Gardening, which was once seen as subsistence living, due to being poor, is now being seen as sustainable, sovereign action (Doxtater, 2001).

The role of Policy and Concern about Genetically Modified Foods

Related to the idea of choice, the Six Nations community also faces concerns over genetically modified foods affecting our traditional crops (Garlow, 2013). The argument around genetically modified foods is personal and also commercial. Seeds that are modified, for example, to bear sterile fruit are in direct opposition to the traditional concept of seed saving. Seed saving is not only something that is cost effective for members of our community who are cost conscious, but also ensures you know what you are growing and where it is from since you grew it yourself. If some foods are being genetically modified, community members are choosing either not to purchase or not to grow them. Traditionally grown foods, such as the white corn grown by the Haudenosaunee, become inedible if planted near modified strains of corn (Robin, 2010). This intrusion of industrial agricultural methods affects every facet of the community when food is such an integral part, not only of physical health, but also of cultural, spiritual, and emotional health (Doxtater, 2001). Conversely, if you receive seeds from an Elder, you are continuing our culture by planting them. Concern over genetic modification highlights the need for change on a larger scale. It brings up the question, “Who can and should support and push for local programs to make change and support and encourage these initiatives?” The Our Sustenance program has the potential to take on a similar advocacy, education, and policy influencing function as other programs that are operating in larger urban centres within the Canadian province of Ontario. For example, programs such as The Stop (2017) and the Daily Bread Food Bank (2017) in Toronto both work to

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incorporate education, food, and knowledge about food and social issues. Likewise, FoodShare Toronto (n.d.) is a program that promotes policy regarding food and accessibility, based on healthy foods and local sustainable options. These programs suggest new opportunities for Our Sustenance.

THE PATH TO FOOD SECURITY AT SIX NATIONS

The following sections describe traditional agricultural practices of the Haudenosaunee people, which demonstrate the teaching and value of interdependence. It begins with an overview of the plants known as the Three Sisters, then describes the mound approach to agriculture. It is then shown how these practices express the interdependency inherent to traditional Haudenosaunee knowledge.

The Three Sisters

Our Creator thought carefully about the people and knew they would need food so he gave the people ‘Our Sustenance,’ the Three Sisters, corn beans and squash. He gave the seeds and said, ‘the families’ will plant a garden and work the land. (Cornelius, 1999, p. 76)

People of this territory are members of a culture that has a history of growing specific foods together—corn, beans, and squash, known as the Three Sisters—as a staple of their diet (Cornelius, 1998). There are cultural as well as agricultural reasons for why these foods were grown together. Through my research, I found that the connection between these plants and the people was still present. As demonstrated in the quote above, there is a traditional belief in our culture that the Creator gave us our sustenance to feed the people by providing us with the Three Sisters (Cornelius, 1999). These three foods are integral to our best health and were at one time the staple of the Six Nations diet. The land and proximity to the Grand River in southern Ontario mean that we have good conditions for the community and plants to grow. At a physiological level, it is believed these foods are also easiest for our bodies to digest. It has only been with the introduction of processed food and refined sugar that diabetes and obesity have become such challenging issues for our community (Public Health Agency of Canada, 2011). We have strayed far from our traditional form of agriculture. Another benefit of the Three Sisters is the food security they still can provide. All three foods are easily stored for long periods of time. Corn and beans can be dried for use year-round. Squash and pumpkins can be stored in a cool dark place and will be safely edible for an entire winter season. Modern food practices and modern science support the wisdom of this way of producing food. We can apply this traditional knowledge to modern food preservation methods. Traditional Iroquois white corn is something that is still present in the community, but is no longer a staple of the diet. Corn, beans, and squash are still commonly eaten, particularly when they are seasonally available. However, they are not necessarily staples in the way they were in the past. Iroquois white corn

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needs to undergo a process of lying, or being boiled with hardwood ashes to open the husk of corn kernels and allow them to be edible and soft. The work involved in preparing and making the corn usable for cooking is not something many people have the knowledge to do, nor the time or desire to learn. That does not mean that corn is absent in the diet; however, genetically modified, and new varieties of sweet corn are not at all the same (Garlow, 2013). The fact that sweet corn has a high sugar content also means it is a health concern for so many Six Nations residents where diabetes is such an issue (Public Health Agency of Canada, 2011). In addition, genetic modification of corn signifies an approach to agriculture that runs contrary to the cultural meanings of corn in our community, and Haudenosaunee values. When looking at ways in which Six Nations could work toward food security initiatives, I learned that the cultivation of corn is inextricably linked to traditional modes of living and being. Corn—one of the Three Sisters and the teachings they signify—is at the foundation of our cultural belief system as well as the cornerstone to our physical health and wellness. Growing corn in a traditional way is not just about growing food to meet nutritional needs, but sets into motion the Haudenosaunee value and teaching of interdependence. When our people grow corn in this manner, it shows us how everything is interconnected and dependent on the wellbeing of others, all the way from the food we grow and eat to the way we live and work together. The specifically Haudenosaunee approach to growing corn takes the form of mound agriculture, which will be discussed below.

Mound Agriculture We, the Haudenosaunee, once had our own kind of gardening, referred to now as mound agriculture, a way of growing that simultaneously takes advantage of the complementary growth cycles of each plant (Doxtater, 2001). This is the first level of the Three Sister’s teaching of interdependency, in the sense that planting the mound is a singular step that starts with one. A single person or small group can plan the garden to produce a very high yield. This level of effectiveness mirrors the traditional Haudenosaunee Longhouse. A growing mound gives three plants (corn, beans, and squash) the best possible conditions for each to grow in a relatively small amount of land. There is less weeding, and the soil maintains its moisture better, allowing for less watering. This is a significant consideration for sustainability when water is at a premium and needs to be transported to the garden. In these ways, the mound format, or what Doxtater (2001) calls “Indigenagronomy,” teaches cultural values as well as demonstrating sound, locally-derived methods for growing food in a way that protects the plants, provides for a full cycle of planting/growing/harvesting/preparation and meets the nutritional needs of the people.

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The Haudenosaunee Teaching of Interdependence

The idea is that food is interdependent in relation to actual land, space, time, food, and culture and that these interdependencies are what allow us to live well, to live sustainably, in this place. These values of interdependency and sustainability are communicated through our stories. As well as being an actual food source, the Three Sisters, and especially corn, are integral to oral histories and myths, including the Creation Story (Cornelius, 1999). The growth of the Three Sisters out of the body of Sky Woman’s daughter in the traditional creation story shows the first transformation that brought corn, beans, and squash into the lives of the Haudenosaunee. The growth of one body into three separate plants in turn becomes an interdependent single unit of nutrition or sustenance (Doxtater, 2001). That same cultural note becomes not just a social guide but also a guide to good health. By connecting these two levels of interdependency, the nutritional and the social, growing, harvesting, and preserving food through the Our Sustenance program can become a catalyst to move away from unsustainable food issues and, in doing so, move our community toward cultural revitalization in a way that does not require us to reject modernity. The concept of having a garden and growing food represent the central Haudenosaunee teaching of interdependence on all levels, and, in the specific context of this research, the interdependence of food, culture, and community. There is a Longhouse belief in our culture’s history that states that if a member of the tribe plants a garden then they should plant enough for themselves and their neighbours, in case their neighbours’ crops fail (Ontario Federation of Indian Friendship Centres, 2007). In my community, the issue around food security is not quite the same as planning ahead in case of a crop failure, but perhaps more the case that helping a neighbour means planting a large garden and sharing with your family and friends. Sustainability through interdependency is mirrored in the Longhouse, where a single dwelling is a building with separate spaces for each family, but with a central area to cook and grow and live. Similar to the mounds for growing food, a Longhouse allows a community to live in an interdependent community setting, in a way that makes optimal use of space and energy. The Three Sisters can indicate secondary levels of interdependence in the way that these foods also coincide with or help to constitute aspects of the Longhouse calendar. Traditional ceremonies are centred around the growth cycle of corn, and the care, harvest, and eating of the first corn (green corn) are something celebrated by every member of the community (Cornelius, 1999, p. 91). Not only are whole families mindful of the progress of the crops, but they are celebrating and working together at each stage of the food production. The word for the Three Sisters (Tey’o’nhekwen) itself can also be interpreted as a form of interdependence. It is understood to mean “our sustenance” or “what sustains us” (Doxtater, 2001, p. 219), where the interdependencies of individual foods are representative of the Haudenosaunee value of working together in

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cooperation. Interdependency is connected to what Connelly has argued, which is that the Longhouse people’s “conceptual space is based on a transformation between sustainable and unsustainable aspect” (Doxtater, 2001, p. 218).

BRINGING THE PAST AND THE PRESENT INTO THE FUTURE

To gain understanding throughout this process, I needed the right tools and resources. Gathering tools for this research became much like gathering together the items needed for a garden. With trowel in hand, and soil under my feet, I walked the path of the community I was trying so hard to understand. In seeking the goals for the community in relation to the ideals of food security, I saw both the joys and pitfalls of a community-based program being the guiding force to alter food security. I spent many days and weeks in conversation with funders, community members, media outlets, non-community members, and those who are generally interested in food security and the social change that comes with it. I found that doing Indigenous research, as an embedded community member, was both beneficial and also difficult. My greatest tool for gathering data, and in turn reflexively analysing it, became myself. Smile and ask questions; listen and be still when someone is sharing. Those are the greatest tools. When I took the time to stop and consider what I was seeing every day at work, and hearing with every social media post and shared idea, I realized I was seeing the data I was seeking. What I found through conversations and interviews while conducting this research is that people are interested in growing food for their own reasons. Some people want to attain a traditional sense of cultural living, others want to know what goes into their body, and where it came from rather than something that is likely genetically modified, sprayed with pesticides, and otherwise mistreated. Some people want to know more about gardening because it makes them feel good and even happy. I have also been struck by the fact that the concept of food security or availability in this community was not something people liked to talk about directly. To garden is to grow food, and there is no associated shame with it; however, there was a time when only poor kids or families had to eat only fresh fruits and vegetables because the cost of a pack of seeds was worth every penny, literally. Now, children at schools at Six Nations are told not to bring processed food for snacks in their lunch boxes, so parents, whether they can afford it or not, are being pushed in the direction of whole fresh foods or home cooked food. The close partnership between education based health programs and schools have created a heightened awareness of the dangers of processed foods and high sugar content snacks, and the schools are adjusting their practices as well. As much as this is a good thing for the health of these children, for some children it also eliminates and limits their food options. When a family survives on a single income and the food they get comes from a food bank, or donation program, what they receive is inevitably not going to be ideal. However, if they cannot take those foods to school, the kids are simply not eating during the day.

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If food security is an issue, how can we find a compromise to ensure children are eating? One of the ways is through some of the programs that Our Sustenance offers. The bridge between food access and the community can be summed up in Our Sustenance—literally. When our culture was given the gifts of knowledge and food, we knew we could provide for ourselves. The Our Sustenance program is trying to connect to those original teachings to be beneficial on a large scale. We receive support, socially, monetarily, and conceptually from Chief and Council. There is still more that could be done, however. Some of the primary schools on the reserve have a greenhouse built into them. All schools have the land and space available for a garden. If it could be utilized to grow some basic simple ingredients such as lettuce, cucumbers, spinach, and kale, a school could easily create a program that uses those foods and helps feed those who do not have enough. Since whole foods are what school policies are promoting, this offers an ideal approach. If we can teach children at an early age that the ideal is also possible, then we can instil culture, health and wellness in an entire generation. As well, the creation of community awareness of our programs is still lagging, but, as much as that is true, the program has grown more and more this past year and the momentum is there for greater numbers of community members to find us and start to participate. Sharing knowledge is often considered something that happens in prescribed locations, at certain times. Children gain knowledge and learn at school. Classrooms, training facilities, and lecture halls all have an affiliation with knowledge. Six Nations, and many other cultures believe that knowledge is passed on within its beliefs and its very culture. Through this research, I have seen that knowledge can and is shared, on every level, in every place in this community. What is needed for Six Nations is the ability and willingness of the community members to heed the food and cultural knowledge that is there for the taking. Our Sustenance is creating waves in our community and is gaining momentum. I am hopeful it is enough to create the change that is needed to reduce the food insecurity. The way in which food is grown or the way we teach how to grow it does not necessarily make the knowledge traditional, but in planting, growing, harvesting, and eating our own food together, we are living the teaching of interdependency with one another and the land. Programs in the community, including ours are teaching and sharing information that we feel is important to assist people to make healthy choices. The Our Sustenance program is a movement for food security on every level. In the intervening seasons since my research was formally conducted, many changes have come about—some of them small, some seemingly insignificant have been quite literally, life changing. The fourth summer of the program, seven families grew a garden as a result of the children’s programs that Our Sustenance ran. Those children brought their parents back, determined to grow a garden and even if they had to show their parents how, they were ready for it. A bittersweet note is the passing of time. The 82-year-old seed keeper I spoke with during my research has been referring people to the Our Sustenance greenhouse grower, and has started giving her what is left of her prodigious seed collection. On one hand, it means she is preparing to not be the perpetual teacher

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and seed keeper. On the other hand, it means she finally sees hope in a generation and someone who just might be willing and able to step into her role. The Our Sustenance greenhouse grower’s role has blossomed from being simply the grower—who would hopefully produce some seedlings and help us promote food production in our homes—into the focal resource for and a driving force of the program. The first thing that happened was that she inherited the Our Sustenance program and enhanced it beyond expectations. When she began, there was a group of students from the local Cayuga and Mohawk Immersion School who were planning to attend the greenhouse as part of their classroom time. What started out as a couple of classrooms coming once a week turned into classrooms of each and every grade from Grade One through Grade Eight attending for at least an hour per week, so that there were often two classrooms per day learning about gardening in the greenhouse. They learned the value of planting and growing their own food. They learned what a seed needs to survive, but also what it needs to flourish. My mother, the greenhouse grower, used a mix of physical activity, hands-on training, and storytelling to pique the interest of the children, and really get things growing. When we sat down to discuss this research, the topic turned quickly from gardening, to culture, food, and social beliefs. There is a divide in this community between what is seen as affiliation to traditional Longhouse and/or more Western Church beliefs, a divide that is still present today. Although the Our Sustenance program is administered by an elected government charged with the task of changing obesity and other declining health trends, this program is taking a distinctly cultural approach to gardening. At the Six Nations Farmer’s Market, some of the trends coming to our community are ones around organic or chemical free food, local food, and the associated health benefits of growing your own foods. We aim to further those trends at the greenhouse. The Our Sustenance greenhouse practices organic growing methods. That means we use only natural food and pest control in a chemical free space. The greenhouse grows food, it grows plants to harvest seeds so we can be sustainable, and it grows traditional medicine plants. While the goal of the program was feeding the community, what has grown in the greenhouse is an atmosphere that feeds the body, mind, spirit, and culture, if participants are open to this and seeking it. This has meant growing traditional medicine plants as well as being a safe, open, and welcoming space for learning and growing.

CONCLUSION

The action-oriented, Indigenous, community-based research approach and information gathered through conversations worked together in this research to create a picture of food security initiatives and how the Haudenosaunee way of knowing about food can be shared. In my role within the Our Sustenance program, I not only got to see but also work to guide the program to answer the growing need in the Six Nations community to increase and expand food security. To say that I found myself an unbiased observer in my own community would be

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impossible. That does not mean I do not see that there is room for improvement and growth in my community. In fact, not only is there room for growth, but a desperate need for it. Themes that emerged from this study, including health, resurgence in cultural knowledge, and community have helped guide Our Sustenance. There have been changes in community programs recently that have been done with the idea that culture and health need to be integrated. The goal of finding a link between current community activities and cultural teachings seemed more like an ideal than a reality. What was a bit of a shock to me was that these themes and changes came to fruition during the course of this research. The concept of cultural knowledge as something that can be shared and learned in social spaces is opening doors to an inclusive, sustainable community. When I conducted my interviews and community conversations I was able to see community members making conscious food choices, generating cultural changes, and sharing their experience. Today, to garden is not just a growing trend, but it is also starting to be seen as a status or wealth symbol as well as a reclamation of culture. It is a hopeful sign for more than just this territory when First Nations communities are recreating community gardens and providing culturally relevant knowledge about plant and food production. In Six Nations, we are beginning to walk the path from the Longhouse to the greenhouse.

REFERENCES

Aboriginal Investment Services. (2010). O gwa wihsda, Kiinwe Zhoonyaa (our money): Six Nations and new credit leakage study. Retrieved from http://www.newcreditfirstnation.com/uploads/ 1/8/1/4/18145011/doc051010.pdf

Ceremonies, C. (2012, July 5). Cycle of ceremonies. Retrieved from https://sites.google.com/site/ haudenosauneenw/cycle-of-ceremonies

Cornelius, C. (1999). Iroquois corn in a culture-based curriculum. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Daily Bread Food Bank. (2017). Retrieved from http://www.dailybread.ca/ Doxtater, M. (2001). Indigenology: A decolonizing learning method for emancipating Iroquois and

world indigenous knowledge. Dissertation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. Food and Agriculture Organization. (2003). Trade reforms and food security (Chapter 2: Food security:

concepts and measurement). Rome, Italy: Commodity Policy and Projections Service Commodities and Trade Division. Retrieved from http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/y4671e/y4671e06.htm#fn31

FoodShare. (n.d.). Programs: Fresh produce. Retrieved from http://foodshare.net/programs/ Garlow, N. (2013). Are genetically modified organisms infecting six nations crops? Two Row Times,

October 30. Retrieved from https://tworowtimes.com/news/local/are-genetically-modified-organisms-infecting-six-nations-crops/

Hume, G. (2010). The local food revolution. St. Thomas, Canada: Municipal World. Johansen, B. E. (2000). Encyclopedia of the Haudenosaunee. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Lickers, A. (2015). Longhouse and greenhouse: Searching for food security in a community-based

research project. Master’s Thesis. Victoria, Canada: Royal Roads University. Retrieved from https://dspace.royalroads.ca/handle/10170/798

Ontario Federation of Indian Friendship Centres. (2007). Onkwawen Tkaienthohseron “Our garden.” Toronto, ON, Canada: OFIFC.

Public Health Agency of Canada. (2011, December 15). Chapter 6 – Diabetes among First Nations, Inuit, and Métis populations. Retrieved from http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/cd-mc/publications/ diabetes-diabete/facts-figures-faits-chiffres-2011/chap6-eng.php

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Ramsden, P. G. (2006, December 14). Haudenosaunee (Iroquois). Retrieved from http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/iroquois/

Robin, M. M. (2010, July 3). Phantoms in the machine: GM corn spreads to Mexico. Retrieved from http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/3012

Simeone, T. (2004, March 17). Indigenous traditional knowledge and intellectual property rights. Parliament of Canada. Retrieved from http://www.lop.parl.gc.ca/content/lop/researchpublications/ prb0338-e.htm

Siri Dammana, W. B. (2008). Indigenous peoples’ nutrition transition in a right to food perspective. Food Policy, 33(2), 135–155.

Socha, T., Zahaf, M., Chambers, L., Abraham, R., & Fiddler, T. (2012). Food security in a Northern First Nations community: An exploratory study. Journal of Aboriginal Health, 8(2), 5–14.

The Stop Community Food Centre. (2017). Retrieved from: http://thestop.org/

Adrianne Lickers Xavier Doctoral Student, Royal Roads University Coordinator, Our Sustenance Program

C. Etmanski (Ed.), Food Leadership, 17–35. © 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

GEORGE LADAAH OPENJURU

2. INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE

Informal Learning and Food Security Practices among the Acholi People of Northern Uganda

This chapter is about achieving food security through the revitalisation of indigenous knowledge among the Acholi people of Northern Uganda. It draws from the theory of knowledge democracy, which articulates the idea of validating and accepting all forms of knowledge, including indigenous knowledge systems, knowledge generated through community-based research (CBR), and processes of informal learning about food security practices among the Acholi people of Northern Uganda. These concepts will be discussed later in the chapter. In the meantime, to open the chapter it is important to understand that

food security is an urgent public health issue … because of high rates of poverty; effects of global climate change and environmental pollution on traditional food systems. (Power, 2008, p. 95)

The commercialisation of food production contributes to the urgency of this health issue. Power (2008) goes on to add

that given the centrality of traditional food practices to cultural health and survival, I propose that cultural food security is an additional level of food security beyond individual, household and community levels. (p. 95)

This observation is a strong call to rediscover the traditional food security practices that will support the restoration of sustainable food production and consumption. Food security concerns include traditional land ownership and utilisation practices to ensure that land is available for use by the community for food production in a sustainable manner. Food harvesting, sharing, and consumption, including wild food harvesting of both animals and plants (fruits, berries, and tubers). This is similar to what has been reported for Indigenous people worldwide (e.g., in Canada as reported by Power, 2008). The existence of this useful indigenous knowledge in food security practice was confirmed through an ethnographic research project looking at the Acholi cultural food security practices that was conducted from early 2014 to mid-2015. This knowledge can now be used to promote food security practices through a more participatory, CBR process in which the community is invited to address their food security concerns using their context and relevant indigenous knowledge and practices. This chapter starts by explaining briefly who the Acholi people are, in order to provide background for the indigenous knowledge of food security practices being

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discussed. This will be followed by a review of the key concepts, literature, and methodology used in the study, before discussing the findings related to the Acholi food security practices. Several researchers have worked in this area of indigenous knowledge and food security and sustainability from an agricultural and food technology perspective (Agea, Lugangwa, Obua, & Kambugu, 2008; Chirimuuta & Mapolisa, 2011; Power, 2008; Lwonga, Ngulube, & Stilwell, 2010). The new angle that this chapter is adding is that the concepts of knowledge democracy, CBR, and informal learning can be useful in achieving food security. The primary objective of this chapter is to show how indigenous knowledge in the context of knowledge democracy is very important in maintaining community resilience and achieving sustainable livelihood. This chapter calls for the promotion of knowledge democracy through CBR as the main scholarly practice that encourages the co-creation of knowledge. CBR is consistent with the Acholi community’s ways of being with nature and knowledge democracy recognises the usefulness of all forms of knowledge in sustaining life on planet Earth.

WHO ARE THE ACHOLI PEOPLE OF NORTHERN UGANDA AND THEIR FOODS

Uganda is located in Eastern Africa; the other countries of East Africa are Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi. The Acholi are Luo people, who migrated from the Bahr el Ghazel region of Southern Sudan to their present location in Northern Uganda. They were named by the Arabs who called them Shooli on account of the similarity of their language to the Shiluk people of Southern Sudan. This name was later adjusted to Acoli and then to Acholi. The Acholi people occupy the districts of Gulu, Nwoya, Amuru, Kitgum, Pader, Lamwo, and Agago. They are part of the ethnic group in Northern Uganda who speak a Luo language dialect (Atkinson, 2001). In 1986, the current government of Yoweri Kaguta Museveni overtook power from Basilio and Lutwa Okellos who were Acholi Army Generals (Mutibwa, 2010). After that takeover, there was much armed resistance to the National Resistance Army (NRA) and the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government. This resistance created a state of insurgency in the region that lasted until about 2005. During the insurgency, there was disruption of the Acholi traditional knowledge systems and ways of being, including food security practices and land use as well as ownership arrangement. This disruption has persisted with intensity after the war, as powerful individuals have started claiming what was originally communal land. These post-war developments have significantly distorted the original food security practices and other cultural practices of the Acholi people as well (Harris, 2012).

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

The key concepts informing the discussion in this chapter are knowledge democracy, CBR, indigenous knowledge, informal learning, and food security. Taken together, these concepts frame how indigenous knowledge contributes to

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food security and how this knowledge is passed on from generation to generation through informal processes of learning.

Knowledge Democracy

The concept of knowledge democracy provides an epistemological platform, which supports the concept of indigenous knowledge systems. Knowledge democracy is about accepting all ways of knowing by giving them all equal value in shaping and explaining our world, with a view of making it a better place for us to live in as equals. Diverse ways of knowing encompass all forms of epistemologies of minority communities, including indigenous epistemologies in the global north and global south (Millar, 2006). Knowledge democracy is therefore about giving all knowledge systems space without patronisation. It is about whose knowledge counts in organising life in this world. It is a discourse on knowledge representation and utilisation to achieve a food secure world for all. There is a lot of community resilience, survival, and sustainable food practices that are embedded in indigenous knowledge; in the context of knowledge democracy, these forms of knowledge are allowed to come to the fore and inform food security practices, rather than allowing Western agricultural knowledge to dominate. Knowledge systems that ensure harmonious existence between nature and people in sustainable tandem have been responsible for sustaining different communities around the globe. Ignoring such knowledge is the same as ignoring the foundation upon which a community has been surviving and distorting the harmony that such knowledge informs. Of course, the concept of knowledge democracy is not without contestation as it connotes freedom of choice as in market capitalism (In’t Veld, 2010). This means the dynamic of choice will be dictated by the context of existence which is now informed by the dominant form of knowledge (Western, scientific). We also know that freedom of choice is what is leading the world into mass production and consumption bordering on a level of irresponsibility that is, in effect, destroying our world. So, the concept of knowledge democracy being used in this chapter is one where the co-existence of all forms of knowledge nurtures alternatives to dominant knowledge systems, especially related to food.

Community-based Research

The concept of knowledge democracy goes together with the methodology of community-based research (CBR) (Etmanski, Hall, & Dawson, 2014). CBR goes by many names including but not limited to Participatory Action Research (PAR), or Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), Collaborative Action Research (CAR), or simply Action Research (AR). Whatever name is used, this type of research approach is one in which those community members who are most affected by the problem under study actively participate in the study process. They may do so either in collaboration with formally trained researchers or by working independently to address a problem that is affecting them as a community (Brydon-

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Miller, Greenwood, & Maguire, 2003; Hall, 2005; Work Group for Community Health and Development, n.d.). This research approach extends the philosophy of knowledge democracy by deepening and expanding the practice of alternative knowledge generation through the participation of the affected community group. This participation comes with the acceptance of local knowledge as essential in understanding and addressing the problem being dealt with. Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury (2001) defined action research as:

a participatory, democratic process concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes, grounded in a participatory worldview which we believe is emerging at this historical moment. It seeks to bring together action and reflection, theory and practice, in participation with others, in the pursuit of practical solutions to issues of pressing concern to people, and more generally the flourishing of individual persons and their communities. (p. 1)

This, as already explained above, fits neatly with the concept of knowledge democracy. Consequently, in the global south and excluded north, there are a number of innovative CBR practices in different sectors which are conducted to promote empowerment and social change (i.e., addressing issues of poverty, sustainable development, social development, governance, conflict, and empowerment of marginalised communities). Much work is going on under CBR in directions which promote knowledge democracy (e.g., German, et al., 2012; Marincowitz, 2003; Niekert & Niekert, 2009; Omar, 2013; Opondo, German, Stroud, & Engorok, 2006). The use of knowledge through community action covers a number of areas from social vulnerability and poverty (Niekert & Niekert, 2009), to agricultural improvement (Opondo et al., 2006), and climate change (German et al., 2012). It is one of the key methods of community-university engagement (Nhamo, 2012). However, some practices of CBR by grassroots practitioners, and researchers in the global south and also the lesser developed areas and excluded epistemologies of the north are not recognised by academics and are therefore generally absent from academic journals. However, regardless of whether they are legitimised by academia or not, in most cases CBR is dedicated to enriching development discourse and practices, and addressing social and economic problems in the daily lives of people.

Indigenous Knowledge

Indigenous knowledge

represents a rich and varied cognitive and practical heritage that is more than a ‘woven basket for tourists.’ (Preece, 2009, p. 37)

Indigenous knowledge includes processes of knowledge creation by the people of Africa. Knowledge creation and education as explained by Ford (as cited in Preece, 2009), is

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intimately tied to the social life of the people both materially and spiritually, it was multivalent in terms of goals and methods, being both gradual and progressive in order to conform to the physical, emotional and mental development. (p. 37)

So, learning was integrally tied to life itself. This is the education which was used to pass on food production, processing, preservation, and consumption to the next generation of Acholi people. Accordingly, the content of educational curricula was not provided in disciplinary chunks as is done in the formal school education systems. As Preece (2009) noted,

It encompassed philosophy, arts, maths, astronomy and farming. It included understanding patterns of traditional behaviour such as relations of reciprocity, a complex etiquette for everyday negotiations and greetings at various times of the day. In this educational system, learning took place informally and through active participation in the production process by the young. It was not considered or regarded as child labour. The teaching and learning process is integrally intertwined with productivity and all other aspects of everyday life. A child learns as they grow and they continue to learn the different responsibilities of the different stages of their life. (p. 37)

As such, the process of learning indigenous knowledge was naturally interdisciplinary. I would like to clarify that when the word indigenous is mentioned in some parts of the world (e.g., Canada) what may immediately come to mind are Indigenous people. In this case, the word indigenous is only used in reference to indigenous knowledge in a context where the people holding such knowledge may not be described as indigenous due to historic migration patterns in Africa.

Informal Learning

Informal learning resonates well with the concept of indigenous knowledge and education. Drawing largely from Hager and Halliday (2006), informal learning is the learning which is not organised and goes on outside any formal educational arrangement such as a school, college, or university. There is no prescribed curriculum or structure which guides this kind of learning. The learning is often unintended and not planned. It is the learning that goes on as we live out everyday life. Hager and Halliday (2006) argued that in schools and other learning institutions, “currently the balance is shifted too far toward the formal” (p. 6). They suggested that the balance should in fact be shifted in favour of informal learning. Accordingly, they argued that,

the assumptions implicit in many policies, theories and practice concerned with lifelong learning, that such learning must be predominantly formal is wrong … and potentially dangerous for harmonious societal development. (2006, p. 6)

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Informal learning is a type of education that was intimately tied to the social, material, and spiritual life of the people. It was multivalent in terms of goals and methods, being both gradual and progressive in order to conform to physical, emotional, and mental development. It was holistic and lifelong in nature, not compartmentalised into different subject areas, but essentially relied on nurturing the ability to memorise. Therefore, myths, legends, epics, tales, historical poems, proverbs, songs, and plays all constituted learning mechanisms. It was an intensely moral upbringing, to build strength and agility, moral character and wisdom—a shared objective by the whole community—hence the proverb ‘it takes a village to raise a child.’ For the Acholi people in particular, learning about the land, its grasses, its natural resources for healing, and so on were all part of understanding our holistic relationship to the earth as equal humans. The informality of indigenous education is seen in the fact that education took place in the home as well as the community, and, as such, virtually all adults were potential teachers. The teaching was based on life and everyday life occurrences or experiences in which both adults and children were together. The logic of informal learning in indigenous knowledge—supported by Hager and Halliday (2006) and Preece (2009) above—has already been extended into critiquing current food security measures in many African communities. It is argued that the dominant food security model being promoted in Africa is based on knowledges that are generated from laboratories, research stations and universities (Chirimuuta & Mapolisa, 2011, p. 52). Moreover, practices based on an intergenerational learning arrangement between elder and younger members of community have now been distorted by the boarding school system of education which does not give enough time for children to learn livelihood practices from their parents. Even what is taught in school is completely different from what is required for continued livelihood in the student’s local environment. As will be explored below, this argument goes on to explain that supporting the informal learning inherent to indigenous knowledge systems should be an integral part of the food security strategy that must be promoted in Africa (Chirimuuta & Mapolisa, 2011).

Food Security

Food security underscores the need for all people to have enough nutritious food and water at all times. Being food secure suggests that people are able to physically, economically, and socially access food in a sustainable and safe manner for an active and healthy life (Sseguya, 2009; World Bank, 1986). Citing Koc, et al. (2000), Abioye, Zaid, and Egberongbe (2011) explained that

‘food security’ means food is available at all times; that all persons have means of access to it; that it is nutritionally adequate in terms of quantity, quality, and variety and that it is acceptable within the given culture. (p. 4)

This is close to the definition provided by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations (1996) that food security is a

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condition in which all people have physical and economic access to food at all times in sufficient, safe and nutritious condition to meet their dietary needs and food preference for an active and healthy life. (as cited in Baskin, 2008, p. 2)

Basically, all conceptual definitions of food security are about the availability, supply, acceptability, accessibility, and utilisation of food in sufficient quantity and quality for every person in a particular community at all times (Baskin, 2008). Of course, food security cannot be achieved without sustainable food production. Food production is now compromised among the Acholi community with the decline of the traditional culture of Acholi food production and management as well as the commodification of food production. This refers to the production of food for sale and profit that is now taking priority over ensuring household food supply. Climate change as a consequence of unsustainable land use (e.g., charcoal burning) is also having an impact on food production.

Integration of Five Concepts

Taken together, these five concepts—knowledge democracy, CBR, indigenous knowledge, informal learning, and food security—suggest that all knowledge systems, especially indigenous knowledges and intergenerational learning and teaching processes, ought to be leveraged and valued in the pursuit of addressing community problems related to food security. To revamp and achieve sustainable food security may then require increased food production over and above subsistence requirements. The knowledge required to sustain this production level must be one that the local population is able to work with comfortably. In Africa, this means the use of a knowledge and educational system which is native to Africa. This brings us back to the use of indigenous knowledge and indigenous mode of transmission, that is, indigenous education (Ocitti, 1988). This type of education is sometimes referred to as African Traditional Education. This is the education which existed in Africa before the coming of the European explorers and Missionaries who later introduced the formal modern education we have today (Adeyemi & Adeyinka, 2002; Ndofirepi & Ndofirepi, 2012). This chapter advocates for the use of CBPR and Knowledge Democracy by reporting an ethnographic qualitative study of the Acholi food security practices in Northern Uganda. The idea of a practice can itself be understood as a way of doing things or being. It is a usual or customary action or processing, repetition or exercise of an activity in order to achieve fluency, which is the condition of having mastery of a skill or activity through repetition. Citing Scribner and Cole (1981, p. 236), Openjuru (2011) explained

Practice as recurrent goal-directed sequence of activities using a particular technology and particular system of knowledge…they are socially developed and patterned ways of using knowledge and technology to accomplish a task. (p. 37)

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In reporting on Acholi food security practices, this chapter is therefore talking about these patterned ways of using knowledge and technology that are culturally based to achieve food security among the Acholi people. It also takes into account how this knowledge is passed on through informal learning arrangements to the next generation to ensure the continuity of the Acholi society. This is what one of the renowned scholars of education, Professor J. P. Ocitti, documented as the Indigenous African Pedagogy or Education as practised by the Acholi people (Ocitti, 1988), which is the approach promoted here.

THE ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH APPROACH

In line with CBR, this study aimed to address social and economic problems in the daily lives of people. In order to address the challenges related to food security, it was first necessary to understand the indigenous food security practices among the Acholi of Northern Uganda. A qualitative methodology was therefore seen to be the most appropriate hence the choice of an ethnographic research approach.

Ethnography usually refers to forms of social research having … strong emphasis on exploring the nature of particular social phenomenon, rather than setting out to test hypotheses about them. (Atkinson & Hammersley, 1994, p. 248)

As described above, the socio-cultural phenomenon explored in this study related to food production, processing, preservation, and consumption. Different tools were designed corresponding to the different methods of data collection: observation guides for observing people working in their farms and being part of the daily activities, as well as interviews and informal conversations guides. Formal interviews were conducted with farmers who still have knowledge of practices which are no longer common, for example certain hunting practices. Analysis of data involved explicit interpretation of the meanings and functions of the different activities that were observed as discerned in events unfolding in the daily life of the community (Bryman, 2001; Openjuru, 2011). This rich knowledge collection was understood within the framework of knowledge democracy, informal learning, and CBR, which combined to value and harness Acholi sustainable food production knowledge. In this context, other research methods which disregard this time-tested knowledge must be discouraged.

DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS

The key findings are classified under the following topics: intergenerational informal learning, food production methods, food processing and preservation methods, wild food harvesting, wild animal hunting, domestic fruit growing for food, domestic animal and poultry rearing, fishing, food sharing practices, and the bigger picture relationship between food and spirituality. These traditional practices ensured the continued existence of diverse food plants and wild animal

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species and how these were well knitted into the traditional belief systems and ways of life of the community.

Intergenerational Informal Learning

Informal Learning is at the centre of food security among the Acholi People to ensure that the next generation is able to carry on with the practices. Informal learning and training in food production normally starts early as soon as a baby is born and there are rituals which are performed differently for male and female babies. These rituals are ways of initiating the babies into the different gender roles they are expected to play in their society. From then on, the child’s upbringing normally aims at preparing them for those different roles. While still in a younger age, the children are allowed to follow their parents to gardens to watch the older people work. They will help with small errands like providing drinking water from a calabash kept in the cool shade, or taking care of their baby siblings as their mother worked away. In that process, the children are informally learning the food production roles of their parents. The boys learn from what their fathers and other older male relatives are doing while the girls learn from their mothers and female relatives. This happens for all stages of food production, processing, preservation, storage, preparation, and consumption.

Food Production Methods

There are various methods of food production. For example, a fallow system of farming which allows for soil health and recovery by leaving plots of land uncultivated for several seasons. Intercropping is done to maintain soil productivity by planting a variety of crops on the same plot. In this practice two or more different types of crops are planted in the same area but with different harvesting seasons, for example, sesame is planted together with peas and bitter vegetables locally known as Malakwang. This food production strategy not only ensures the maximum efficient use of a piece of land but also the use of land in a manner that reduces soil exhaustion and enhances its productivity, thus ensuring sustainable crop yield on the same piece of land for a longer time. Another method is called gitaa, which entails collective field cultivation. Under this farming system people take up different farm fields in the same location to give the impression of a large manageable farm with similar crops and with each person owning and working on their own piece of land. The harvest from the individually owned piece of land is stored by individual households. This enables people in the community to conserve sections of land while they collectively cultivate others. There are a number of crops that are grown in this manner, for example, a variety of cassava tubers from which they make cassava flour, sweet potato tubers, millet, sorghum, simsim/sesame, groundnuts, beans and peas, maize, and a variety of green vegetables. All the above farming practices are based on the indigenous knowledge of the Acholi. They are familiar practices, which have been time tested over generations

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OWLEDGE

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from the from the a variety

raditional s that are hat enjoy

a tree is holi Sub-ting them e (Okullo

ed in the o buffalo

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and hippopotamus, the prize kill. However, the creation of game parks and conservation initiatives has since restricted big game hunting for food. The community is now being non-formally educated to appreciate wild animals as a tourist attraction and thus a source of cash/income rather than as food sources for the family and community. Traditionally, the Acholi community self-imposed hunting restrictions, for example, nursing female antelopes and their young ones were left alone to avoid annoying the gods. Animals that successfully escaped to respected sections of the forest where the gods reside are also left to go. This practice ensured the survival of the species to feed the next generation of community members in the future. The loss of respect for the traditional gods as a result of the Acholi people embracing Christianity is contributing to the depletion of wild life that was available as food to the community. The meat from these bush animals is normally eaten smoked and cooked in a peanut or sesame butter sauce. To get the butter, both are toasted and grounded with grinding stones or pounded with mortar and pestle to create a butter that is mixed into a sauce. Commonly, these days, machines are used to crush the toasted groundnuts or sesame into a butter paste that is locally packed in food containers and sold commercially. However, the old practice still persists as well in some homes and for creating a limited quantity of paste.

Domestic Fruit Growing for Food

There is a variety of fruit trees that are not farmed but planted as supplementary food around the homestead. This includes, but is not limited to, mangoes, papaya, guavas, lemon, and oranges. These different types of fruit trees have different propagations, preparation, and preservation practices based on the communities’ traditional local knowledge about them (Acholi [African] Community in Queensland, 2012). Some domestic and forest fruits are spread through wild bird droppings, which means the wild birds should be allowed to enjoy the ripe fruits as well. These fruits mature during the different seasons, for example, during the mango season both children and adults have a lot of mango fruits thus ensuring sufficient and quality food supply for the community (Baskin, 2008).

Domestic Animal and Poultry Rearing

In any Acholi home, there is a practice of animals and poultry rearing. All the birds and animals are kept together in the home to provide food sources. The poultry and animals kept include cattle, goats, sheep, and fowl including ducks. In rare cases, rabbits, pigs, and pigeons are also kept. The rearing of Guinea pigs seems to have disappeared during the long period of insurgency. See Figure 3 below for an example of domestic animals and poultry found in the home state.

Witas rabbanimalcompocrops foragetheir g(e.g., caccounterms Acholi Thenow asustainguaranpowerchunksowneremergdisapppromoactionsno lon Smaerosionnot fodisgracdisappinsecu Conwork. relativ

Figure 3. D

th the exceptiobits and Guinls and fowl aound to feed. Thave already

e for food in goats and conchicken and dunt the seriousof the preservi depend. ese animal reaas collective/n. For exampntees open graful individuas of communaship and useence of priv

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IND

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DIGENOUS KNO

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OWLEDGE

29

s, as well t of these out in the l the food re left to

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asions, or important important

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guests such as in-laws on a scheduled visit, while bigger animals like bulls/cows are killed during bigger occasions such as marriages and funeral rites. There is also the slaughtering of chicken and goats for sacrificial purposes. Whatever the case, all poultry and animals are eaten or consumed collectively in one-way or the other. Added to these traditional occasions are new religious occasions celebrated by Christians and Muslims, for example Christmas.

Fishing

Traditionally, the Acholi caught a variety of fish from the many rivers, streams, and swamps that intersect Acholi land. The fish are either cooked fresh, sun dried, or smoked. This practice was also acknowledged by the Acholi (African) Community in Queensland (2012) as they were documenting Acholi food preparation practices. There are many methods that are used for catching fish, such as using hooks, fish catching baskets, trapping using nets and basket traps, and spearing. All these provided extra sources of nutritious food for the family. Today, most of the streams and swamps are drying up and these practices of fishing can no longer be used. Only some big rivers still have some limited quantity of fish, however, not enough for communal fishing expeditions.

Food Sharing Practices

There was a traditional practice of food sharing that took place during the harvest period. Food harvest season is a time of food abundance. During such times, everybody came with an empty harvest basket and left with a full one after they had contributed their labour to the harvest. Food exchange between families for purpose of social bonding was also normal at the time of harvest and included the exchange of common food items like millet, groundnuts, and sorghum. Young families, who may still have been landless, could survive on these food collections until such time that they could open up their own farms or food gardens on donated land. Unfortunately, with the commercialisation of food production, this practice of food sharing has disappeared as those who come for harvest are paid in cash, not with food items, and are not allowed to carry away any part of the harvest. Rather than redistribution in the community, all surplus production (above subsistence requirements) is sold. In some cases, it has been reported that husbands have sold off the entire family food harvest, and then irresponsibly used the money earned. As such, the concept of food sales or marketing does not make sense when one powerful member of the household decides to sell the whole family food stock, leaving the household with nothing to depend on. This is not common. However, it is an indication that although food was traditionally used to enhance good social relationships and promote community wellbeing, with the realisation of the commercial value of food came the decline of its social value. Food is now not being shared, but sold. This is all contributing significantly to food insecurity.

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Food and Spirituality

As can be seen in many of the examples above, the spirits that connect humans to nature, e.g., the forests and animals, are respected during most Acholi food cultivation, gathering, and hunting practices. Accordingly, rituals are performed to thank and appease the gods before engaging in any economic activity such as hunting or opening up new land for cultivation. The oracles are consulted and traditional priests and diviners, who were labelled witch doctors by missionaries, are consulted to pray for a successful hunting. The priests bless the hunters and intercede with the gods to protect them and ensure that they come back safely. In addition to this, the ancestors who reside in the spirit realms are included as they are part of the gods’ world already. Traditionally, the forests reserved for the gods are not touched. Not a single tree is cut down from such forests without consulting the oracles. This means that to enable humans to use forest resources, diviners must consult and appease the spirits who are thought to be residing in those sacred forests. These practices are now labelled superstitions, a savage form of existence, or a lower stage of development under the Enlightenment era European knowledge canon (Jahoda, 2002). However, we can appreciate that these traditional beliefs that normally discouraged the indiscriminate cutting down of forests were connected to the well-being of the community. As has been shown in many examples above, the weakening of these traditional belief systems has led to the decline in the respect or reverence that the Acholi people had for nature. As a result, forests have been cut down for charcoal burning and there has been a rise in the exploitation of the natural resources on which the Acholi people’s food livelihood depended. Along with the disappearance of the forest come the disappearance of the forest food resources such as animals, wild fruits and tubers, which were very good for supplementing the home-grown food. It is also now known that the cutting down of these forests is affecting the rain patterns or leading to climate change that is also negatively affecting home food production as well. According to traditional understanding and knowledge, it can be said that the rain gods who inhabit the forests are now unhappy and withholding the rain clouds or releasing them erratically to punish the disrespectful environmentally irresponsible human conduct. The connection between spirituality and food security does not only stop with traditional forest management practices; it also includes social relationships during cultivation and harvest. For example, it is relevant to understand that domestic violence is particularly discouraged during cultivation. Violence is believed to be a bad omen for the crops being cultivated. This belief system helps to maintain harmonious social behaviours during cultivation and harvest, and ensures that labour for food security is not compromised by bad relationships.

I must add that its very unfortunate that these good belief systems and practices that were intrinsically connected to the everyday livelihoods and management practices of the Acholi people (and Africans as a whole) were demonised through the spread of the Christian religion. Without a commensurate inheritance of

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Western livelihood and management practices, this disjuncture in belief systems is, in a way, responsible for lowering productivity as a consequence of poor management practices, thus giving rise to poverty, food insecurity, and famine.

CONCLUSION

This chapter has emphasised how members of the Acholi community developed their indigenous knowledge, which they used in their food production over generations. Traditional knowledge about food served various social purposes and was consistent with the world view of that particular group. In recent years, distortions or disrespect of that knowledge has left the community in disarray as they have embraced new knowledge systems that do not resonate well with their world view. The outcome, in some cases, is irresponsible behaviours that endanger the general well-being of the community. It can be difficult for people to reconcile modern environmental awareness campaigns that are based on the Western knowledge paradigm with beneficial practices based on indigenous knowledge. Although both may have food security as a goal, the former emphasises the relationship between trees and good climate (including necessary rainfall and rivers full of fish) while the latter promotes avoiding behaviours that are offensive to the gods, who will punish with misfortunes such as poor food yields, or dry spells, thus leading to food scarcity. From these observations, it is recommended that CBR, with its emphasis in engaging all stakeholders in dialogue and problem-solving, could go a long way in bridging these knowledge gaps and reviving the traditional knowledge system. When it is better understood how traditional beliefs originally served to create harmony between human activities and nature, there could be an uptake in reviving indigenous knowledge so it can once again be used to inform human social and economic behaviours. In this way, food security could be restored as the social food behaviours at both the community level and household level are brought under control. Moreover, as indigenous knowledge practices are revived, community elders become increasingly important stakeholders in the community, thus reviving traditional practices of intergenerational learning and knowledge sharing. In line with the discourse of knowledge democracy, this chapter has demonstrated that indigenous knowledge can make a major contribution to the enhancement of community food security. Culturally relevant knowledge has the potential to better integrate into the Acholi community as a foundational part of people’s essence and existence, thus making the practice of such knowledge natural for the good of the community. In the examples given above, it is easy to see how the use of traditional knowledge systems and practices ensured that human survival activities, like ensuring a food secure community, existed in synchrony with nature. Likewise, informal learning where knowledge was transmitted through the generations and the different stages of life was done in synchrony with everyday life, throughout one’s lifetime.

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Finally, you will note that in this chapter, I have deliberately avoided being critical of indigenous knowledge because for a very long time now indigenous knowledge has been on the receiving end of negative evaluation to the extent of demonising it. As I have shown, this has led to loss of the values that indigenous knowledge could bring in contributing to the well-being of humanity and particularly to food security. Rather than continue undermining indigenous knowledge, with this chapter I am promoting the celebration of indigenous ways of knowing as part of the practice of knowledge democracy. Whose ways of knowing count and where (Hall, 2012), are valid questions that must continually be asked. In this chapter I argue that indigenous knowledge will continue to be useful in the context in which it is produced and used.

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Atkinson, R. R. (2001). The roots of ethnicity: The origin of the Acholi of Uganda. Kampala, Uganda: Fountain.

Baskin, C. (2008). Indigenous youth exploring identities through food security in Canada and Brazil. MAI Review, 3(5), 1–11.

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Bryman, A. (2001). Social research methods. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Chirimuuta, C., & Mapolisa, T. (2011). Centering the peripherised systems: Zimbabwean indigenous

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David, W. Widianingsih, N. N., Kasim, A., & Ploeger, A. (n.d.). Role of indigenous knowledge in traditional farming system on natural resources management. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Wahyudi_David/publication/236108208_Role_of_Indigenous_Knowledge_in_Traditional_Farming_System_on_Natural_Resources_Management/links/00b7d51d3927d62811000000.pdf

Etmanski, C., Hall, B., & Dawson, T. (Eds.). (2014). Learning and teaching community-based research: Linking pedagogy to practice. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

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Gill, G. (2002). Applications of appropriate agricultural technology and practices and their impact on food security and the eradication of poverty: Lessons learnt from selected community based experiences. London, UK: ODI Food Security Briefings 3.

Hager, P., & Halliday, J. (2006). Recovering informal learning: Wisdom, judgement and community. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.

Hall, B. (2005). In from the cold: Reflections on participatory research from 1970–2005. Convergence 38(1), pp. 5–24.

Hall, B. (2012). Whose knowledge counts? The emerging knowledge democracy movement. Retrieved from http://practiceinparticipation.org/guestcolumn/whose-knowledge-counts-the-emerging-knowledge-democracy-movement/

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George Ladaah Openjuru Gulu University

C. Etmanski (Ed.), Food Leadership, 37–52. © 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

TRISTAN READER AND TERROL DEW JOHNSON

3. FISHING FOR CHANGE

A Pedagogy of Native Food Sovereignty

One cliché seems to guide the prevalent understanding of popular education and capacity building: Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime. A critical examination of this overused trope, however, reveals a much more textured understanding of the role of empowering education that is currently emerging from the movement to build food sovereignty within Indigenous communities. Such an exploration reveals the socio-political context of Native education and explores the resulting historical trauma and loss of food sovereignty that deeply impacts indigenous communities to this day. The New Generation of O’odham Farmers program—and its approach to transformative education—provides a sharp contrast to this past. Based upon the experience of the Tohono O’odham community, in this chapter we describe a set of pedagogical principles and processes that can be used in Indigenous communities across North America and beyond.

FORGETTING HOW TO FISH: EDUCATION, HISTORICAL TRAUMA, AND THE LOSS OF INDIGENOUS FOOD SOVEREIGNTY

For countless generations, Indigenous peoples have known “how to fish.” Tribal food systems did not merely provide nutrition; they nurtured community, rooted culture and identity, served as a tool of education and knowledge transmission, and were the foundation of Native economies. By the second half of the 20th century, however, virtually every Native community in North America had seen its traditional food system devastated, its economy crippled, its health ravaged, and its cultural and linguistic vitality severely damaged. What was one of the greatest contributors to this devastation? Education. The seminal book Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools asks “Who can quarrel with education?” Over and over again, the clear answer is: Indigenous people.

Taken, often by force, from their homes at ages as young as four, transported to facilities remote from their families, relentlessly stripped of their cultural identities while being methodically indoctrinated to see their traditions—and thus themselves—through the eyes of their colonizers, chronically malnourished and overworked, drilled to regimental order and subject to the harshest form of corporal punishment, this was the lot of one in every two native youngsters in North America for five successive generations. (Churchill, 2004)

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This experience was not limited to the Native peoples of the United States (U.S.). First Nations communities in Canada and Aboriginal Australians also suffered from similar “educational” projects (Archuleta, Child, & Lomawaima, 2004). The boarding, or residential school experience contributed significantly to community attitudes toward education, to historical trauma in Native communities, and to the devastation of Indigenous food systems.

Attitudes Toward Education

This historical experience of “education” has had—and continues to have—a profound impact on Indigenous peoples’ attitudes toward the very concept of education. This article’s co-author, Terrol Johnson, remembers being told by his grandmother about some of the ways in which her village would protect their children from forced removal to boarding schools. “They used to have big grain baskets,” remembered Katherine Pancho.

When the men from the schools came to take all of the children away, people would hide them in the basket with the corn and wheat. That way the men couldn’t take them from us. (Pancho, 1999)

Education was something to be feared, avoided and actively resisted. These experiences of and attitudes toward education are not merely historic; many people continue to demonstrate a distrust of educational institutions—if not education itself. Within the Tohono O’odham Nation, it is our experience that every single tribal member either attended a boarding school or has a living relative—usually a parent or grandparent—who did. It can hardly be coincidence that half of all Native Americans currently do not graduate high school, the highest rate of all ethnic groups in the U.S. (Faircloth & Tippeconnic III, 2010). Although many factors contribute to these low graduation rates, the experience of boarding schools and the suspicion of educational institutions is certainly a contributor. Given these experiences and attitudes toward education and schools, there is a clear need for formal and informal educational programs that are culturally appropriate and can empower both individuals as well as whole communities.

Education, Historical Trauma and the Loss of Cultural Vitality

Over the past two decades, a grassroots movement to confront and heal from historical trauma has proliferated throughout Native American communities (Whitbeck, Adams, Hoyt, & Chen, 2004).

[Historical Trauma is] the collective emotional and psychological injury both over the life span and across generations resulting from the history of difficulties that Native Americans as a group have experienced in America. These experiences are not “historical” in the sense that they are in the past and a new life has begun in a new land. Rather the losses are ever present, represented by the economic conditions of reservation life, discrimination,

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and a sense of cultural loss … The symptoms of historical trauma … run the gamut of those associated with post-traumatic stress disorder to symptoms of unresolved grief. (Halpern & Regier, 2007)

One of the historical traumas that continues to reverberate in the emotional and psychological life of entire communities is the abuse and oppression experienced in boarding schools. This trauma continues to be passed down to new generations and becomes magnified beyond the emotional and psychological to include the cultural and material. For example, the parents of Terrol Johnson both attended boarding schools as children. There, they were physically and emotionally punished if they spoke O’odham neok (the O’odham language). Many years later, they refused to teach Terrol and his brothers the O’odham language. When he asked them why not, Terrol’s mother told him that she did not want him to be punished and abused for using the language as she had been. The decision not to teach the language to a new generation—made in order to protect them from suffering and abuse—means that not only do Terrol and his brothers not speak the language, but another generation after them, their children, are not learning the language in turn. Multiplied by the experience of the thousands of Tohono O’odham who attended boarding schools, the impact of this so-called ‘education’ on language vitality has been devastating, with very few tribal members under the age of 30 able to speak the O’odham language fluently. Similar effects have been seen on other parts of the O’odham Himdag (Desert People’s Lifeways). Many Tohono O’odham ceremonies, legends, songs, and other cultural practices saw a similarly rapid decline in the second half of the 20th century as the impacts of forced assimilation reverberated through the community. Without the visionary leadership of a few tribal elders—foremost among them Danny Lopez and Frances Manuel—many of these cultural practices would have been lost forever (Cohen, 2012). The Tohono O’odham are hardly the only tribe to identify language loss as a major impact of the boarding school experience. In their work to conceptualize and measure historical trauma, Whitbeck et al. (2004) worked with Native American adults who had children ages 10 to 12 in four communities in the Midwestern U.S. and Ontario, Canada. “Foremost among the cultural losses mentioned was the loss of their language,” they noted. Moreover, “Loss of language was tied to the boarding school catastrophe” (Whitbeck et al., 2004). Thus, in many communities the educational experience continues to be associated not only with the emotional and psychological trauma of those who attended boarding schools, but also with the decline in the vitality of entire tribal languages, cultures and identities well into the 21st century.

Education and the Loss of Food Sovereignty: The Tohono O’odham Example

The foods of the Sonoran Desert—a vast arid area in what is now southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico—sustained the Tohono O’odham for over a thousand years. Developing a set of ecologically-adapted strategies to produce food, the Tohono O’odham combined flood-based farming during the summer rains,

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collection of wild desert foods, and hunting to provide the Tohono O’odham with a rich and varied diet. In addition to providing healthy foods, all of these activities (and their cultural aspects such as traditional dancing during the annual rain ceremony) promoted high levels of physical activity and fitness. The traditional food system supported a local economy, maintained the people’s physical well-being, and provided the material foundation for the O’odham Himdag. Until the second half of the 20th century, the Tohono O'odham were almost entirely food self-sufficient (Lopez, Reader, & Buseck, 2002). As late as the 1920s, the community utilized traditional methods to cultivate over 10,000 acres in the floodplain of the Sonoran lowlands; by 1960, that number had declined to 1,000 acres (Nabhan, 2002). By 2000, the number was less than ten. In 1930, the Tohono O’odham produced 1.4 million pounds of tepary beans—an important staple. By 2001, fewer than 100 pounds of these beans were produced. At the same time, the once common practice of collecting and storing wild foods declined dramatically. Over the course of a few short decades, the Tohono O’odham community went from being almost entirely food self-sufficient to being almost entirely food dependent.

The causes for this loss of food sovereignty are complex, multi-faceted, and include (but are not limited to): – Federal Work and Assimilation Policies: U.S. governmental policies removed

families from their own lands to work as migrant laborers in commercial cotton fields. Entire families would leave their communities for six to eight months each year. It became impossible for many families to plant, tend and maintain their fields, or to collect seasonal wild foods.

– World War II: During the war, most young Tohono O’odham men—those responsible for much of the farming and many parts of ceremonial life—served in the military for years at a time, leaving many fields empty of crops and ceremonies unperformed.

– Commodity Food Programs: In order to keep market prices high, surplus commodity programs and price supports became federal policy. For reasons ranging from ignorance to charity, commodity foods were imported to native communities. Most of these foods were processed. In fact, the prevalence of commodity lard and white flour across American Indian reservations resulted in the pan-Indian ‘food’ known as fry bread. The introduction of and easy access to processed foods led many people to alter their diets and decrease the amount of traditional foods produced and consumed.

– Termination and Relocation Programs: In the mid-20th century, the federal government’s American Indian relocation program, which moved native people off of reservations and into urban areas, had a devastating effect upon Tohono O’odham culture and food systems.

Unsurprisingly, one additional factor contributed to the decline of the Tohono O’odham food system: boarding schools. In addition to the emotional, psychological, and cultural impacts of the Boarding School Experience, entire generations of children never learned the practical skills and cultural importance necessary to farm in the desert or how to collect, process, and cook wild foods.

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The health, cultural, and economic impacts of the loss of the traditional Tohono O’odham food system were devastating. First, the loss of the traditional Tohono O’odham food system has had devastating health impacts on the Tohono O’odham. For centuries, traditional desert foods—and the physical effort it took to produce them—kept the Tohono O’odham healthy. As recently as the early 1960’s, Type II Diabetes was virtually unknown among the Tohono O’odham. Today, more than 50% of the population develops the disease, the highest rate in the world (Fortier, 2005). In the 1990s, the crisis intensified, with the disease—formerly known as ‘adult-onset’ diabetes—appearing in children as young as six years-old (A. Francisco, personal communication, 2014; see also Damman, Eide, & Kuhnlein, 2008: Milburn, 2004; Power, 2008; Waziyatawin Wilson, 2004; Whiting & Mackenzie, 1998). Second, virtually all elements of traditional culture—ceremonies, stories, songs, language—are directly rooted in the system of food production. O’odham culture is truly an agri/culture. The near total destruction of the Tohono O’odham food system has led to a dramatic loss of Tohono O’odham language and cultural traditions. Third, the loss of Indigenous food systems has had devastating economic consequences for Native communities. As Canadian Indigenous Food Sovereignty activist and author Dawn Morrison noted:

Indigenous food systems are best described in ecological rather than neoclassical economic terms. In this context, an Indigenous food is one that has been primarily cultivated, taken care of, harvested, prepared, preserved, shared or traded within the boundaries of our respective traditional territories based upon values of interdependence, respect, reciprocity and responsibility. (Morrison, 2011)

This perspective reflects a view of Indigenous economics that provides for the material and cultural needs of a people. Thus, the loss of the Tohono O’odham food system was a loss of economic vitality and independence. Extremely high levels of poverty and unemployment persist on the Tohono O’odham Nation. In 2013, for example, unemployment on the Tohono O’odham Nation was 69.4% (U.S. Department of the Interior, 2014). Recognising the accuracy of Morrison’s argument that neoclassical economics may not be the best tool for describing Indigenous food systems, such analysis can provide important insight into the impacts of losing food sovereignty. Food represents a huge economic development opportunity for Indigenous communities. We calculate that between $63 million and $80 million USD (e.g., 58–73.5 million Euros/4.3–5.4 billion Indian Rupees) is spent annually on the food needs of the Tohono O’odham Nation.1 More than 95% of these expenditures go to outside producers, vendors and businesses. Similar patterns can be found across the Americas. In just 12 countries in the Americas, for example, we estimate that annual food expenditures by Indigenous people are an estimated $63.7 billion USD (57 billion Euros/4.3 trillion Indian Rupees).2 Clearly, development opportunities —including those of an Indigenous economic model—based in the food system

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can help meet the need for sustainable employment, economic development, community wellness and cultural revitalization.

A Common Indigenous Experience and the Need for Food Sovereignty Education

In many crucial ways, the experience of the Tohono O’odham community is not unique. Indigenous communities across North America have experienced similar negative impacts of educational policies, high levels of cultural/linguistic decline and historical trauma, devastating rates of nutrition-related disease, and the loss of the Indigenous economies that were rooted in Native food systems. Given these realities, there is a profound need and opportunity for transformative educational programs that are rooted in efforts to revitalize Indigenous food systems. Once again, Morrison (2011) illuminated the issue:

The Indigenous food sovereignty approach provides a model for social learning and thereby promotes the application of traditional knowledge, values, wisdom and practices in the present day context. In an approach that people of all cultures can relate to, Indigenous food sovereignty provides a restorative framework for health and community development and appreciates the ways in which we can work together cross-culturally to heal our relationships with one another and the land, plants and animals that provide us with food.

A MODEL OF INDIGENOUS FOOD SOVEREIGNTY EDUCATION: NEW GENERATION OF O’ODHAM FARMERS

The New Generation of O’odham Farmers program provides one example of the efficacy of connecting transformative education with food systems redevelopment. A project of Tohono O’odham Community Action (TOCA), an 18-year-old community-based organization, the New Generation program provides an example of the symbiotic relationship between culturally-appropriate education and food systems development. Transformative education is essential to the (re)development of sustainable Indigenous food systems; at the same time, rooting education programming in broader efforts to redevelop food systems transforms peoples’ experience of education. As a grassroots organization, TOCA has worked to develop a wide variety of community-based projects aimed at redeveloping a Tohono O’odham food system which promotes wellness, ecological sustainability, cultural vitality, economic justice and empowerment. Among the components of this developing food systems are: – Two farms which produce traditional foods such as tepary beans, Ha:l squash,

O’odham 60-day corn. – A wild food program which supports families in harvesting saguaro cactus fruit,

the buds of the cholla cactus, mesquite beans, prickly pear and other healthy, traditional foods.

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– School gardens and curriculum development which support the development of cultural, food and nutritional literacy by tribal youth.

– A food service social enterprise that is working to introduce traditional, local and scratch-cooked foods into the school meal programs where most children eat twice per day.

– Desert Rain Café, an affordable, local restaurant that increases community access to traditional, healthy foods, provides new food-based employment opportunities, and provides a local market for Tohono O’odham food producers.

– Educational and cultural events – such as the annual harvest festival and saguaro fruit harvest camp – that bring hundreds of community members together to learn, teach and celebration food traditions.

Within this context, TOCA started the New Generation of O’odham Farmers program in 2009. Dedicated to training and empowering community members to engage in food system redevelopment, this program emerged from experiences on TOCA’s two farms and the interests of local young adults to learn how to create a livelihood for themselves in their own communities. More than simply providing job training, the program works with community members on several levels, including: – Technical knowledge and practical skills related to food production; – Critical analysis and empowerment; – Systems thinking; – Analysis of scale; and – Exploration of the relationship between local and global food systems. Taken together, these educational approaches are having a profound impact on both individual community members and the Tohono O’odham community as a whole.

TEACH A MAN3 TO FISH: TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE AND PRACTICAL SKILLS

The concept of “teaching a man to fish” primarily refers to providing people with technical knowledge and practical skills. Indeed, such education and technical knowledge are essential components for building the capacity of Indigenous communities to sustain Indigenous food systems. The producing, processing, and preparation of food—whether through farming, fishing, hunting or wildcrafting—requires broad and deep practical knowledge. The New Generation program has worked to share this knowledge with full-time, paid apprentices, young-adult interns and youth summer interns.

Workshops and trainings cover critical topics such as soil management, bed and field preparation, plant care and culture, [and] farm design and management…Hands-on activities include hard work at TOCA’s farms and community gardens planting, watering, harvesting…All activities are designed to give beginning farmers the skills knowledge, and tools to become independent, and to bring their own village, family farms, and community gardens back to life. (Paganelli Votto, 2013)

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This process of skill building utilizes four key educational approaches. First, nearly everything in this part of the program is taught in a hands-on manner in situ rather than in a classroom environment. It is very much a process of learning by doing, rather than learning by being told. In essence, it reflects Paulo Freire’s (2000) concept of people as the subjects of their education, rather than objects. In addition to helping apprentices and interns act as the agents of their learning, it also responds to the negative experience and attitude toward more formal education. Equally important, it helps develop the practical knowledge, experience and skills necessary to creating and sustaining farms. Second, the New Generation learning process embraces complexity. It is not sufficient, for example, for farmers to understand the principles of traditional ak chin farming in which flood waters that accompany the annual desert monsoon storms are channeled to fields. Exactly how, where and when the water flows will vary from field to field and from village to village. New Generation learners work with complex environments, learning how principles are applied and adapted to a specific context. Third, the nature of complexity often requires a willingness to experiment. When revitalizing an agricultural field that has not been farmed for two or three generations, much of the intimate knowledge of place has been lost. When confronted with a decision about the best way of doing something—channelling water into a field for example—New Generation participants are encouraged to experiment. Noland Johnson, the New Generation program’s lead trainer, often tells participants to conduct an experiment. “Plant half of your seeds in rows and half in beds,” he has been heard to say. “Then see which works.” Fourth, experimentation means failure. As John Dewey noted, however:

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. (Salkind, 2008)

New Generation participants are encouraged to fail, reflect on the causes of the failure, and develop new approaches. Taken together, this approach to learning has been quite successful in helping program participants “learn to fish,” that is, develop the technical knowledge and practical skills of farming. Although necessary, however, such knowledge is not sufficient for communities to redevelop Indigenous food systems.

DOES FISHING MAKE SENSE?—CRITICAL ANALYSIS AND EMPOWERMENT

As Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire (2000) noted, “liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information.” Yet too often, adult education programs and even community-based programs focus more on the transmission of information—technical knowledge and practical skills—than on supporting acts of cognition. In essence, this approach never extends beyond the attempt to “teach a man to fish.” Yet this leaves us with an unanswered question that profoundly challenges this approach: Does teaching the skill of

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fishing even make sense in the Arizona desert or high in the Bolivian Andes? Clearly the answer is an unequivocal “no.” Transformative food system education requires that we move beyond teaching practical skills and technical knowledge. The move from technical knowledge to critical analysis is perhaps the most fundamental shift in developing a transformative and empowering educational experience. Indeed, empowering communities to critically examine their social and economic relationships, cultural values and heritage, and ecological context is essential to the creation of food systems that are socially and economically just, culturally appropriate, and environmentally sustainable, as well as empowering people to learn, reflect and make changes within their communities. This approach to education is not new. The American Pragmatist John Dewey (1910) argued that we do not learn from experience, but rather we learn from reflecting on experience. So too did Freire (2000):

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

This process of reflection and analysis is, in some important ways, reflected in traditional Tohono O’odham pedagogical approaches. One of the key cultural forms of knowledge transmission and pedagogy is traditional storytelling. Tohono O’odham legends operate on many levels. While a story can certainly entertain, it also teaches cultural values, instructs the people on how to behave toward one another, scolds, celebrates, and teach practical lessons about living life in the desert. Yet these deeper lessons are rarely referenced directly. Rather than filling passive listeners with knowledge (i.e., making them Freirean “objects”), they are invited into a reflective relationship with the story, seeking its deeper lessons and meanings (i.e., become Freirean “subjects”). New Generation trainer Anthony Francisco (2014) observed:

The story is the way that O’odham learn throughout time. That’s the way they learned things … Just take a moment and listen. Think about it, and put in your own terms and in your own understanding. Not ‘this is what you’re going to learn’ and ‘this is the way we want you to learn it.

Building upon both Freirean and traditional Tohono O’odham pedagogies, the New Generation program quite intentionally engages participants in a process in which they reflect upon the root causes of topics such as decline in cultural vitality, loss of food sovereignty, rampant rates of diabetes, and other key community challenges. This reflection often takes the form of a new form of storytelling. Participants share ‘food memories,’ tell the story of food in the Tohono O’odham community, and connect it to the broader changes and histories of the community. In doing so, they are asked to conduct social analysis, often for the first time in

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their lives. “That is something we talk about in the beginning,” says Anthony Francisco, a member of the New Generation staff.

We talk about what happened to our traditional food system … It did take us to the different events that happened: boarding schools, wars, droughts, relocations. This led us into historical trauma and how that can be a big factor, especially for the younger generations who have no realization of what is going on and what happened and why it even matters to them. They don’t go to boarding school today, but why is boarding school such a big issue today, even though it happened in the 1900s. Why does that matter? How does it effect our lives today? … I think that is what a lot of the older people missed out on. They were caught in that survival mode themselves where they think “this is how we will get by and this is what I have to do.” They didn't have the chance to think of things in this way or think of food as a strong memory for them or even how food is used as a power in some form of structure. They were never taught to think of things in this way. To them – well, I can’t really speak for them, but just seeing their reactions and comments, it just never dawned on them that food can be this powerful or things we do can be this powerful. (A. Francisco, personal communication, 2014)

This reflective process is empowering for program participants. It allows them to come to deeper understandings of their world, the ways in which historical events continue to exert their influence today, the social determinants of health, the root causes of poverty and other key topics. Moreover, it provides the basis for thinking about systems and strategizing how to change them.

WHAT IF THE POND IS POLLUTED OR RUNS DRY?—SYSTEMS THINKING

What if the stream feeding the fishing pond is polluted with industrial toxins? Or the pond has run dry due to changing climactic conditions? Questions about the social, economic, ecological and cultural systems are essential for redeveloping Native food sovereignty and transformative pedagogy in general. Food systems address multiple topics, ranging from food production, processing, distribution, preparation and consumption, to the environmental context, social structures and cultural values that drive them. Yet too often, community development programs still focus on the choices and behaviours of individuals, “consumers,” families and communities. In her discussion of Native American health and nutrition, Jamie Stang (2009) noted:

Even the most culturally competent, evidence-based programs, cannot improve eating behaviors among individuals or populations who live and work in an environment that does not support or provide healthy food choices.

In essence, she argues that without the creation of a supportive environment—a food system that nurtures healthy, culturally-appropriate food choices—individual

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and community choices are meaningless. Or as one tribal elder once said: “They tell us to eat better food. But we can’t eat what we can’t get.” Teaching community members to think about various food systems is central to the New Generation program.

[We teach] the food system that we live in today, our community food system and the industrial food system. (A. Francisco, personal communication, 2014)

As a part of the program’s “Food Justice Curriculum,” community members are asked to explore differences in food systems. Table 1: “Community Defined Differences in Food Systems” reproduces the handwritten posters that emerged from one such session.

Table 1. Community defined differences in food systems

Category Western/Industrialized Food

System Traditional O’odham Food

System

How we heal ourselves from sickness

• Take medicines – pills and pharmaceuticals

• Visit hospital

• Bahidaj [saguaro fruit] • Sugi [creosote bush] • Makai [traditional healer]

Cultural connection to food

• Food reduced to vitamins and minerals

• Meaningless

• Singing • Dancing • Celebrating • Stories

Stages of the food system that we are a part of

• Mostly consumption (unless our job is in some part of the food system; e.g., farm labor, processing factory, Bashas [a grocery store chain] worker

• Planting • Harvesting • Cooking

How knowledge about which foods one should eat gets shared within society

• Advertising and fads • Scientists and health

professionals • Celebrities

• Traditions/stories • Grandparents • Community

Who keeps the seeds How the food affects our bodies

• Multinational corporations • We buy them from seed

companies

• Diet related diseases like diabetes and obesity

• Dependencies

• Farmer Anthony • The community • Nourishes/provides fuel • Cleanses • Helps grow • Protects from sickness

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Although not as comprehensive as the “Dominant Model versus Food Sovereignty Model” presented by Michel Pimbert (2009), this process of engaging community members in thinking systemically is essential for empowering communities to address social, economic, and political issues. In terms of food, it provides an essential tool for thinking about what Native food sovereignty might look like. On a broader level, it teaches a method and process whereby individuals and communities are able to examine the values, social organization, structures, and impacts which define their world; and it helps communities envision different social structures and strategize ways to make that vision a reality.

ROD AND REEL OR TRAWLER AND LONG NETS?—THINKING ABOUT SCALE

One issue that has emerged from the New Generation program’s community-based education activities is related to scale. Issues of scale extend beyond merely environmental sustainability (e.g., “will the pond be overfished”). They also include issues of social scale. Appropriate scaling of food sovereignty projects is essential to their vitality. If they are too small, they fail to provide for the food needs of a people; too large and they run the risk of depleting natural resources and increasing social/economic inequality. In contrast to their non-Native counterparts, however, Indigenous communities have a degree of built-in restrictions on scale. With relatively homogeneous populations in clearly defined territories/bioregions—whether traditional homelands or reservations established through relocation—it may be easier for Indigenous communities to define and limit the scale of their food systems. Exploring issues of scale can be an important part of the process of discussing and creating Indigenous food systems.

EAT THE FISH OR SELL IT?—FOOD SOVEREIGNTY OR GLOBAL FOOD SYSTEM

Should the fisherman eat the fish he catches? Sell it to his neighbour? Or sell it to the highest bidder in the global market? One remaining topic that has often emerged from the New Generation program is the relationship between the local food system and the global food system. To what degree is it desirable or possible to integrate the two? The question whether to produce for internal consumption or for external markets is a central question for food system development in Indigenous communities. Once again, Morrison (2011) illuminates the issue:

Self-determination in this context refers to the freedom and ability to respond to our own needs for healthy, culturally-adapted Indigenous foods. It represents the freedom and ability to make decisions over the amount and quality of food we hunt, fish, gather, grow and eat. Indigenous food sovereignty thus promotes freedom from dependence on grocery stores or corporately-controlled food production, consumption and distribution in the industrialized food system.

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This relationship between local, regional and global food systems is more than philosophical. Within the Tohono O’odham community, members of the New Generation program have struggled with the issue of whether to produce and sell traditional foods within the community—thereby promoting wellness and culture—or to sell their limited products to non-Native ‘foodies’ who are willing to pay three or four times what community members are able to pay. Similarly, concerns about nutrition in Bolivia’s quinoa-growing region have increased significantly even as production of this traditional staple has increased to meet a growing global demand for this new ‘superfood.’

While quinoa prices have almost tripled over the past five years, Bolivia’s consumption of the staple fell 34 percent over the same period, according to the country’s agricultural ministry. (Romero & Shahriari, 2011)

The process of engaging communities in serious conversation about food stimulates a very different conception of food economies than that of the current global food system. When people are encouraged to use the various pedagogical approaches described in this chapter—technical knowledge and practical skills, critical analysis and empowerment, systems thinking, consideration of scale—a radically new vision of food sovereignty emerges. This vision is perhaps most clearly articulated in the Declaration of Nyéléni adopted at the 2007 Forum for Food Sovereignty by about 500 delegates from more than 80 countries. The comprehensiveness, texture and nuance of this vision justifies full consideration:

Most of us are food producers and are ready, able and willing to feed all the world’s peoples. Our heritage as food producers is critical to the future of humanity. This is specially so in the case of women and indigenous peoples who are historical creators of knowledge about food and agriculture and are devalued. But this heritage and our capacities to produce healthy, good and abundant food are being threatened and undermined by neo-liberalism and global capitalism … Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. It defends the interests and inclusion of the next generation. It offers a strategy to resist and dismantle the current corporate trade and food regime, and directions for food, farming, pastoral and fisheries systems determined by local producers and users. Food sovereignty prioritises local and national economies and markets and empowers peasant and family farmer-driven agriculture, artisanal-fishing, pastoralist-led grazing, and food production, distribution and consumption based on environmental, social and economic sustainability. Food sovereignty promotes transparent trade that guarantees just incomes to all peoples as well as the rights of consumers to control their food and nutrition. It ensures that the rights to use and manage lands, territories, waters, seeds,

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livestock and biodiversity are in the hands of those of us who produce food. Food sovereignty implies new social relations free of oppression and inequality between men and women, peoples, racial groups, social and economic classes and generations. (Via Campesina, 2007)

SHARING THE HARVEST: FOOD-BASED EDUCATION THROUGHOUT INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES

Across the Americas—from high in the Bolivian Andes to the deserts of the Sonoran Desert to the frozen tundra of arctic Alaska—Indigenous communities are reasserting their food sovereignty and rebuilding tribal food systems. Rather than developing universal curricula that can be scaled up for use in other Indigenous communities, what emerges from the successes of the New Generation program is a set of principles and processes that can be adapted and potentially used in Indigenous communities across North America and beyond. These include: – Provide technical knowledge and practical skills by engaging students as

subjects, embracing complexity, supporting experimentation, and embracing and reflecting upon both success and failure;

– Teach the skills of critical thought and empower people to conduct social analysis;

– Develop the skill of systems thinking in examining social, economic, cultural and ecological contexts;

– Consider the appropriate scale for projects, food systems and economies; and – Explore the appropriate relationship between food sovereignty and global food

systems. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to exactly how these principles and processes can be applied in Indigenous communities. With their remarkable linguistic and cultural diversity, there can be no one curriculum or program that will be appropriate to every community. However, just as the genetic diversity of Native seeds contributes resiliency and dynamism to agriculture, so too will the pedagogical diversity of the food sovereignty movement contribute to resilient and dynamic Indigenous communities.

NOTES

1 Calculation by the authors: 20,000 of the tribe’s 28,000 tribal members live on the Tohono O’odham Nation. The United States Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service sets per capita food expenditures for the U.S. at $4,229 annually. If Reservation residents spent this amount on food annually, total food expenditures would be $84,580,000. Given high rates of poverty, we estimate that per capita food expenditures on the Tohono O’odham Nation are 25% lower than the national average ($3,172). Thus, 20,000 residents x $3,172 = $63,440,000.

2 Calculation by authors based upon population totals, percentages of population officially recognized as Indigenous, and per capita food expenditures for the following 12 countries: Canada, Mexico, U.S., Costa Rica, Guatemala, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela.

3 We are sensitive to the gendered nature of the “teach a man to fish” trope. It reflects the continued denial of the central role of women in food systems globally, from production and processing to distribution and meaning-making. Several works have focused on gender within the Food

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Sovereignty project, including Patel (2012), Pinheiro Machado Brochner (2014) and Vivas (2012). From its inception, La Via Campesina has asserted that “food sovereignty implies new social relations free of oppression and inequality between men and women, peoples, racial groups, social classes and generations”(Via Campesina, 2007). However, (Julia, White, & Park, 2015) contend that “while women’s rights are seen as central to food sovereignty … few attempts have been made to systematically integrate gender in food sovereignty analysis.” Although an essential project, such an analysis is beyond the scope of this chapter.

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Churchill, W. (2004). Kill the Indian, save the man: The genocidal impact of American Indian residential schools. San Francisco, CA: City Lights.

Cohen, R. J. C. (2012). Rebuilding the Himdag: The fall and rise of Tohono O'odham agriculture and foodways, 1936–2012. (Undergraduate Thesis), Harvard College, MA.

Damman, S., Eide, W. B., & Kuhnlein, H. V. (2008). Indigenous peoples’ nutrition transition in a right to food perspective. Food Policy, 33, 135–155.

Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. Boston, MA: D.C. Heath & Co. Faircloth, S. C., & Tippeconnic III, J. W. (2010). The dropout/graduation crisis among American

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Paganelli Votto, M. (2013). Growing a new generation of farmers. Native Foodways Magazine, Summer.

Patel, R. C. (2012). Food sovereignty: Power, gender, and the right to food. PLoS Medicine, 9(6), e1001223. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001223

Pimbert, M. (2009). Towards food sovereignty: Reclaiming autonomous food systems. London, UK: International Institute for Environment and Development.

Pinheiro Machado Brochner, G. (2014). Peasant women in Latin America: Transnational networking for food sovereignty as an empowerment tool. Latin American Policy, 5(2), 251–264. doi:10.1111/lamp.12054

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Romero, S., & Shahriari, S. (2011). Quinoa’s global success creates quandary at home. The New York Times, 19.

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Tristan Reader University of Arizona Tohono O’odham Community Action (TOCA) Terrol Dew Johnson Tohono O’odham Community Action (TOCA)

SECTION 2

LEADERSHIP IN GLOBAL FOOD SYSTEMS TRANSFORMATION

C. Etmanski (Ed.), Food Leadership, 55–71. © 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

LINDSEY DAY FARNSWORTH

4. BEYOND POLICY

Race, Class, Leadership and Agenda-Setting in North American Food Policy Councils

The Alternative Food Movement is characterized by diverse food production and distribution activities including

urban and rural family farms, community gardens, farmers [sic] markets, green grocers, and associated youth programs [that address] injustices in the current economic system as well as build community by providing spaces for public interaction, jobs, and youth training. (Block, Chávez, Allen, & Ramirez, 2011, p. 214)

This chapter addresses an important gap in the Alternative Food Movement (also referred to as the Good Food Movement) literature by peering into the black box of food policy council organization and process and by asking critical questions about how these organizations square their structures and agenda-setting processes with the social justice values of the larger movement of which they are a part. Food policy councils (hereafter referred to as FPCs) are governmental, non-profit or hybrid institutions that convene individuals representing of a wide range of food-related issues to engage in information exchange and problem solving. In recent years, FPCs have received considerable attention for their potential to facilitate cross-sector policy and programmatic solutions to complex issues such as hunger, environmental health, and regional economic development. As of October 2015, there were 282 total FPCs in North America, an increase from 176 in 2010 (Center for a Livable Future, 2015). Over 75 percent of these FPCs are located in the U.S., with approximately 22 percent in Canada and about 2 percent in tribal nations (Center for a Livable Future, 2015). Outside of North America, food policy councils are largely limited to the UK and other Commonwealth countries, namely Ireland and Australia, where they are comparatively few in number. Most FPCs are local, operating at the city, metro or county levels; only about 12 percent are state-level entities (Center for a Livable Future, 2015). Notwithstanding their recent proliferation, questions persist as to how effectively FPCs advance their social, ecological, and economic goals and the extent to which they have been able to actualize the diversity that they champion (Alkon & Mares 2012; Harper, Lambrick, Shattuck, Holt-Giménez, & Alkon, 2009, p. 37). To achieve just and sustainable food systems, food activists, scholars, students, and practitioners must attend to innovations in food policy, production, access, and supply chain development. They must also attend to innovations in community organization and leadership development within emergent alternative

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food systems. As such, critical reflection on the ways the internal structures, cultures, and processes of FPCs embody and/or contradict their stated goals will be crucial in discerning the strengths and limitations of FPCs as vehicles for progressive food systems change. This chapter explores how FPCs have negotiated this terrain by taking up such questions as: What challenges have FPCs encountered as they have worked to create diverse memberships, inclusive meetings, and relevant agendas? Given the apparent tensions between their various goals, I ask whether we are demanding too much of FPCs and discuss how locating them in a broader movement context could help to conceptually and practically resolve some of these tensions. I close by identifying particular approaches to leadership development at the grassroots, organizational, and movement scales that could reduce the pressure on FPCs to at once serve as both de facto ‘departments of food’ and vehicles for participatory democracy.

CONTEXT & METHODS

This chapter draws on the FPC literature as well as exploratory research conducted in conjunction with the University of Wisconsin–Madison Community & Regional Food Systems Project, which integrates research, education, outreach, advocacy, and community engagement to uncover innovations spanning from urban food production to local food policy. My methods included participant observation and fifteen in-depth interviews with members of three FPCs representative of multiple geographic regions, membership structures, and city sizes. My involvement as a member of the Madison Food Policy Council has also provided sensitizing information that has informed this research. I used a quota sampling method to ensure that interviewees represented a range of topical knowledge and priorities (Gray, 2007, pp. 104–105). My sampling frame was based on topic areas commonly represented on FPCs by member appointment, such as food justice, emergency food provisioning, urban agriculture, farm to institution, food access and policy. Interviewees had varying degrees of involvement with their councils. Individual participation ranged from founding members with over five years of service to members with less than a year of service to individuals whose involvement was intermittent. I conducted and recorded individual phone interviews between October 2012 and February 2013. Interviews focused on uncovering members’ motivations for participating in FPCs and how those motivations shaped their understanding of their councils’ strengths and weaknesses. After transcribing the interviews, I used an abductive coding process to deliberately examine both predetermined and emergent themes (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012). First, I coded the transcriptions with a priori codes, i.e., codes derived from my central research questions rather than the data (Saldaña, 2013). For example, I coded for motivations, outcomes, and barriers to desired outcomes. During the coding process, additional themes emerged from the data; these became grounded theory codes (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005, pp. 507–508). Class and racial

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dimensions of FPC leadership and agenda-setting were not central to my initial research question but were themes that surfaced in many of the interviews. Given the contentious nature of some of the topics discussed, I have given interviewees pseudonyms to protect their anonymity. By and large, interviewees spoke favourably of their FPCs. Most of them could readily identify specific policies or initiatives that resulted from or were strengthened by the work of their FPCs. In “More than the Sum of Their Parts: An Exploration of the Connective and Facilitative Functions of Food Policy Councils,” I draw on a subset of these interviews to discuss how FPCs have amplified the work of their members and partners by accelerating existing projects, incubating and vetting nascent projects, and fostering systems knowledge and partnerships (Day Farnsworth, 2016). However, several challenge areas also emerged throughout the research. Namely, I encountered divergent conceptions about the core functions of FPCs and concerns about their diversity and inclusivity. Both of these challenges raise questions about the composition, culture, and agenda-setting practices of FPCs, which are explored here. Additional research on these topics will be necessary to elaborate or disconfirm these preliminary findings.

FOOD POLICY COUNCILS: COMMUNITY COALITIONS OR EXPERT ADVISORY BODIES?

There is an inherent tension in the way FPCs are discussed in the academic and popular literature. On the one hand, they are framed as a vehicle for promoting participatory democracy—an organizational structure through which citizens can have greater influence over local food system governance (Werkerle, 2004; Winne, 2008). On the other hand, noting the absence of ‘departments of food,’ authors have also described FPCs as quasi-governmental bodies that develop, evaluate, and align food-related policies—tasks that might otherwise fall under the purview of policy-makers and bureaucrats (Hesterman, 2011, pp. 176–184; Pothukuchi & Kaufman, 1999). A survey of the FPC literature surfaces examples of each. However, considering that the majority of FPCs have few if any staff members and limited funding (Harper et al., 2009, p. 38), this dual function seems like a particularly tall order for FPCs to fulfil.

In much of the FPC literature, the question of whether FPCs should be vehicles for participatory food system governance or expert advisory bodies has manifested as a debate about whether FPCs should be seated inside or outside of government (Clancy, Hammer, & Lippoldt, 2007; Dahlberg, Clancy, Wilson, O’Donnell, & Hemingway, 1997; Harper et al., 2009). Research suggests that government-based or affiliated FPCs are more likely to have budgetary and staff support and formal advisory powers than independent FPCs (Clancy et al., 2007). Yet, they are also more vulnerable to resource revocations associated with changes in political administrations. Conversely, non-profit or otherwise non-governmental FPCs may have stronger ties to the grassroots and greater flexibility in challenging existing policies, but they must allocate more time and resources to attracting outside

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funding and tend to have fewer staff members and less formal political influence (Harper et al., 2009).

Other structural and compositional issues facing FPCs include questions about how members should be selected (e.g., by appointment, application, or self-selection) and how decisions should be made (e.g., through consensus or majority rule). With each approach, explicit and implicit decisions are made that reinforce particular notions about the primary purpose of FPCs—namely, whether they should be community coalitions or professionalized policy bodies. Packer (2014) posited that at its core, this tension illuminates the contradictions between FPCs’ “radical” ambitions and “reformist” organizational orientation (p. 14). This research explores how this contradiction manifests in concerns about racial and economic diversity and inclusivity, and simultaneously, as frustration about time and resource inefficiency.

Stumbling Blocks to Food Justice: White Cultural Dominance and Privilege-Blindness

Food justice refers to

ensuring that the benefits and risks of when, what, and how food is grown and produced, transported and distributed, and accessed and eaten are shared fairly. (Gottlieb & Joshi, 2010)

Food justice has become the focus of numerous organizations, gatherings and recent publications (Alkon & Agyeman, 2001; Allen & Wilson 2012; Gottlieb & Joshi, 2010; Hesterman, 2011; Jayaraman & Schlosser, 2013). And a growing number of FPCs are incorporating food justice language into their mission statements. For example, the Los Angeles Food Policy Council’s mission is to serve as

a collective impact initiative working to build a Good Food system for all Los Angeles residents—where food is healthy, affordable, fair and sustainable. (Los Angeles Food Policy Council, no date)

Similarly, the Milwaukee Food Council’s stated purpose is

to develop intentional, positive strategies for a healthy, affordable, equitable food system that nourishes our community and respects the environment. (Milwaukee Food Council, no date)

Yet, interviewees highlighted a dissonance between the inclusive language that some FPCs use to define themselves and the culture they create at their meetings and through their programming. While the participants of this study focused on fairly specific instances of the class-privileged and racialised dynamics within FPCs, their observations echo other voices in the literatures on food justice and race and community food systems. Slocum (2006) highlighted how whiteness—largely unnamed and unacknowledged—has ‘shaped’ discourse, resource allocation, content, and

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staffing decisions of community food non-profits. And other scholars have illuminated other expressions of the presumptive, programmatic and spatial implications of white-centred narratives and leadership in the Good Food Movement (Alkon & Agyeman, 2011). For example, Guthman (2008) examined how race and class-privilege coloured the self-righteousness of University of California, Santa Cruz undergraduates engaged in ‘food justice’ projects targeted at communities of colour. Alkon and McCullen (2011) showed how white, liberal farmers’ market patrons “conflate social and spatial relations” by reading these culturally and corporeally majority-white spaces as ‘community’ spaces despite their demographically unrepresentative and culturally homogenous characteristics. Herrick (2008) showed how making people of colour the target of health and nutrition projects is not only an interpersonal or spatial phenomenon but also manifest at the policy and programmatic scale. Capturing the prevailing sentiment of recent anti-racist food scholarship, Etmanski (2012) noted:

The overwhelming consensus among these authors is that the alternative food movement is dominated by a Euro-white membership that promotes ecologically-friendly, ethical food while—with a sense of tragic irony—largely ignoring racialised injustices. (2012, p. 491)

In FPCs as in other majority-white community food organizations and spaces (e.g., farmers’ markets), whiteness

is a location of structural advantage and involves cultural practices that have come to be understood as normal. (Slocum, 2007, p. 523)

As the above authors observe, together with whiteness, privilege-blindness (McIntosh, 2013) at once endows its beneficiaries with overconfidence while constraining their ability to see the limitations of their normalized experiences. In the remainder of this subsection, I examine how these issues are manifest in the composition and process of FPCs in 1) the exploration of misguided approaches to improving food quality, affordability, and accessibility in communities of colour and low-income neighbourhoods, 2) the challenge of recruiting diverse members, 3) the actual or de facto expectation that non-majority individuals will speak on behalf of “their” communities, and 4) the use of alienating meeting protocol. Interviewees repeatedly observed that FPC discussions about urban agriculture and food access projects were often characterized by what Guthman (2011) describes as an “if people only knew” mentality. Imbued by “whitened cultural histories,” this view presupposes that the primary reasons people do not eat fresh, local, whole foods is lack of awareness or access (Guthman, 2008). Frustrated by such assumptions, Tony, who had a background in anti-hunger organizing and was an intermittent participant of a food policy council in a large metro area explained:

We still don't believe that the Good Food Movement or whatever it is, pays enough attention to the [other] issues affecting low-income people … A lot of recommendations are made that are just ludicrous for someone who’s trying

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to live on $840 a month and is mentally ill and is not liable to ever be hired for any kind of job and is just struggling to survive.

In other instances, FPC members felt that council discussions underestimated the latent potential of existent community resources. Min, the director of a farm-to-table organization based in a low-income neighbourhood of colour noted how race and class bias can affect the way groups conceive of solutions:

A lot of community food system activists come from a middle or upper-class background and they have a middle or upper-class lens, so they make some assumptions around people and their motivation and what they are capable of and not capable of …. They’ll come up with ideas [to improve healthy food access] without having talked to any of the neighbourhood vendors who might be willing to stock healthier options if they were properly supported.

As the above quote demonstrates, race and class privilege combined with a lack of familiarity with particular neighbourhoods can cause people to overlook community assets. This is a primary critique of grocery-store attraction initiatives, which often use public funds to incentivize large retail grocery chains to locate in food insecure areas rather than investing in small businesses, such corner stores and ethnic groceries, which are already located in many communities seeking more fresh food options (Raja, Ma, & Yadav, 2008; Short, Guthman, & Raskin, 2007). By contrast, asset-based approaches (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993) draw on resources and relationships that already exist within a community, e.g., neighbourhood markets, and find ways to strengthen them through technical assistance or infrastructure development. For example, in Los Angeles, FPC staff developed and hosted a series of multilingual trainings for (and in partnership with) neighbourhood market owners that covered topics ranging from bookkeeping to produce purchasing and merchandising. In this way, they enhanced small market operators’ capacity to offer fresh produce and move more products. Without members who can speak to both the strengths and needs of particular food insecure neighbourhoods (in addition to direct input from communities), FPCs can too easily overlook neighbourhood assets even as they sincerely attempt to improve the neighbourhood food environment. Interviewees also highlighted some of the challenges associated with recruiting FPC members in under-represented communities. Several individuals noted how city staffers and white people active in the local food movement tended to approach the same handful of leaders of colour whenever they were trying to diversify a board or event. As Min, an East Asian American, elaborated:

Say you’re African American and you’re doing some ground-breaking work … you’re going to get asked to speak, to serve on boards, and to do all this stuff so it’s hard to attract those people to come to your meetings.

Another interviewee noted that some white and economically privileged people make assumptions about leaders and leadership that prevent them from recognizing the many forms they take. As Mary explained:

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I’ll say [at an FPC meeting] ‘Here are people who know who the key stakeholders in the community’—because it's not always the obvious ones … Influential people come in lots of different packages and they aren't always obvious to people in the majority culture.

Others noted how majority white and class-privileged FPCs can place an unfair burden on non-majority members by putting them (intentionally or not) in positions where they are expected to speak on behalf of certain populations or help other council members realize why particular projects are patronizing or impractical. The following remark, again from Min, expresses understandable frustration resulting from this dynamic:

Quite honestly, some ideas that get mentioned at the Council make my eyes roll. People are very well meaning, but I know the minute they go into communities, they are going to offend people, but I don’t have the time to say ‘You’re full of shit’ or ‘You’re a closet racist.’

Finally, exclusionary practices can also result from subtle, but culturally imbued procedural practices. Protocol such as Robert’s Rules of Order is one such example. Councils formally seated in government may use Robert’s Rules as a matter of course, without recognizing how they may amplify pre-existing power imbalances and can have a silencing effect on individuals who lack a command of them. When asked about the challenges of serving on her FPC, Debbie, who had been on both sides of the emergency food system remarked:

I’m a little shy [at FPC meetings] not really knowing how the politics or protocol work. I’m not as experienced on that as other people are …. It can come across a little heavy or bureaucratic … and I just want to make sure that if I were sitting at the [FPC] table and I was a low-income mom—which I have been—that I wouldn’t feel intimidated.

Packer (2014) encountered similar dynamics in her study of the Rhode Island Food Policy Council, in which she highlights the non-profit FPC’s tendency toward self-imposed bureaucratization (pp. 11–12). As she surmises:

Professionalized, foundation-dependent civic groups circumscribe an alienating form of ‘participation’ that appeals mainly to members who share the same class and educational backgrounds as their founders (and funders) (p. 10).

Indeed, FPCs seated in government are even more wed to participation-regulating protocol, such as quorum requirements and public comment rules.

Whose Agendas Do Food Policy Councils Advance?

Research suggests that FPC members who work in fields such as emergency food security, food service management, economic development, and urban planning tend to view their involvement with FPCs as an extension of their professional

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responsibilities (Day Farnsworth, 2016). Correspondingly, many of the FPC success stories that interviewees highlighted were examples of how their involvement with FPCs gave them access to new partners, information, resources, and legitimacy that enabled them to advance efforts that might not have otherwise been possible. For example, one individual relayed a story about how the FPC helped engage marketing and merchandising experts in a healthy corner store conversion program, which in turn increased the participation of small grocery operators. Notably, such stories were typically imparted by non-profit or public sector staff who, however personally invested, viewed participation in FPCs as an opportunity to advance work-related agendas. My research did not uncover a single story about FPC initiatives that came directly from the grassroots without the support or involvement of a mediating community organization or public agency. Given that FPCs have had difficulty creating inclusive spaces and meaningfully engaging diverse stakeholders, the de facto professionalization of FPC agendas raises questions about the extent to which FPCs may actually divert attention and resources away from grassroots activities. For example, Tony, (a long-time anti-hunger activist) feared that the new government-affiliated FPC in his city was little more than a mayoral pet project that would detract from the on-going food justice work of more radical community-based organizations:

Why can’t the food policy council be something that gets support for stuff people are already doing instead of this whole new group of people parachuting in, and because of their connection with the mayor, sort of co-opting our whole agenda? A useful entity would help find funding and resources for existing groups. (quoted in Day Farnsworth, 2016, p. 257)

His concerns gain currency when considered in light of the following story shared by Shaheen, the director of a community-based organization with a long history of social justice work. While initially sceptical about the new FPC, Shaheen was eventually persuaded to get involved with a citywide event that the FPC was sponsoring. Participating organizations were required to attend planning meetings, complete paperwork, and plan local activities in exchange for FPC funding, volunteers, and publicity. The FPC printed glossy posters and distributed press releases to promote the event, but it ultimately failed to deliver on its promise to provide volunteers and funding to participating community organizations. As she concluded:

What was all this drama about? I was filling out these forms and coming to these meetings … You don't have any money. You can’t send any volunteers. So this was just so we could be part of [your event]?! … We didn’t need to be part of no [FPC event] … It’s like money and flashiness without any substance … I just think all that money they spent doing all that could have actually gone to something that really mattered.

Whether or not other community-based groups shared this experience, this anecdote raises questions about whose idea it was to host the event, who benefits

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from the associated publicity, and whether this type of FPC activity highlights or detracts from more substantive community-based food justice work.

Meanwhile, other interviewees discussed disagreements within their FPCs about whether formalization, which could potentially increase the impact of an FPC, would necessarily come at the expense of further alienating under-represented communities. One individual who was deeply committed to social justice felt that her council’s open membership structure came at the expense of productive meetings and the development of strategic policy agendas, both of which can be crucial for creating systemic change:

There’s been a really strong commitment to keeping [the FPC] ad hoc. It’s an anybody can come anytime kind of meeting. And the difficulty that I have with that is how many times we go back to square one at a meeting … I want to move something. I’m looking for access points and partners to help push particular policy issues … I really want this council to grow into a more formalized body that works to push on policy. (Day Farnsworth, 2016)

Another FPC member and director of an organization that worked on food access issues had a similar criticism of ad hoc membership policies:

I'm not discounting the value of having the grand assembly … But I think it's a mistake to think that the group could really affect policy without having a meeting of either board members or executive directors of the agencies involved in the work. The people who show up at meetings often can’t really represent their organizations. Even if they believe strongly in something, it won’t necessarily result in action when they get back to the office. (Day Farnsworth, 2016)

This observation calls into question whether open membership models are only superficially more inclusive than appointment-based ones, particularly when an organization has no formal advisory powers. Just because an FPC has an open membership structure does not mean that everyone who comes to council meetings has equal influence or decision-making power when they return to their organizations or communities. As such, while open door policies may invite a wider range of stakeholders to participate in discussions about food system change, absent the accompaniment of strategies for building community power and influence, FPCs are unlikely to significantly disrupt existing power balances.

ARE WE ASKING TOO MUCH OF FOOD POLICY COUNCILS?

My research validates what Harper et al. (2009) observe—that FPCs are having difficulty engaging and adequately representing diverse members and constituents and struggling to create effective organizational structures. At the same time, FPCs continue to confront a variety of other challenges including acquiring adequate staff and funding, negotiating complex political environments, and pursuing policy and programmatic activities that balance food system breadth and depth (Harper et

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al., 2009, p. 37). Why, then, did the number of FPCs in North America increase by more than 50 percent between 2010 and 2015?

I suspect that the emergence of new FPCs in spite of the ample documentation of the challenges faced by current and failed FPCs speaks to persisting needs and aspirations. Specifically, it suggests 1) that there is growing recognition of the potential benefits of better coordinated and more participatory food system governance, and 2) that people are eager to participate in and engage diverse communities in this important work. But should the same organizations that are responsible for cultivating participatory democracy in the food system also be expected to serve as collective de facto departments of food? In essence, are we asking too much of FPCs? McClintock (2014) asked this same question of urban agricultural projects. Just as the FPC has effectively been cast as an institutional panacea of the Good Food Movement, urban agriculture has become one of the Movement’s most visible and celebrated modes of production. It has also been credited as a means of promoting “food security and food justice, public health, environmental sustainability, green jobs, education, and community-building” (McClintock, 2014, p. 148). McClintock asserted that this view of urban agriculture is misguided. First, it is impractical to assume that particular agricultural (or institutional) embodiments of the Movement can single-handedly advance its range of agendas. Secondly, these projects have not only emerged as contestations of the dominant food system. In many cases, they have developed to address inequities exacerbated by neoliberalisation (McClintock, 2014). For example, the vast non-profit sector that assists with basic food provisioning for food insecure households is clearly a response to market failures that create poverty and hunger, and it can hardly be understood as a bold reclamation or revisioning of the food system (McClintock, 2014). And yet, regardless of whether a community food initiative is conceived of as a contestation or an accommodation to neoliberalisation, as McClintock (2014) noted:

Systemic change will … not arise from the work of a sparse smattering of urban agriculture projects … To successfully challenge the structural forces that gave rise to urban agriculture movement … requires embedding urban agriculture within a broader framework of justice and structural change. Urban agriculture alone cannot usher in food justice. Food justice requires increased entitlements. It requires jobs and living wages, not just a garden or grocery store in every neighbourhood. (pp. 165–166)

In short, food systems change calls for integrated and systemic solutions that comprehend how inequalities in the food system are symptomatic of larger socioeconomic imbalances. Although many FPCs strive to promote food justice agendas that take seriously such critiques, their exclusionary tendencies and cultural and racial homogeneity combined with the constraints of political realities seem to impede their ability to confront the structural problems necessary to advance their more progressive ideals (Packer, 2014).

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What are the structural implications of this observation for FPCs? In essence, the types of organizational structures and processes that are most effective at fostering inclusion, diversity and participatory democracy are not necessarily the same ones that are best suited to efficiently developing, coordinating or implementing specific policies. In fact, as FPCs become more institutionalized, they appear to adopt bureaucratic cultures, practices, and priorities that distance them from the very communities that they seek to serve and engage (Packer, 2014). Nevertheless, both inclusive food system governance and strategic agenda-setting and policy development are imperative for progressive food systems change. As such, it may be advantageous to 1) rethink the notion of efficiency, and 2) consider how particular FPC goals articulate with the broader systems change goals of the Good Food Movement. In other words, if the end goal is to build FPCs capable of advancing the ideals of food justice, we must build it into their DNA. This may require FPCs to resist the temptation to organize and operate in ways that favour short-term policy wins and instead view their structures and practices as central components of their food systems change work. At the same time, we can collectively nurture a movement context that reinforces FPCs’ most progressive objectives. Questions of leadership and leadership development are implicated in the growing pains of FPCs as well as the composition and trajectory of the Good Food Movement. The remainder of this chapter takes up this topic at three different levels by exploring approaches to leadership development facilitative of greater civic engagement, inclusive organizational practices, and effective movement building.

STENGTHENING OUR INSTITUTIONS AND OUR MOVEMENT THROUGH INCLUSIVE LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

Leadership Development for Civic Engagement

Over four decades ago, United Farm Workers of America organizer and leadership expert Marshall Ganz challenged the common notion that leaders are somehow apart from the rest of us. “In reality,” he noted:

We find leaders everywhere—linking together networks through which we work to achieve common purposes. In every community, church, classroom, and organization hundreds of people are doing the work of leadership without which these efforts would not survive. (as cited in Schmitz, 2012, p. 75)

Paul Schmitz, CEO of Public Allies, a U.S.-based non-profit organization dedicated to youth leadership development, built on this observation and a growing body of leadership literature when he stated that

leadership is not about a position that one is entitled to have; it is about a process in which one takes responsibility to engage. (Schmitz, 2012, p. xvi)

As such, Schmitz (2012) described leadership as

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a dynamic, collaborative, values-based process grounded in relationships and intending positive social change. (p. 86)

Because leaders are everywhere, if an organization has the skills to foster leadership development and a compelling vision (or the ability to support the visions of others), it should be able to engage members. One reason that FPCs may encounter difficulties recruiting diverse members is that they are leading with a solution (FPCs) rather than spending time learning about community priorities. If extensive recruitment is necessary to build diverse membership, that may be an indication that FPCs are not viewed as a particularly inspiring or useful approach to food problems in certain communities. Saul Alinsky (1971) reminded us to stay within the experience of those we are trying to engage and that good tactics are those that people enjoy. If the vision, structure, language, or culture of a proposed FPC fails to resonate with diverse groups of people and diversity is a priority, initiating an FPC may not be the right strategy.

Rather than focusing on FPC development, it may be more productive to employ a community organizing approach to find out what food-related issues are most troubling or important to people. Through one-on-one meetings and community forums, organizers can help surface community food priorities. In time, people may decide that an FPC is needed to realize certain goals. In this case, the particular structure and composition of the council can emerge from specific objectives and political opportunities rather than hypothetical scenarios. In any case, community organizing itself is a powerful way to build leaders from the grassroots and can lead to more inspired and sustainable solutions than strategies that are imported from elsewhere. In the words of Margaret Wheatley (2005) “people support what they create” (p. 89).

Leadership Development for Inclusive Organizations

As this chapter has discussed, overrepresentation of white and class-privileged members can inadvertently lead to misguided or inappropriate project ideas, put non-majority council members in uncomfortable positions, and create exclusive meeting environments. Such imbalances also raise larger questions about an FPC’s accountability to low-income folks and people of colour, who as the targets of many food and health initiatives should have a stronger voice in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of them. FPCs can work to increase inclusivity in multiple ways. For appointment-based FPCs, it could be as simple as expanding the range of appointment categories to include eaters, youth, and elders, in addition to the usual suspects (e.g., school food service director) (Packer, 2014, p. 19). FPCs can also provide opportunities for council members to learn about meeting protocol. Madison, Wisconsin provides semi-regular trainings for the people who serve on city committees to familiarize them with topics including how a bill becomes a law, the role of alders, Robert’s Rules of Order, as well as Open Meetings regulations (Soglin, 2013). These actions can help expand our notions about what constitutes an expert and increase citizen

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knowledge of government procedures and regulations. However, as Schmitz (2012) observed:

One of the big mistakes that groups and organizations make in well-intentioned efforts to add more diverse people involves wanting these new people to join the existing culture. The group wants to bring in new perspective but ends up marginalizing that perspective, because rather than expanding or reshaping group norms to engage the newcomers, the group expects the newcomers to adopt the existing norms. (p. 165)

To engage with diversity and inclusivity issues more deeply, some FPCs have pursued process-oriented approaches to addressing the impact of racism on cultural relations in the food system. For example, the Milwaukee Food Council and the Chicago Food Policy Advisory Council have hosted dismantling racism workshops. Through professionally facilitated exercises, dialogue, and readings, dismantling racism workshops, and other types of anti-oppression trainings invite participants to engage in the difficult work of exploring both the subtle and profound ways in which they have been advantaged or disadvantaged by race and other personal, familial, environmental, and structural factors (e.g., disability, stable housing, quality education, and federal loan programs).

Public Allies has used similar exercises in its programing to help its participants cultivate the awareness and agency necessary to respond to oppressive or exclusive policies, practices, and behaviours (Schmitz, 2012, pp. 155–186). In fact, the organization’s notion of “inclusive leadership” expects leaders to translate their knowledge of “oppression, power, and privilege” into their leadership practice (Schmitz, 2012, p. 77). FPCs that struggle to cultivate inclusive diversity may find that these types of trainings and dialogues can foster a commitment to “inclusive leadership” and mutual accountability, and by extension, increase their reach, diversity of experience and insight, and impact.

Leadership Development for Inclusive Movement Building

Finally, Los Angeles, California offers several compelling examples of effective inside/outside political strategies in which multi-issue organizing and movement building led to demonstrable changes in local environmental policy, food procurement policy, and increased representation of progressive people of colour in local government (Frank & Wong, 2004; Matsuoka & Gottlieb, 2013). In fact, Matsuoka and Gottlieb (2013) identify the Los Angeles Food Policy Council and several of its early achievements as products of this strategic approach, which requires both “mature community-based movements” and supportive elected and appointed officials (p. 464). In particular, they observe that organizing efforts to engage a variety of food systems stakeholders with the purpose of developing a multi-issue food policy agenda not only put food issues on Mayor Villraigosa’s radar, it got them into his agenda. He ultimately appointed the chair of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council as his food policy advisor and advocated for food

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policy during his tenure as President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors (Matsuoka & Gottlieb, 2013, p. 462).

Yet, the origins of this success story arguably predate the Villaraigosa administration. Beginning in the early 1990s, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labour (LACFL) AFL-CIO1 realized that it was out of step with the changing demographics of the Los Angeles region and that its old “checkbook politics” model was no longer working (Frank & Wong, 2004). To grow and diversify its membership and influence state and local electoral politics, the LACFL needed to become more inclusive and engage the grassroots. Over the next fifteen years, the LACFL undertook efforts to develop new labour and political leadership by promoting a social action agenda that embraced a wide range of economic justice issues. It organized new workers, cultivated new alliances—particularly with Spanish-speaking immigrant groups, and implemented sophisticated get-out-the-vote initiatives. By the early 2000s, LACFL and its affiliates had helped to elect a number of progressive leaders into local and state government, many from their own ranks, including Mayor Villaraigosa (Frank & Wong, 2004).

As this example illustrates, the importance of political context and history cannot be overstated. To meaningfully engage diverse leadership and to advance progressive goals, FPCs must be attuned to where they are situated in the broader political context and understand how their political opportunities are circumscribed by this landscape. Without the groundwork laid by progressive labour and community organizing, the Los Angeles Food Policy Council would have found itself in a very different political environment, and may not have come into existence at all. In fact, a previous iteration of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council was initiated in the 1990s and was ultimately dissolved (Matsuoka & Gottlieb, 2013).

CONCLUSION

As Schmitz (2012) observed,

when we fail to engage the talent indigenous to our communities; we can't create sustainable change … to solve persistent community challenges, it is not enough to build more effective organizations. We need to build more effective communities. (pp. xvii–xviii)

Building more effective and inclusive organizations can be an important part of the solution, but we must learn to see organizations, such as FPCs, in context. In truth, FPCs could be (and have been) effective when structured as either grassroots coalitions or as more formal advisory bodies, but the effectiveness of a particular configuration depends on an understanding of how it fits into the broader political ecology.

If, as in Los Angeles, there are “mature community-based movements” and allies in local government, then an FPC may be able to leverage pressure from grassroots groups to advocate for progressive policy changes. However, if the grassroots are not organized and priority issues have not been identified, FPCs may

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find that their agendas become dominated by non-profit and public sector priorities or that their activities become primarily symbolic. There is nothing necessarily wrong with advancing the priorities of the non-profit and public sectors, but given the political realities that FPCs face, absent pressure from more radical voices (e.g., grassroots groups, community organizers), FPCs are likely to pursue largely incremental and reformist change regardless of the values espoused in their mission statements.

Grassroots leadership development through community and electoral organizing can be a powerful way to augment the work of progressive FPCs by building community and political leadership. This work can help to populate FPCs with capable and diverse leaders and strengthen their ties to both elected leadership and the voices of their constituents. These strategies, together with inclusive leadership development activities for existing FPC members (e.g., anti-oppression and city committee trainings), can help grow more diverse and effective FPCs as well as the grassroots movements and government allies that they need to truly promote food systems change.

NOTE

1 The LACLF, locally known as the “County Federation,” is the second largest central labour body in the U.S. and includes such affiliates as the Service Employees International Union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, and several major teachers’ unions; as of 2004, it had 345 affiliates representing over 80,000 members (Frank & Wong, 2004, p. 156).

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Alkon, A. H., & Agyeman, J. (2011). Cultivating food justice: Race, class, and sustainability. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Alkon, A. H., & Mares, T. M. (2012). Food sovereignty in U.S. food movements: Radical visions and neoliberal constraints. Agriculture and Human Values, 29(3), 347–359.

Alkon, A. H., & McCullen, C. G. (2011). Whiteness and Farmers Markets: Performances, perpetuations … contestations? Antipode, 43(4), 937–959.

Allen, W., & Wilson, C. (2012). The good food revolution: Growing healthy food, people, and communities. New York, NY: Gotham Books.

Block, D. R., Chávez, N., Allen, E., & Ramirez, D. (2012). Food sovereignty, urban food access, and food activism: Contemplating the connections through examples from Chicago. Agriculture and Human Values, 29(2), 203–215.

Center for a Livable Future. (2015). Food policy council directory. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Retrieved from http://www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-institutes/johns-hopkins-center-for-a-livable-future/projects/FPN/directory/index.html

Clancy, K., Hammer, J., & Lippoldt, D. (2007). Food policy councils: Past, present, and future. In C. C. Hinrichs & T. A. Lyson (Eds.), Remaking the North American food system: Strategies for sustainability. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Dahlberg, K. A., Clancy, K., Wilson, R. L., O’Donnell, J., & Hemingway, T. (1997). Strategies, policy approaches, and resources for local food system planning and organizing. Local Food System Project. Minnesota Food Association.

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Day Farnsworth, L. (2016). More than the sum of their parts: An exploration of the connective and facilitative functions of food policy councils. In J. Dawson & A. Morales (Eds.), Cities of farmers: Urban agricultural practices and processes. (pp. 245–264). University of Iowa Press.

Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2005). The Sage handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Etmanski, C. (2012). A critical race and class analysis of learning in the organic farming movement. Australian Journal of Adult Learning, 52(3), 484–506.

Frank, L., & Wong, K. (2004). Dynamic political mobilization: The Los Angeles County Federation of Labour. WorkingUSA, 8(2), 155–181.

Gottlieb, R., & Joshi, A. (2010). Food justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gray, P. S. (2007). The research imagination: An introduction to qualitative and quantitative methods.

New York: Cambridge University Press. Guthman, J. (2008). Bringing good food to others: Investigating the subjects of alternative food

practice. Cultural Geographies, 15(4), 431–447. Guthman, J. (2011). If they only knew. The unbearable whiteness of alternative food. In A.H. Alkon &

J. Agyeman (Eds.), Cultivating food justice: Race, class and sustainability (pp. 263–281). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Harper, A., Lambrick F., Shattuck, A., Holt-Giménez, E., & Alkon, A. (2009). Food policy councils: Lessons learned. Oakland, CA: Food First Institute for Food and Development Policy.

Herrick, C. (2008). To the west and east of Interstate-35: Obesity, philanthropic entrepreneurialism, and the delineation of risk in Austin, Texas. Environment and Planning, A, 40(11), 2715.

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Jayaraman, S., & Schlosser, E. (2013). Behind the kitchen door. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Kretzmann, J. P., McKnight, J. (1993). Building communities from the inside out: A path toward finding

and mobilizing a community's assets. Evanston, IL: The Asset-Based Community Development Institute, Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University.

Matsuoka, M., & Gottlieb R. (2013). Environmental and social justice movements and policy change in Los Angles: Is an inside-outside game possible. In D. Halle & A.A. Beveridge (Eds.), New York and Los Angeles: The uncertain future (pp. 445–466). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

McClintock, N. (2014). Radical, reformist, and garden-variety neoliberal: Coming to terms with urban agriculture’s contradictions. Local Environment, 19(2), 147–171.

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Milwaukee Food Council. (n.d.). Our purpose. Retrieved from http://www.milwaukeefoodcouncil.org/ #!purpose/csgz

Packer, M. M. (2014). Civil subversion: Making “quiet revolution” with the Rhode Island Food Policy Council. Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, 3(1), 6.

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Raja, S., Ma, C., & Yadav, P. (2008). Beyond food deserts – Measuring and mapping racial disparities in neighborhood food environments. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 27(4), 469–482.

Saldaña, J. (2009). The coding manual for qualitative researchers. London & Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Short, A., Guthman, J., & Raskin, S. (2007). Food deserts, oases, or mirages? Small markets and community food security in the San Francisco Bay Area. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 26(3), 352–364.

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Slocum, R. (2006). Anti-racist practice and the work of community food organizations. Antipode, 38(2), 327–349. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2006.00582.x

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Lindsey Day Farnsworth University of Wisconsin Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies Centre for Integrated Agricultural Systems Community & Regional Food Systems Project

C. Etmanski (Ed.), Food Leadership, 73–91. © 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

MYRIAM BEAUGÉ

5. DIGGING IN

Food Literacy Communication & Sustainability Advocacy in Community Sharing Gardens

The past two Internet-focused decades have produced a recurring theme: the planet is shrinking. Technological innovation has enabled communication between people, as well as across nations and cultures, at a level of ease previously unimaginable. However, that sense of the world getting smaller also stems from a heightened awareness of the resources that we must extract from the planet to feed a growing population, particularly in urban centres where residents are typically disconnected from their food sources. The United Nations (2015) foresees the global population reaching 8.5 billion by 2030, with more than half of people living in cities. As Balasescu’s research (2011, pp. 297–298) reminds us, an Urban Age is upon us and it comes with significant sustainability challenges. Focusing on two urban extremes, namely the megalopolis that is Istanbul, Turkey, and the comparatively small Romanian city of Bucharest, Balasescu (2011) argued that a city was not a concept removed from its residents and their actions. It was not only inhabited, but also actualised through the residents’ contribution to it and their experience of it, with all of the individual and collective actions, aspirations, and conflicts that one might expect. He identified the need to therefore rethink sustainability as more than a marker of economic growth. He saw it as a broader sphere that also contained the concepts of “co-habitation, negotiation, and harmony” (p. 298). To him, sustainability was related to ethical civic considerations and pertained to people’s connection to each other and the environment. The city of Vancouver, Canada, serves as another potential case in point. With its breathtaking mountain and waterfront views, physically active population, and expanding organic food sector, Vancouver has become a poster city for an idyllic eco-conscious West Coast Canadian life often depicted in the media. But there exists an enduring disconnect between that depiction and the daily struggles of a growing number of vulnerable residents for whom access to fresh, healthy food is anything but a given. As recently as 2013, while Vancouver was grabbing headlines for ranking third in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) annual list of most liveable cities in the world, the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society was diligently assisting more than 27,000 residents in need every week—10 percent more than the previous year (EIU, 2013a, 2013b). This reality moved local environmental stewardship and social justice advocates to promote grassroots initiatives that united communities, as well as improved and secured access to reliable food sources for all residents (Adelman & Sandiford, 2007). This chapter

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examines one of these initiatives, the Edible Garden Project, and its approach to fostering urban ecological and social sustainability leadership through contextualised food literacy communication and the promotion of self-driven, multi-sensory, and place-based adult education.

EXPANSIVE LEARNING: THE CORNERSTONE OF AN EMERGING NETWORKED KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY?

Food Literacy: An Evolving Concept

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines literacy in simple terms as, “knowledge that relates to a specific subject” (2015). Add the word food and one might be inclined to think of food literacy as skill-based food knowledge. Before delving into my research on the Edible Garden Project, I spent a lot of time searching for a standard definition, one on which scholars in different fields—from education to health sciences—could agree. I did not find one. Instead, every definition I stumbled upon contributed to mounting evidence that food literacy was in fact not a specific term, but an emerging and evolving concept (see, e.g., Sumner, 2015). To me, it eventually came to mean a sphere of knowledge that included not only information about food (e.g., where and how it grew, how it was prepared, and its nutritional value), but also what role food played in socio-economic organisation and how all of the choices we as citizens of the world made around food (e.g., production, distribution, pricing, sales and consumption) affected our health, the environment, and our overall human experience.

On a Community Mission: The Edible Garden Project

The Edible Garden Project was born out of a need to give vulnerable residents living on the City of Vancouver’s North Shore access to fresh local produce. From the start, it was meant to bridge a gap that a Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) study had helped to identify in 2005 (Edible Garden Project, 2016). Sustainability advocates, including representatives of VCH, District of North Vancouver, City of North Vancouver, North Shore Recycling Program, North Shore Neighbourhood House, community volunteers, and agencies, formed a coalition with the goal of growing fresh food for donation. In 2006, the programme formally began and three years later, the Queen Mary Demonstration Garden was built. The North Shore Community Garden Society was also set up to support local initiatives and expand what is now a network of nine fruit and vegetable gardens that volunteers plan, cultivate, harvest, and maintain in order to share fresh bounty with people in need. They do it through social service partners such as the Harvest Project, Sage Women’s Transition House, and the Greater Vancouver Food Bank’s Food Hub. Add to that individual advocates who independently grow their own produce at home in support of the cause and the Edible Garden Project becomes not only an organisation that allows North Shore residents and groups to grow and donate food,

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learn about gardening, and meet new like-minded people, but also a vehicle to build community around shared ecological and social sustainability values.

The Project

Seeds of Sustainability: Food Literacy Communication in Sharing Gardens is an ethnographic research project that I undertook in the summer of 2013 for my thesis while completing my MA in Intercultural and International Communication at Canada’s Royal Roads University. Drawing on scholarly work around issues of food security (Dixon, Donati, Pike, & Hattersley, 2009), the promotion of alternative agriculture practices and land use (Ladner, 2011; Naylor, 2011), sustainability communication (Shane & Graedel, 2000), and locally-based collaborative economics and politics (Cohen & Garrett, 2010, p. 473; Curtis, 2003; Perkins, 2007; Sens & Stoett, 2010, p. 70), I set out to explore how the Edible Garden Project’s sharing gardens might encapsulate various local sustainability issues—from crop diversity and waste management to resource allocation and productivity metrics (Coenen, Benneworth, & Truffer, 2012; Servaes, Polk, Shi, Reilly & Takupitijage, 2012, p. 110). I researched how they not only acted as “arenas of development” (Jorgensen, 2012), but also demonstrated how sustainability might exist through the ever-changing links that connected members of a community (Garud & Gehman, 2012). On Vancouver’s North Shore, where housing prices alone were among the highest in the city (Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, 2014), the community sharing gardens had emerged as dynamic settings where volunteers exchanged and generated local knowledge about food, invested themselves in producing food in an ecologically responsible manner to help support their vulnerable neighbours, and came to understand urban sustainability as a city’s long-term viability through the well-being of its residents and environment (Block et al., 2011; Dempsey, Bramley, Power, & Brown, 2011). Instead of considering sustainability as a topic of communication within the context of urban economic growth (Balasescu, 2011, p. 297–298; Chang, 2010, 2013), putting sustainability principles into practice through the process of teaching and acquiring food literacy skills in sharing gardens became the means by which to communicate food security and sovereignty as a social value (Melkote, 2002; Shi, Cheng, Lei, Wen, & Merrifield, 2011; Starr, 2010; Ziemann, 2011). In essence, by looking at these gardens, I was researching something akin to Carm’s (2013) notion of expansive learning:

Expansive learning takes place at the crossroads of education, knowledge management, and innovation. It investigates the links between the individual and the social in vertical and horizontal dimensions of concept formation and knowledge creation. The horizontal sideways dimension of co-learning is strategically mediated through collaboration in a multidimensional partnership where subgroups are faced with questioning and reconfiguration in the cultural context of rules and boundaries between the different actors, organizations, or levels acknowledging the need for sustained horizontal and

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vertical forms of collaboration in order to meet the overall objectives. (p. 3461)

The connection between the two was what I sensed to be a need to re-conceptualise the goal of education for all and place it in the context of education for sustainability (Carm, 2013, p. 3448). The main objective of my research was to better understand how volunteers in Edible Garden Project sharing gardens used the multisensory experience of group gardening to enhance the processes of teaching and acquiring food literacy skills. I also sought to find out how the volunteers established and articulated the connection between their own actions and the nurturing of a healthy, sustainable community (Teng, Escaler, & Caballero-Anthony, 2011, p. 60), becoming networked leaders in an emerging knowledge-based micro-economy.

Capturing Learning in Action

I chose sensory ethnography (Crang & Cook, 2007; Nakamura, 2013; Pink, 2009) as my methodology. Approaching the Edible Garden Project as not only a community of volunteers and food growing experts, but also a culture with its own language, value system, and customs, ethnography as a broad research strategy seemed fitting because it focused on a culture-sharing group (Creswell, 2013, p. 90). What explicit instructions and performed knowledge was communicated between members? What knowledge was assumed? How did members position themselves within the broader local society, particularly as it related to their connection to vulnerable residents? Ethnographic research could help answer these types of questions. From there, placing an emphasis on sensory ethnography (Pink, 2009) was the next logical step. Food and the process of acquiring food literacy skills are highly sensory experiences in the context of a sharing community garden, a place where people come to grow food together to donate to others, so it made sense to employ a research strategy to match. Sensory ethnography helped me capture the many facets of the sustainability and food security communication that occurred among the sharing garden volunteers and staff, as well as between the research participants and me. Being alert to the sensory aspects of communication also helped me understand what sustainability-related meanings the volunteers drew from the sensory experience of sharing food knowledge (Pink, 2009, p. 73), how their senses supported information retention, and how the emotions they triggered might have turned food production practice into social value. Finally, the research strategy positioned me within the sharing garden culture as not just an observer who was removed from the communication that was taking place, but as a “sensory apprentice” (Pink, 2009, p. 69) who worked alongside them, as well as in my own home-based garden. The fact that one of the organisation’s core mandates was the sharing of knowledge among people with varying skill levels made my participation as a keen yet inexperienced helper possible.

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Methods of Data Collection

I collected data primarily through participant observation and field notes within the sharing garden environment, and semi-formal interviews. This data collection involved a total of 19 participants, including four members of the Edible Garden Project staff and nine volunteers who regularly attended group gardening sessions at sharing gardens (namely the Booth, Bridgman, Lillooet, Lynnmour, Queen Mary and Sailview gardens) and Loutet Farm, my primary sites on Vancouver’s North Shore. The volunteer who coordinated BUG (Building Urban Gardens) Blitzes to support people who wished to start a food garden, as well as five other local food sovereignty and sustainability advocates, completed my group of participants. I used hand-written field notes to record data and also photography as means of generating additional qualitative data through participant observation (e.g., documenting non-verbal communication and artefacts) and providing more cultural context to help me make sense of the data that I had gathered using the other research methods (Pink, 2010).

Data Analysis

The first step in my analysis was to discern between emic (i.e., reflecting the views of the participants) and etic (my perceptions) data to get a more holistic understanding of the phenomena that I was researching (Creswell, 2013, p. 96). The next step was to code my data using both a framework chart, a mechanism that helped me deconstruct the sharing garden experience into learning themes (namely communication focused on food literacy and security, ecological and social sustainability, and food community dignity), and a concept map (see Figure 1, inspired by Smiciklas, 2012, p. 39) that could demonstrate how all of these themes co-existed (Crang & Cook, 2007, pp. 140–146; Seale, 2012, pp. 366–392) in the communication that occurred in the sharing gardens and off-site through the networks to which the gardens were connected. These analytical tools were highly useful in researching multiple sites using my methods of data collection. They also helped to identify what were effectively different learning modules that collectively formed the Edible Garden Project ‘curriculum’ that volunteers approached and worked on at their own pace in a self-directed yet collaborative manner so that they could at once evolve as learners, teachers, programme developers, and community leaders.

SPROUTING KNOWLEDGE: FOOD LITERACY AND SUSTAINABILITY NURTURED IN SHARING GARDENS

Growing Food is a Sensory Learning Experience

One of the research participants can no longer imagine eating produce that is not fresh and local, preferably straight from the garden. It is not surprising considering that she is the Edible Garden Project’s former community coordinator and was its

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having that shift in thinking about their food and…really attaching more value to their food. I think having the sharing gardens is amazing because of the learning opportunity with the community. For myself, it completely changed the way I looked at food. Once you see that, you can’t really go back. (C. Hardie, personal communication, November 22, 2013)

Before Edible Garden Project volunteers get to taste test the produce that they grow, there is a lot of knowledge that they acquire and exchange about their group’s culture, the places that they inhabit during gardening sessions, and the work they need to accomplish over a growing season. Each phase of their work solicits all of their other senses—sight, hearing, smell and touch. Instead of relying on a top-down learning system, in which experienced lead volunteers would solely provide a precise set of written and/or oral instructions to their crew prior to the gardening session so that they could later execute a plan, all members gather at the space and step into its localised culture. They come ready to collaborate, ask questions, identify challenges, come up with solutions, make mistakes, and most of all contribute their energy to moving their cause forward, namely growing food for their vulnerable neighbours. While the volunteers bring their own sets of gardening experience, skills, personality, and motives for participation, they all have an equal chance to alert their senses to learning opportunities that lie in all aspects of growing food. This includes: 1) food literacy (e.g., the nutritional benefits of integrating fresh produce into one’s daily diet, the value of produce diversity, and how one goes about growing food in an urban setting); 2) ecological stewardship (e.g., the advantages of creating arable pieces of land, however small, in a city, how one can repurpose old tools and materials in a garden, and turning household organic waste into fertiliser that’s free of chemicals); 3) social sustainability (e.g., how gardens create links between people across socio-economic groups, and how gardens level the playing field in terms of people’s access to food knowledge and avenues to apply it); and 4) the importance of food community dignity (e.g., why the gardeners like their vegetable beds to be tidy, and selecting and harvesting produce with the goal of delivering high-quality products to food recipients). Volunteers can see, hear, feel and smell the performance of this knowledge and its multiple outcomes.

Seeing is Believing so that You Can Remember

The sense of sight tends to be the first one solicited. The volunteers see each other arrive at a gardening session, recall (for regular volunteers) or identify (for newcomers) the space, and visually reassemble their sharing garden culture. They assess the state of the garden, look for opportunities to (re)organise tools and supplies to optimise their productivity, and show each other how they work in the garden. Sight enables volunteers to “read each other’s moods and figure out who likes to do their own thing or work in teams,” as one participant said. It also helps in remembering what achieved goals look like (see Figure 2).

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it’s just something that many people never really thought about. (C. Hardie, personal communication, November 22, 2013)

As Edible Garden Project’s manager noted, it makes the project’s purpose that much clearer.

I think in a lot of ways we’re just a place of inspiration. We’re demonstrating what can be done. Our sharing gardens, they are in all sorts of different places and spaces on purpose so we can show people, yeah it’s possible to [grow food] on a strata property or on a rooftop. It’s possible to do this in a public park, in a community garden, in your front yard, in your backyard or on your boulevard. So even though you don’t necessarily talk about them as demonstration areas and that [they’re there] for that purpose, they are. (E. Jubenvill, personal communication, March 5, 2014)

In these small “arenas of development” (Jorgensen, 2012), communication about food literacy, ecological and social sustainability, and food community dignity is effectively taking place (Ziemann, 2011, p. 89). The gardens, therefore, become at once a locus of and vehicle for communication.

DISCUSSION

Local Organic Production by Any Other Name

Permaculture by definition assumes a symbiotic relationship between human actors and their natural habitat, so it is no wonder that discourse surrounding this agricultural system typically includes such buzzwords as ‘organic.’ Yet, as permaculture advocates, Edible Garden Project volunteers make little use of the term when working and communicating with each other in sharing gardens. It is as though situating their sites within the current sustainability discourse is not a set priority. Rather, sustainability communication is about the experience of what are essentially applied organic agriculture principles, regardless of whether or not the practice meets every criterion necessary for the product thereof to officially be labelled as organic. The product of the volunteers’ labour is not packaged into standardised containers with labels or branding of any kind; it is shared in bulk without concern for the type of market competition that is integral to for-profit food production and distribution. Communication within the sharing gardens, therefore, is focused on building a collaborative community and on the elements that represent the essence of the food that is produced, some of which are also markers of what is commonly identified as local organic produce—its freshness, untainted nature, local production, variety, and accessibility. Within the context of the sharing gardens, the terms ‘organic’ and ‘local’ are not pronounced to evaluate modes of production and the results thereof as if these were removed from community members’ daily life and belonged to someone else. Their meaning is learned through performance to demonstrate that food production is woven into a shared human, community-anchored experience. As Vancouver-

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based urban agriculture advocate and former city councillor Peter Ladner (2011) noted:

Many cities are blurring the boundary line that used to dictate that food is grown ‘out there’ and eaten ‘in here,’ give or take a few backyard gardens. (p. 42)

When this line dissolves and urban dwellers’ food is produced where it is consumed, an opportunity arises to gain a spatial perspective on where/how societies and economies transition toward sustainable modes of production and consumption (Coenen, Benneworth, & Truffer, 2012). The sustainability communication that occurs verbally and through the performance of food production tasks in sharing gardens therefore becomes a useful indicator of a broader society’s transition journey, along with the challenges that it faces and opportunities that lie ahead.

Moving the Market Goal Post: Access among New Economic Performance Parameters

Like Shane and Graedel (2000), Edible Garden Project’s sharing garden volunteers have developed their own markers of not only activity, but also performance. For them, giving vulnerable residents on Vancouver’s North Shore more direct and reliable access to fresh produce, both in terms of physical proximity and affordability, is the return that they seek for their investment of time and resources. The way they assess their performance factors in ongoing response to local need, not the creation of product demand (e.g., through advertising or branding deals) or market-share gains on the competition. One of their underlying principles is community collaboration, as the Edible Garden Project’s manager noted:

If you zoom out a little and look at the community food organisations or any organisation delivering food programmes on the whole North Shore, it’s a very collaborative environment and network. We all work very hard not to duplicate or not to step on each other’s toes or to compete; we complement [each other]. The door is always open to have these conversations and figure out how we can leverage each other’s strengths to make [things] better as a whole, which I think is very valuable and is not something that’s true for every community. (E. Jubenvill, personal communication, March 5, 2014)

These are foretelling signs of the silver lining that Balasescu (2011) spotted in the planet’s increasingly urbanised future:

We must imagine the cities of tomorrow starting now. We must integrate in their design not only our environmental concerns but also our human dimension and moral concerns. Maybe the very “design” of the “sustainable/green economy” should be built on the possibility of life with no economic growth. And it should definitely reintroduce ethical concerns

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(included but not limited to ecology) and un-commodified emotions into the measurement that indicates performance. (p. 298)

I Think and Learn, Therefore we Are: Individual Mindfulness Helps Reshape the Community Concept

Members of a community, however tightly bound, do not co-exist in a vacuum. There are outside forces, such as local and national government policies, which can have a significant impact on their relations and how power is shared among them. These forces can also affect how individuals position themselves within that context, which in turn influences how they might evaluate what Chang (2013, p. 237) referred to as the cost of shifting to a more flattened sustainability model.

In its best practice, the mutually reinforcing relationship between natural capital and social capital leads to “killing two birds with one stone,” as well as an increase in capital for future production, for a community. This result may serve as a stimulant to discussions on an alternative to the conventional development path (Chang, 2010). While considering putting this mutual reinforcement into practice, one should be aware of what might be sacrificed: individual values, to a certain extent, and possible harm to other forms of social capital.

Edible Garden Project volunteers actually do not reject individual values. In fact, they celebrate the pursuit of an internalised sustainability experience and support each other to shape that experience so that it can meet individual needs, such as developing leadership skills and learning the specific techniques that they wish to apply in their own personal gardens. But they remain conscious of their common sharing garden goal, which is to serve the community. The garden volunteers’ contributions are seen as neither pure sacrifices nor self-indulgent do-good acts, but as community investments. The garden volunteers invest their time and energy into growing food for others because they view the fostering of food sovereignty and the adoption of ecolocal agriculture as worthy returns for all community members, including themselves. It is a path that researchers Edmonds-Cady and Sosulski (2012) wished social work students would have taken, having noted:

Embracing diversity and confronting privilege and oppression is key to effective, holistic practice and is a principal competency for students. (p. 48)

Such collaborative local economics offer alternatives to balance-of-power focused systems that have historically represented the organisation of global economies and in which one economic actor’s gain is another’s loss in a perpetual sum-zero game (Sens & Stoett, 2010, p. 70).

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Beyond the Physical Space: Exploring Virtual Connections among Grassroots Actors

Taking into consideration that the current communication that occurs off-site is relatively low-tech when it comes to operating sharing gardens individually and collectively, even if the Edible Garden Project as a whole does use the Web and social media consistently, how would things change if more of the latest technology were introduced? Would it enhance or hinder on-site communication and the volunteers’ reliance on multisensory transfer of information? This was discussed at a sharing garden planning meeting when a volunteer introduced an online tool that she used to keep track of her work. Some volunteers welcomed the idea, while others were not so quick to warm up to it, visibly curious but apprehensive of how it might change their individual gardening experience and their ability to control it to a certain extent. If technology were eventually introduced in the gardens’ regular processes, it would open up an avenue for further research into the parallel that might exist between the multisensory experience of a natural learning environment like a sharing garden and that of multimedia, all in the context of food literacy education and sustainability communication.

CONCLUSION

It has been 12 years since VCH formally identified food security as a gap on its city’s North Shore, leading to the creation of the Edible Garden Project. Since then, Edible Garden Project staff and sharing garden volunteers have dedicated their time and efforts to producing food for their vulnerable neighbours as both a sign of solidarity and the articulation of the value that they placed on ecological and social sustainability leadership. By generating and sharing food knowledge, as well as promoting food literacy as a worthy pursuit within a welcoming community, the garden volunteers are showing others multiple facets of sustainability mindfulness. Their actions, therefore, become forms of sustainability leadership. The year 2013 marked the first year that the group’s gardens had had stable, predictable production, a sign that Edible Garden Project had matured from a grassroots, last-resort aid mechanism to what could potentially become a viable ecolocal food production system. It has been a transition journey toward sustainability. Edible Garden Project volunteers have had and continue to have the multisensory experience of being community development actors who produce and share knowledge, and witness the impact of the tasks that they perform within an education network. As I completed my research, they were about to further refine and add yet another layer of complexity to their food literacy and sustainability communication with the launch of Edible Garden Project’s Multi-Herb Culture Garden, a project run at the Queen Mary sharing garden in collaboration with the North Shore Multicultural Society, with funding from the Vancouver Foundation. Now in operation, the project sees North Shore residents with diverse cultural backgrounds work together to plan, design, build and manage the herb garden to

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grow herbs and spices that are consumed around the globe, from China to Iran. The idea behind it is for the Edible Garden Project to run a garden whose participants better reflect the North Shore’s cultural mosaic—back in 2011, approximately one-quarter of Vancouver’s North Shore residents had entered a non-official language as their mother tongue on that year’s Census, and the region has experienced significant growth ever since, particularly in its Persian, Chinese, Korean, and Filipino cultural communities (North Shore Multicultural Society, 2016). However, communication methods evolve within the Edible Garden Project’s sharing gardens, the work that volunteers perform there and the educational opportunities provided will likely be needed for some time to come. While Vancouver continues to grab headlines for its high liveability rankings, the Food Bank hub opens every Wednesday to serve eager clients at the North Shore Neighbourhood House.

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Myriam Beaugé North Vancouver, Canada

C. Etmanski (Ed.), Food Leadership, 93–106. © 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

SEJUTI DAS GUPTA

6. GUJARAT AGRICULTURAL SUCCESS

A Case of a Transformational Leader or a Transactional Leader?

India is ranked 67 out of 81 countries in the world with the poorest food security status (International Food Policy Research Institute’s Global Hunger Index, 2011). In the composite index of food insecurity of rural India, Gujarat is a star performer. In 2011, Gujarat registered high in food insecurity and it is amongst the top three worst affected states in India. This comes at a time when the last decade has celebrated the state’s 10 percent growth rate in agriculture. The intention here is to understand how these contradictory facts coexist and reflect on what it means for the nature of political leadership of the country and the social structures therein. Political leaders of the Indian state of Gujarat (where this case study took place) certainly have done something right given such high growth rates, yet something seems to have simultaneously gone abysmally wrong. To build an understanding, the drivers of such agricultural growth will be identified in the pages that follow. The purpose of this chapter is to attempt to generate an understanding of the political economy of agricultural policy and its implications. The main support base of the present leader will be analysed by identifying the coalition partners of the state. These will then feed the question: Does Gujarat leadership qualify as transformational or transactional? In this situation, leaders could be influential because it is in the best interest of the followers to do what the leaders want (Kuhnert & Lewis, 1987). Or is agricultural growth a function of the political settlement operating in the state between leader and elites? The why question will be answered through evaluation of region-state leadership qualities and priorities and whether local-institution leadership has been successful in resisting the big-picture vision or has been subsumed within it—thereby neglecting the needs and wants of the common people. The larger question is: Given the current levels of poverty, the agriculture-dependent nature of the Indian population, and increasing food insecurity, where are the common people in this approach to governance? After all, people are the main reason why the state, as an organisation, exists. The inquiry was conducted in the domain of task prioritisation in policies and budget allocation undertaken by Narendra Modi’s government (the elected leader). It also inquired into how the organisation (in this case, the state) geared towards achieving the set goals by enthusing the members. To understand the nature of leadership, this chapter reflects on new techniques adopted to motivate the people working in the government. It should be acknowledged that the state government (both elected and bureaucracy) were under the leadership of Chief Minister (CM) Narendra Modi during his 12-year ruling period (2001–2014). He has developed a

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reputation as the strongest leader that India has had since the first Prime Minister, Nehru, and in 2014, Modi was elected as the Prime Minister of India.

LEADERSHIP: A THEORETICAL UNDERSTANDING

The words leader or leadership qualities are commonplace, but they have a theoretical and historical background which is widely debated. Although recent scholars have largely moved away from trait-oriented leadership theories (Yukl, 2013), historically, thinkers have often tried to identify the qualities, characteristics, and values which make for a good leader. As early as the third century BC, for example, Plato ascribed wisdom as the most critical aspect of leadership as he formulated the notion of ‘philosopher king.’ During the Renaissance, Machiavelli later spoke of the leader as ‘a mix of a lion and a fox.’ Max Weber remains seminal in formulating both the qualities of a leader and categorising them on the basis of these characteristics. For him, charisma, legality, and tradition are the three sources of leadership (Weber, 1947; see also Durant, 1926; Russell, 1967; Skinner, 1978). Putting theory into practice in India, leaders of caste or kinship groups, for instance, would fit Weber’s category of ‘traditional authorities.’ However, this category is not as relevant for this chapter1 as the other two categories of legality and charisma. Those who hold legal authority are likewise leaders and, in this case, it refers to the elected members of the legislative assembly or parliament insofar as they have legal sanction. Weber’s third category is based on the individual charisma of the leader, who can influence the people with or without legal authority. In Weber’s conceptualisation, it is a positive thing to be able to influence others, a notion that has been carried forward in 20th century scholars like Burns (1978) and Bass (1985, 1997). Since the 1950s, politics as a discipline entered a phase of behaviouralism in the United States, which impacted leadership studies as well. Focus singularly came to be devoted on individual behaviours, which by the 1970s lead to the crystallisation of two notions dominating leadership studies: transactional and transformational. Behaviour was to be studied closely to reflect on the nature of leadership. According to Burns (1978), transactional leadership “requires a shrewd eye for opportunity, a good hand at bargaining, persuading, reciprocating” (p. 169), whereas he regarded transformational leadership an ethical construct. Bass (1985) developed transformational leadership further and characterised it as a process by which followers trust and admire their leader, hence are influenced to take up newer tasks over what they were originally allocated. Later scholars argue that transformational leadership as originally conceived by Bass (1985) is not necessarily moral insofar as it only affects a positive change amongst the followers. It could cause the followers to take the path of “negative, unethical and immoral directions” depending on the leader’s personality and expectation (Parry & Proctor-Thomson, 2002, p. 75). A leader may demonstrate a transformational leadership style, but it could be underlined by self-interest and self-satisfaction; such a leader could be described as pseudo-transformational. On the other hand, if

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leaders are connected to their communities, and have concern for their organisations, in this case the people they are governing, then it could be described as a case of authentic transformational leadership (Parry & Proctor-Thomson, 2002). A chief shortcoming of this body of leadership literature is its overt focus on the individual capability of a leaders and the influence they wield on the people, as Kuhnert and Lewis (1987) have argued. Much literature has been written about outcomes of such leadership rather than identifying the underlying motivations of their behaviour (Bommer, Rubin, & Baldwin, 2004; Ployhart, Lim, & Chan, 2001). Therefore, little is known about why few leaders become transformational and others do not. Although it is crucial to understand the nature of leadership, this chapter focuses more on a critical appraisal of policies pursued by a leader along with his connection with the elite groups dominating the political coalition. In the case of Gujarat under Narendra Modi, interrogating such factors can potentially answer if his efforts have been geared to bring a change for wider citizens or merely to cater to the interests of a few groups over others. Two concepts are relevant to round off this discussion of leadership: the concepts of political settlement and elitism. Khan (2005) described settlement as a coalition amongst elites. Any coalition consists of different powerful social groups like big landowners, military, industrial elite, intelligentsia. It helps in maintaining political stability and further economic growth. This concept is significant insofar as it appears to be a viable explanation to make sense of the Indian case under investigation here, not to mention other countries in South Asia. Likewise, elite as a term has been used widely by political scientists and sociologists, referring to a political system where power is concentrated in the hands of a few. Elitism sits in contrast to pluralism, where power is distributed amongst multiple groups. Theorists who use elitism as productive concept show that the control is founded on the interlocking relationships between a few powerful groups. It often consists of leaders in business, government, civic organizations, educational and cultural establishments, and the mass media. Commonly referred to as the power elite, they can exert tremendous control on government in policy making and resource allocation. This is enabled by their control over the economic resources of the major business and financial organisations in the country. Their power may not be personal and could be drawn from being part of top management of the big corporations. In the context of India, an elite consists of the rich and big farmers who have historically been important and gained power after the Green Revolution, in regions like Punjab and Gujarat where commercial agriculture took firm roots (Lerche, 2014; Rutten, 1995).

CONTEXT OF THE STUDY

My fieldwork was conducted in 2011–2012 and included 45 long interviews and a literature review that encompassed scholarly articles, grey literature reports, and media sources. Interviews were held over a period of three months and then I

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revisited districts on two occasions the following year. Respondents included journalists, businessmen, academics, farmers, members of political parties, and social activists. The respondents were spread across nine districts, located primarily in central and southern Gujarat. This region has been marked by one leader’s dominance since 2001 that has come to be identified as the state itself, where all success is ascribed to his capability and vision. India had a similar experience in the 1970s when the slogan was ‘Indira is India’—Indira Gandhi being the then prime minister. Gujarat and its economic success have been similarly ascribed to Narendra Modi. Across the board, he has been hailed as a good manager; some have called him a management guru and others, a heavy-handed administrator. Journalists, academics, and businessmen have argued that his regime is the one bringing in transformation in the state’s economy and society, unforeseen in other states in India (Jagannathan, 2014). Although the level of change is debatable given variation in the rates of growth of agriculture, that there has been a change is non-negotiable. In the following sections, I will go through the policy tenets and its implication for different sections of farmers.

FIELDWORK

This section is derived from both a literature review and findings resulting from my fieldwork. It aims to establish that the transformational leader is bound by the political settlement operating within the state. Consequently, I argue that Modi is trying to bring in policies to perpetuate the interest of certain elite groups over others. In this sense, his leadership constitutes a transaction between the leader (state) and these social groups. This transaction is a crucial factor in maintaining the leader’s political power while the social groups exert both political and economic power. To elucidate the transaction, state agricultural policies since 2001 have been highlighted, as well as how each of these policies are meant to benefit the resource-rich farmers alone to drive agricultural growth, thus serving the interests of the leader and one of the elite groups.

Understanding the Policy

Gujarat’s total cropped area is 128 lakh2 hectares, which equals 65 per cent of the total area of the state. The policy statements post-2000 and the Agro-vision 2010 document—both retrieved from government websites—have set the goals and stipulated a planned path. Though this chapter does not present an exhaustive list of policies, these documents are the source of the tenets discussed here. The central goal is achieving growth in the primary sector, agriculture. The path stipulated to achieve this growth is input centricity, meaning using chemical pesticides, high yielding seed and fertilisers, and hybrid seeds, all sourced from market. The state is found favouring commercial and high value cropping and providing aid for required infrastructure to grow these crops. But adopting cash crops demand various other resources, as Byres (1981) and Cleaver (1972) have pointed out in

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context of the Green Revolution, and as Gidwani (2000) has described in the context of cotton. Hence, such policy initiatives, when put to the test in a political economy perspective, are found to be more lucrative for those capable of investment, like large-scale capitalist farmers.3 The not so glorious part of the story is that the nutritional poverty levels in Gujarat are higher than all-India levels (Dixit, 2009). Dixit argued that this is because official figures do not consider the change in consumption patterns, caused partly by high relative food prices, thereby affecting poverty estimations. It also means the government’s commitment to a task of rapid growth has glossed over a critical aspect of marginalised people, for example Tribals (which is the Indian term for Indigenous people), small farmers, wage labourers, and female labours who are also the subjects of the state. As such, these agricultural policies can be described as exclusionary insofar as they leave the resource-poor out of their circle of benefits. As mentioned previously, since 2000, the state has had a strict administrator and visionary at the helm, Mr. Narendra Modi. It is widely believed that, through its strategy of promoting large-scale farming, this leader’s plan has altered both the agricultural sector and farmers to an extent unlike anywhere else in India (Shah, Gulati, Hemant, Shreedhar, & Jain, 2009). I argue that the tenets of policy create and operate on the premise of a sharp distinction between big capitalist farmers and the majority of farmers who operate at a much smaller-holdings. Moreover, this is a clear departure from any association with social justice ideals that could have a positive effect on more than half the population. The Gujarat government has blatantly taken a pro-industry stand (discussed in the next section). The pivotal problem of such a vision is that it demonstrates little concern for small farmers and wage labourers. Liaison with big multi-national corporations (MNCs) like Monsanto and Cargill translates into pushing for usage of chemical inputs and hybrid seeds—procured from those very MNCs—to achieve higher growth rates. Therefore, big industries gain in the kind of agriculture Modi is advocating. Agriculture has become the spine of Modi’s success as a transformational leader with a vision for change. It is this vision which is put to the test when one considers his leadership style in more depth.

Infrastructure Support: Power and Road Access

From 2003 to 2006, the Gujarat government introduced Jyotigram Yojana (JGY)—an infrastructure project with the aim to provide 24/7 power supply to villages. By 2006, over 90 per cent of Gujarat’s 18,000 villages were covered under the JGY. However, a subsequent realisation was that this could not be achieved without effective rationing of the power supply to farms. This led the government to invest 1,170 crore Indian Rupees (176 million US dollars) in separating agricultural power lines (known as feeders) from non-agricultural feeders throughout Gujarat (Shah & Verma, 2008).4 This meant laying a parallel rural transmission network where feeders supplying agricultural connections were bifurcated at the substation from those supplying to commercial and residential connections. Hence, now the Gujarat government is effectively rationing farm power supply in order to reduce

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losses. This has made a difference in cultivation capacity, but only for those who can bear the cost of an electric pump for irrigating their fields. The mass of small farmers and wage labourers bear the additional cost of hiring pumps to irrigate their fields (Kumar, Singhal & Rath, 2004). Gujarat has also invested heavily on roads. This has facilitated the transfer of milk from villages twice daily. This has acted as a catalyst in improving rural road connectivity. Indeed, many dairy unions and other private investors contributed to road construction; the National Dairy Development Board even gave a large loan to the Gujarat government to construct/resurface rural roads. Today, Gujarat has 37.77 kilometres of roads per 100 square kilometres, and a road density of 1.35 kilometres per square kilometre. Road coverage is almost 98.7 per cent in the state, far higher than the national average. Infrastructure is a key to development; however, it alone cannot adequately address the needs of the common people. Structural inequality can render such infrastructure redundant, for example, those small farmers I met who are in tied conditions to money lenders or shop owners and thus have to sell their produce to these traders.

The Disproportionate Impact of Infrastructure, Incentives, and Subsidies for Encouraging Commercial Crops

Gujarat has raised the Sardar Sarovar Dam (SSD) height to 121.5 metres; there is enough water in the dam to irrigate 1.8 million hectares as was originally planned. The Gujarat government has also pursued aggressive policies to promote diversification to high value crops, especially fruits, vegetables, and spices. For example, it began offering farmers direct capital subsidy of 2.5 lakhs Indian Rupees ($37, 566 USD) to set up green houses, in addition to a 25 per cent relief in electricity duties. Making water available to farmers has been a claim to fame for the present government. While the SSD project has been providing canal irrigation, the well-known Gujarat Green Revolution Company (GGRC) has been entrusted with micro-irrigation systems. The Gujarat government formed the GGRC to promote micro-irrigation and allocated a fund of 15000 million Indian Rupees to be replenished when needed. The GGRC then began offering a subsidy-loan scheme to those farmers willing to adopt micro-irrigation (Gulati, Shah, & Sreedar, 2009; Shah et al., 2009). Although it is true that this is efficient for water-scarce regions, these technologies are expensive and reduce the use of labour. Again, both of these qualities are more useful for big farmers than for small farmers. As such, the initial cost of installing the machinery ought not to be borne by them. The government has been pushing for higher agricultural growth by making floriculture more profitable. The vision is to transform agriculture to a high growth sector, and this subsector of floriculture has been making significant contribution to agricultural growth, thereby earning state patronage. This is due to an urban and export market. To make more farmers grow these crops, the government has been offering subsidies for mechanization in the subsector. When seen on the ground,

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the main beneficiaries are again the large-scale capitalist farmers engaged in floriculture who are receiving a 20 percent subsidy on tools and technology offered by the government. The resource-poor farmers, who are often small and marginal, are not able to make use of this opportunity. In addition, where food security is a pressing issue, such shifts in cropping patterns toward farming flowers affect food availability. Floriculture diverts land away from food crops to a wave of commercialization that values high value crops and requires a high use of chemicals and machines (Mehta, 2012). These measures have produced outcomes that have changed the lives of farmers more sharply in one decade than over the five decades of policies which preceded it. For example, between 2000 and 2001 and 2005 and 2006, Gujarat’s horticulture production increased by 108 per cent. Gulati et al. (2009) argued that this is a major driver of Gujarat agriculture. The result is two-fold. First, the private seed sector has come to dominate the seed market. In Gujarat alone, they have floated 26 private seed companies (Gulati et al., 2009). Second, throughout the fieldwork it was observed that the retailers are rural elites, who have found that horticulture creates new avenues of diversification in their shops. Their close social ties and positions in the caste hierarchy play a crucial role in selling the products. As a reputed businessman described, “BT cotton [i.e., cotton modified to contain strains of the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis] growers are tending to unite with global capital” (2012 Interview Respondent: Murat). On the other end of the spectrum is the high number of small farmers and landless wage-labourers who can rarely access government seed supplies, not to mention other subsidies for irrigation and greenhouses. Thus, they need to be entirely dependent on informal moneylenders and private seed retailers (2012 Interview Respondent: Ahmedabad, a senior government official). Once again, it is the resource-rich farmers who qualify to make good use of BT cotton, like other high value commercial crops. The price can only be borne by those with investment capability. In addition, the fieldwork showed that the source of high agricultural growth lies in two shifts in cropping patterns: first from food crops to cash crops (such as cotton and flowers as described above), and second from commercial to high value crops accompanied by high use of chemicals and machines (Mehta, 2012). Large-scale capitalist agriculture has therefore gained in acreage. Nevertheless, the government has claimed the success of agriculture is due to its policy efforts in cheaper inputs and credit availability to farmers. For example, Gujarat farmers have adopted a 6.5:3.5:1 nitrogen-phosphorous-potassium composition fertiliser to a 13:7.5:1 fertiliser which is cost-effective. The farm credit system has been simultaneously revitalised. Agricultural loans increased from 22 to 25 per cent annually. Moreover, during the course of three years, agricultural loan disbursals in Gujarat more than doubled from 4,735 crore Indian Rupees ($711 million USD) in 2003 to 2004 to 10,468 crore Indian Rupees ($1572 million USD) in 2006 to 2007 (Shah et al., 2009). This has resulted in a rise in the cost of cultivation in the past decade with higher dependence on chemical products, as interview respondents disclosed.

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Facilitating Market Access

Gujarat was amongst the early states to amend the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) Act to enable farmers to directly sell their produce to wholesalers, exporters, industries, and large trading companies without having to operate through commission agents. On one hand, positions within APMC have remained under large-scale capitalist farmers; however, the new act has allowed large players to establish spot exchanges. The amendment also helped create conditions conducive for the spread of contract farming. Vegetables are now being grown in this mode (Daily News Analysis, 2013). The government has been welcoming large corporations to establish retail chains and source their requirements directly from farmers. This is putting the big capitalist farmers—from whom bulk procurement is possible—at an advantage.

The Core of the Policy Vision

The policy exhibits a renewed concern for the large-scale capitalist farmers as seen in Agrovision 2010 prescriptions. Modi has kept it no secret that the state will facilitate a linkage between farmers and international markets under the World Trade Organization (WTO). The state is channelling its energy toward increasing productivity by using technological solutions (Gulati et al., 2009). Narendra Modi has recently declared the upcoming Second Green Revolution, which is said to bolster agricultural productivity. Although this increase in agricultural growth is perceived by some as a sign of a transformational leadership, scholars have argued that this growth has excluded the majority of small and marginal farmers and labourers from its benefits (Breman, 2007; Hirway & Shah, 2011). Breman (2007) listed two tools commonly put to use in south Gujarat to keep the landless farmers in their status quo; one is the indifference of local authorities and the other is downright sabotage on behalf of village elites. He argued that the latter would do anything to hinder a change in power structure from occurring. Hence the immediate question that arises is whether the policies are addressing a structural transformation as expected from a morally-inclined transformational leader, or whether these policies will deepen existing social inequalities. In this study, large-scale capitalist farmers were found adopting superior technology and tapping into the opportunities presented by the export market, thus increasing their land holdings. They were also found to be consistently diversifying in other sectors. The small and capital-poor farmers were finding it hard to cope with such expensive techniques which are not suitable for their small holdings. If this is the path to be followed, what are the political reasons for the leader to choose it? Through observing these patterns, I arrived at the essence of the agricultural path the state government has envisioned. Sud (2007) argued that the corporatisation of agriculture is the only way to make it commercially viable. Mirroring this argument, a technocrat working closely with the government contributed to the development of my understanding. He indicated that agriculture

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is not a viable occupation given the small size of holdings. Further small and marginal farmers are moving out of agriculture and are selling land for their ‘lifestyle aspirations,’ meaning better standards as the urban life promises. Therefore, the need of the hour in his words is “to craft a policy to allow people to move out of agriculture” (2012 Interview Respondent). He highlighted two measures which could encourage the agricultural sector to thrive and prosper in the state: – systematic conversion of small and marginal farmers into landless labourers;

and – allowing the concentration of land holdings in the hands of a few which would

be useful for technology-driven commercial agriculture. Citing the state of Punjab as an ideal, BT cotton was praised as providing the farmers with a win-win option. The wide adoption of the crop shows they are cultivating to maximise profit. The interview elucidated the crux of the state agricultural policy which is to maximise production of commercial crops to ensure growth in agriculture. Though it was not stated explicitly by this interviewee, my conclusion was that such a policy builds on existing structural inequality, thus further polarising large-scale capitalist farmers and small farmers. A similar perspective was reiterated in an interview with a senior bureaucrat in the Agricultural Ministry. He stated that “the Gujarat government is all for those who can make use of opportunities. They ask and we give” (2012 Interview Respondent). He went on to suggest that since migrant labourers create a socio-economic problem, he was in support of mechanisation so that demand for labourers in agriculture goes down. Therefore, those migrating from other states are forced to turn back. Moreover, a notion of the transformation of society was evident in this interview, which was a vision propagated by Modi for over a decade. However, when investigated carefully, the vision mentions rural growth, utilising opportunities created by liberalisation like raising the production of commercial crops by adopting hybrid seeds, and tapping the export market. Each of the measures favours the already resource-rich farmers, thus propagating large-scale mechanised commercial agriculture. To me, it was revealing that mechanisation and technology were mentioned as key factors to agricultural growth and the possibility of a redistribution of resources was unmentioned. As previously argued, a transformational leader is said to effect a change for the people, which ultimately means the common people (with less or no access to resources). In this case, these are small farmers who are left well outside the ambit of state subsidies and policies. At this point, it becomes imperative to analyse the basis of Modi’s political power to determine the factors behind his leadership.

TRANSACTIONAL IN THE GARB OF PSEUDO-TRANSFORMATION

This section argues that all the talk of state doubling agricultural growth and transforming its nature is true only at a superficial level. The leadership rests on certain elite social groups and has to ensure their economic and social position over

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all else. Hence the widely-reported transformational role of Modi is undermined by a far more transactional approach to leadership.

After 2000: State and Elites Enter New Relation

The state has played a decisive role in both policy making and implementation (Hirway & Shah, 2011; Sinha, 2005; Sud, 2012). Sinha (2005) characterised the role played by the bureaucracy as one of guiding the market. It has taken strident steps towards rapid industrialisation and expansion of real estate. Alongside industrial success, in the last decade, agricultural growth has soared higher than the Indian average. It is indicative of the elite within the state, which consists of industrialists, large-scale capitalist farmers (as argued in previous sections), and the bureaucracy. Within the state, the industrial lobby has been commanding a position since Modi’s ascent to power in 2001. Modi’s fame has been related to a decisive leadership and promotion of high economic growth, often related to his successful wooing of investors by means of organising events such as the ‘global summit of investors.’ He has been celebrated world over, including by Time Magazine (Reilly, 2016), as a global leader for achieving high rates of growth over a decade, unlike other states in India. The super growth rates—10 percent in secondary sector and service sector since 2000—can be ascribed to the state’s careful manoeuvring of policies. To re-emphasise, the state has been identified with Modi’s leadership. Sud (2007) argued that the state’s power is caused by a convergence of political and economic power in Gujarat which has resulted in concentrating all resources to the nurturing of the industrial elite. Several respondents—activists, academics, political leaders located in different districts—also pointed to the existence of such a nexus between the state and large corporations. The interviewees made observations regarding the state’s proactive role in acquiring land for private companies, signing memoranda of understanding that facilitate land procurement in any corner of the state, and advertising it as an industry-friendly state. Be it Maruti, or Tata4, Gujarat has emerged as a favourite destination of corporations because of this agile attitude. The bureaucracy is playing a conducive role in these transactions through weak labour laws. The easy availability of labour facilitates industrial expansion, thus often large corporations are found to thrive at the cost of small enterprises. Other authors, such as Hirway and Shah (2011) and Majumder (2012) made similar observations. Senior politicians from the main opposition party explained how growth has been achieved by giving undue advantage to corporations. This was likewise mentioned by four interview respondents. In 2013, the Comptroller and Auditor general (CAG) the apex auditing agency, found similar problems with the Gujarat government (the Hindu, 2013; Times of India, 2014). It found undue benefits accruing to 520 million Indian Rupees for Reliance. Gujarat Urja Vikas Nigam Ltd., (another department) failed to recover penalty of 1600 million Indian Rupees from Adani Power. Essar was found defaulting sales tax payment of 61690 million

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Indian Rupees by High Court. Similar observations have been made by other scholars (Hirway & Shah, 2011). The crystallisation of nouveau riche entrepreneurs has been pinned as the support base for the state pursuing such proactive industry-friendly policies. The industrial elite have demanded the government to be favourable on several counts, to which Modi has agreed. Sud (2007) argues that the class was disenchanted with Congress and its pro-poor, lower caste, and pro-agriculture policies. They needed a decisive political voice which they found in the national Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Her argument draws upon heavily on the land acquisition policy and how it has been reformulated to accommodate the interests of the class (for details, see Sud, 2007). The state has witnessed a weakening of labour laws arguably to facilitate the same industrial elite’s interests. The government has been passive about any new recruitment of labour officials. Seventy-five percent of seats in the labour department are vacant; even posts like Assistant Commissioner of Labour, the highest post in each district, has been left empty. In Saurashtra, among seven districts, there is only one Assistant Commissioner (Hirway & Shah, 2011). This has smoothened the casualisation of labour thus making Modi a favourite among business houses. The entire machinery of labour is suspended and labour laws have had little implementation, with women among the most marginalised. Two interview respondents argued that this systematic weakening of labour laws has rendered issues like minimum wage, timely payment of wages, safety of working conditions, and any other disputes relating to labour laws redundant since the institution where these are to be addressed has been left in a nonoperational condition. This factor has contributed to the industrial elite finding Gujarat among the most congenial of states in which to invest.

CONCLUSION

The leadership discussed in this chapter is widely characterised as transformational, where the leaders’ vision and far-sighted planning has dominated the policies of the state. But the root of the vision can be traced to the way the political settlement, as in the deeply interconnected relationships between state and the elites (Khan, 2005), operates. This chapter has argued that the leader’s vision has worked in favour of those who were already powerful, particularly large-scale capitalist farmers. This has created a false environment where the leader’s vision and policies may seem to be bringing in a change for the common citizens but actually the whole state machinery is geared to further the interest of the elites. Therefore, transactional nature of the leadership surfaces putting all the talk of transformation into serious question. This is of particular significance since Modi has become India’s current prime minister and the future of the majority of India’s farmers, not to mention that of average citizens, depends on his leadership.

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NOTES

1 India could be described as experiencing a transition from traditional leadership, in guise of dynastic rule of the Gandhi-Nehru family, and the biggest contributor have been smaller leaders of regional parties like Nitish Kumar, Mayawati, Mamata Banerjee, Karunanidhi, Chandrababu Naidu and at the national level from Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which is currently under Narendra Modi leadership. India has two national parties, and Bharatiya Janata Party is one of them. It practices nationalist politics and has had communal overtones from time to time.

2 A lakh is an Indian numeric unit equal to 100,000. 3 Capitalist farmers are those who emerged in India after the Green Revolution in the 1960s. These

farmers are involved in agriculture not for sustenance or consumption but for sale of crops and profit and hence are directly linked to market economies. They also invest heavily in upgrading technology and were the forerunners in bringing in machinery into agriculture, which constitutes the beginning of capitalist agriculture in India. For further details see Byres (1981).

4 Separate electricity infrastructure for rural agriculture and non-agriculture (household) power consumers, is commonly referred to as rural feeder segregation. This has been found to improve both the availability and quality of power supply in rural areas (World Bank, 2013).

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Sejuti Das Gupta James Madison College Michigan State University

SECTION 3

LEARNING IN GLOBAL FOOD SYSTEMS TRANSFORMATION

C. Etmanski (Ed.), Food Leadership, 109–123. © 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

INGRID KAJZER MITCHELL, WILL LOW, EILEEN DAVENPORT AND TIM BRIGHAM

7. OUT OF THE WILD AND INTO THE KITCHEN

Learning about Sustainability through Wild Food Products

It is time to rethink how we grow, share and consume our food.

– United Nations (2014)

There has been no shortage of calls for change in the global and local food and agricultural systems (e.g., Pollan, 2006; Smith & Mackinnon, 2007). The food sector is argued to offer key solutions for sustainable development in terms of hunger, poverty eradication, and the creation of long-term food security (UN, 2015). Numerous attempts have been made in the Global North to reimagine our relationship to the modern food system, from farmers’ markets, to zero-mile diets and even to withdrawal from mainstream provisioning. In this chapter, we critically examine the role wild foods can play in that reimagined relationship and the possibilities and limits of wild food networks to challenge the modern industrial food system. We begin the chapter with a brief overview of Alternative Food Networks (AFNs), the most well-known being organic, fair trade, slow food. These AFNs and, as we argue here wild foods, offer different options to mass-produced ‘placeless and faceless’ foods (Goodman & Goodman, 2009). Wild foods are defined as foods resulting from a minimum of human intervention prior to gathering (Etkin, 1994; International Trade Centre, 2007), though as we discuss later, definitions of what constitutes wild food can be problematic. Here we position wild food producers (collectors) and consumers as forming networks through which individuals can uniquely experience the nexus between production and consumption, which in turn generates and mediates knowledge about sustainability. In light of this idea, that interacting with wild foods increases awareness and knowledge about sustainability, we continue with an in-depth examination of the potential of wild foods to open up avenues for transformative learning. Food is central to shaping individual, cultural, and ethnic identities but while food is a manifestation of the social it also connects us to nature (Leach, 1976; Levkoe, 2005), opening a pathway to thinking and learning about sustainability. Scholarly work examining food (in general) through a learning lens has gradually been gaining momentum. For example, in the field of adult education, Sumner has positioned food as a catalyst for learning (Sumner, 2008a, 2008b, 2013a, 2013b). Flowers and Swan (2011, 2012) have in their work examined food both as an object and vehicle for learning within the context of food social movements, but

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also environmental education more broadly (Swan & Flowers, 2015). Etmanski (2012) has also positioned organic farmers as key leaders and educators addressing ‘wicked problems’ such as sustainability. The recent special issues on adult learning and food in Studies in the Education of Adults is another example (Etmanski, 2015). We argue here that efforts to foster greater sustainability would benefit from a greater understanding of the various learning strategies within the burgeoning alternative food and agriculture movements. Previous research into wild foods has used anthropological and development lenses to examine the role wild foods play in the livelihood strategies of foragers and gatherers, and the problematic relationship between commercialization of wild products and ecosystem conservation (e.g., Belcher & Schreckenberg, 2007). However, no scholarly work has yet examined the transformative learning potential of wild food products. We argue that wild food, in common with other AFNs, is not an end in itself but a ‘source of learning,’ providing us with insights that we can use to rethink our existing unsustainable food sourcing and preparation, and to create more sustainable approaches to our own individual and collective food systems. Specifically, we are interested in the capacity of wild foods to act as a counter-discourse that educates consumers to think in a new way, as Bateson (1972) suggested some time ago. Building on this, we suggest that wild foods provide us with numerous unique learning opportunities, including learning about the ecology of the countryside through foraging for and collecting wild foods, and learning new skills to prepare, preserve and consume them (Mobbs & The Free Range Network, 2008). In order to examine these issues, we draw on various literatures about the ecology and sociology of food, AFNs, and adult learning. We illustrate the potential of the wild food networks to act as catalysts for transformative learning by building on insights gathered from four focus groups of wild food consumers in 2009. Participants were drawn from communities around Victoria, which is the provincial capital of British Columbia (BC) and is located on the southern end of Vancouver Island, off the west coast of Canada.

FOOD, ALTERNATIVE FOOD NETWORKS, AND WILD FOODS

Food “can be a powerful metaphor for the way we organize and relate to society” (Levkoe, 2005, p. 89). The production and consumption of food plays a critical role in shaping and defining individual, cultural, and ethnic identities and social, political, and economic systems (Mennell, Murcott, & van Otterloo, 1992; Murcott, 1982). National and ethnic identities are partly defined by food preferences or restrictions, methods of preparation and rituals of consumption—the social construct of a cuisine. What we as citizens and consumers are prepared to take inside our bodies very much reflects our social identities, and our membership of social groups (Murcott, 1982, p. 203). Food can act as an entry point into a larger discourse around a multitude of issues (Levkoe, 2005). We would also contend, as have Welsh and MacRae (1998, p.214), that food is like no other commodity in offering unique opportunities for

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learning and political (re)awakening. As alluded to earlier, food is not only a manifestation of the social, but inevitably connects us to ecological systems and can teach us about the world we live in (Levkoe, 2005). Leach (1976) has observed that when we eat, “we establish, in a literal sense, a direct identity between ourselves (culture) and our food (nature)” (p. 34). By analysing our relationship to food, we begin to make sense of our “double membership” in the worlds of nature and culture (Murcott, 1982, p.204). For these reasons, we agree with Kerton and Sinclair (2010) that food has become, “a powerful symbol in the struggle to transition to a more sustainable pathway” (p. 401). Increasing numbers of both food producers and consumers are turning to AFNs as part of the struggle to create a more sustainable world. In countries of the Global North such as Canada, more consumers are seeking alternatives to the dominant food system, characterized as industrial, as opposed to natural, and dominated by multinational corporations rather than operating on a human scale (Chaudhury & Albinsson, 2015). We would argue, following Goodman and Goodman (2009), that AFNs have created economic and cultural spaces where, “the production and consumption of food are more closely tied together spatially, economically, and socially” (p. 208). These spaces have been conceptualized as niche markets for premium priced products that represent both a “turn to quality” (i.e., are not mass-produced) and “a significant reconfiguration of producer-consumer relations” (Goodman & Goodman, 2009, p. 210). Levkoe (2005) has suggested that an AFN is

a valuable site for countering the identity of the person only as a consumer” and is further “a place for learning active democratic citizenship.” (p. 90)

He goes on to say (2005):

Participation in food justice movements [such as AFNs] encourages the development of strong civic virtues and critical perspectives [and…] has the ability to increase the confidence, political efficacy, knowledge, and skills of those involved. (p. 90)

Levkoe’s (2005) concept of a food democracy as “public decision-making and increased access and collective benefit from the food system as a whole” (p. 91) is important in this discourse about consumers versus citizens. By contrast, in terms of Micheletti’s (2003) earlier conceptualization of political consumerism, the concerned food consumer is largely limited to individualized action through forms of protest such as mailing postcards to retailers, signing petitions, or urging friends/family not to buy certain brands. However, Low and Davenport (2007) have warned:

The increasing scale of individual ethical purchasing has resulted from modern mainstream expressions of ethical consumption … reducing what was traditionally a collective politicised programme of action to affect specific forms of social change to a diluted notion of individualised ‘shopping for a better world.’ (p. 336)

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Since this initial formulation, using social media may help to coalesce these individual acts into a collectivized whole but Levkoe’s (2005) conception of a food democracy goes further in quoting Hassanein (2003),

citizens having power to determine agro-food policies and practices locally, regionally, nationally and globally … rather than remaining passive spectators on the sidelines. (p. 91)

Although the notion of alternative foods and AFNs has become well-established in the Global North’s discourse around food and sustainability (Goodman and Goodman, 2009; Pietrykowski, 2004; Seyfang, 2007), Cox et al. (2008) have argued that the use of the term alternative is problematic because it is both ill-defined and sets up a false dichotomy between the conventional and the alternative. They highlight two approaches to AFNs: the European where

the ‘alternative’ has generally been regarded as that which can fit into the interstices, or around the margins, of a ‘conventional’ industrial food supply system as a means for small businesses to survive in an aggressively competitive market [versus the American which encompasses] more radical terms as something oppositional to industrial food supply and relates both to a wider sense of protest, and to attempts to establish different modes of exchange between food producers and consumers. (Cox et al., 2008, pp. 68–69)

We suggest that wild foods constitute an important but emergent AFN, and interestingly, as we will illustrate later, the wild food consumers we studied in South Vancouver Island expressed elements of both the European and American AFN discourses. Historically wild foods were the basis of all human diets but even with the advent of modern agriculture, wild food collection remains important to many food cultures on all continents (Bharucha & Pretty, 2010; Etkin, 1994). Wild foods are most often considered a subset of the non-timber forest products (NTFP) sector, which encompasses all the biological resources and associated services of the forest other than conventional timber products. Apart from wild foods, NTFPs are generally considered to include forest- or other wild land-derived products including medicines, decorative materials, fibre and other raw materials, and forest-based tourism activities. The foods, fibres and other NTFPs gathered from forests are crucial to both subsistence consumption and cash-economy production in the Global South, but wild collected foods also have a long and continuing history in the Global North. Approximately 90% of all medicinal and aromatic plants harvested in Europe are collected from the wild, with Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean region being the main suppliers (International Trade Centre, 2007, p. 4). Wild foods are also critically important elements of indigenous cultures globally (Bharucha & Pretty, 2010). Understanding the internal dynamics of wild food networks is not the goal of this chapter, however. Rather we will explore wild food networks as a ‘source of learning,’ which leads participating producers and consumers to rethink the existing unsustainable nature of food sourcing and preparation, and to create more

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sustainable approaches to individual and collective food systems. We argue that learning about and consuming wild food is a particularly important consciousness-raising activity that invites us to revisit our Western human-nature separation (cf. Capra, 1982). One radical perspective argues that while popular AFNs such as organic and fair trade foods encourage people to think about where their food comes from and how it is produced, the wild food movement offers us a potentially less alienating approach to food whereby through active participation in foraging, preserving and consuming,

people can actually see themselves in the products of their labour and develop a more critical understanding of the capitalist modes of production alternative food movements are seeking to transcend. (Cheney, 2013, p. 8)

FOSTERING TRANSFORMATIVE LEARNING THROUGH WILD FOOD NETWORKS

With the transition to a renewed, more ecologically-conscious world possibly requiring “the greatest mobilization of imagination and learning potential yet known in human history” (Welton, 1993, p. 163), transformative learning is argued to be an important pedagogy for achieving sustainability (Lange, 2004; Sterling, 2001). Jennifer Sumner (2008b) has declared eating as a “pedagogical act” (p. 1) while Kerton and Sinclair (2010) have argued that the very act of buying food as a catalyst for transformative learning. Mezirow (1997) has suggested that transformative learning encompasses a process of individuals changing their frames of reference by critically reflecting on their assumptions and beliefs, and consciously making and implementing plans that bring about new ways of defining their worlds. The kind of transformative learning for which Kerton and Sinclair (2010) have advocated can be conceived as both an epistemological process involving change in worldview and habits of thinking, and an ontological process where participants experience change in their way of being in the world (Lange, 2004). The concept of critical reflection is believed to play an important role in the process of transformation and is closely related to the notion of self-directed learning. Self-directed learning is very much built upon the assumption that as mature adult individuals, we are internally motivated to learn, have an independent self-concept, and can direct our own learning (Merriam, 2001). In his work Mezirow (1985) defined critical reflection as

understanding of the historical, cultural, and biographical reasons for one’s needs, wants, and interests. (p. 27)

Becoming critically aware of our own presuppositions, Mezirow (1990) has suggested, involves challenging our habitual patterns of expectation, and the meaning perspectives with which we make sense of our world, others, and ourselves. This kind of self-knowledge, he has argued, is a prerequisite for “autonomy in self-directed learning” (Mezirow, 1985, p. 27). Although Mezirow’s emphasis on critical thinking has been debated over the years (e.g., Kucukaydin, &

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Cranton, 2012), the ability for personal critical reflection on our own place in nature and in modern food culture is essential if we are to disrupt the integrity of taken for granted assumptions and interpretations that support unsustainable food systems. If we adopt Welton’s (1993) concept of the importance of learning sites in the search for a more sustainable world, then we would argue the emerging wild food networks discussed above offer a new and fruitful space for developing insights that can change worldviews and habits. Using transformative learning theory to understand wild food networks compels us to address the following question: in what way does active participation in wild food networks disrupt the integrity of taken for granted assumptions and interpretations through personal reflection on one’s own place in nature and in culture? The context within which wild foods are gathered, bought, and sold reflects Levkoe’s (2005) notion of food democracy and offers the citizen-consumer posited by Chaudhury and Albinsson (2015) the opportunity to begin a process of critical reflection by asking questions such as the above, as well as about: – what the product is and how to use it (owing to the potential novelty of the

item—birch sap or pine mushrooms are illustrative of this novelty aspect where the best ways to use these products may not be widely understood by consumers);

– where the product comes from and how it was gathered (countering faceless and placeless foods, cf. Goodman & Goodman, 2009);

– who (whether a company or an individual) is providing the wild food item for sale or exchange (cf. Little, Maye, & Illbery, 2010).

We would argue that learning is integral to the everyday life routines and experiences of wild food consumers. Wild food consumers must make conscious choices and understand the basis for, and the consequences of operating, at least to some extent, on the margins of the mainstream. While some learning about wild foods may be formally organized through individual research and reading, or through engaging in consumption communities (Szmigin, Carrigan & Bekin, 2007), most is informal (cf. Foley, 1999), and is often the by-product of some other activity (Marsick & Watkins, 1990, 2001). In the case of wild foods, learning is situational (Stein, 1998) and experiential (Steinklammer, 2012), and may include personally harvesting, preparing, and eating wild foods, or interacting with wild food gatherers and other wild food consumers, for example, at events such as a wild food festival. It was at such a festival, called Shop the Wild held in Victoria, BC in 2009, where we recruited focus group members for the empirical research we conducted and to which we now turn.

EXPERIENCES AND PERSPECTIVES OF WILD FOOD CONSUMERS

To illustrate the processes of learning and transformation that result through engagement with wild food networks, we now discuss the experiences and perspectives of wild food consumers who took part in a series of focus groups at Royal Roads University in 2009. These consumers had previously attended a wild

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food festival called “Shop the Wild”1 and had responded to an invitation to be part of our research, the aim of which was to understand more about the motivations, perspectives and knowledge of people who self-identified as interested in wild foods. Four focus groups, each lasting approximately two hours, were held over a three-week period; a total of 20 people participated in a series of structured discussions and table top exercises. The focus group participants, ranging in age from early twenties to late sixties, live in the greater Victoria region, with the majority having at least a bachelor-level University degree. We suggest that, following the work of Kerton and Sinclair (2010) in their examination of organic food, much of the initial learning about wild foods for participants in the focus groups was informal and instrumental in nature (cf. Mezirow, 1985, 1997). Participants in the focus groups talked about their direct engagement with wild foods and how, through this engagement, they gained new insight into problems with the broader food sector and new skills as they became more knowledgeable about the practices required to gather the wild resources and to transform them into edible products. This learning process was reflected in the participants’ questioning of what constitutes a wild food and in their stated desire to protect the wild as a food source. Generally, our research participants viewed wild products as “things that you can harvest from the land, that are grown naturally” and “that no one has planted, that have not been produced on farms” (F2:1).2 To these consumers, wild foods commonly conjured images of the uniqueness and diversity of the ecosystem from which the products came; the foods were also typically felt to have a more direct connection to the natural environment than commercially available industrial foods. Other commonly voiced sentiments were the connection between wild foods and Indigenous knowledge about local eco-systems as demonstrated by First Nations; Bharucha and Pretty (2010) have referred to this as “local ecological knowledge” (p. 2921). It is also worth noting that most of the participants expressed a perception of wild being associated with a form of vulnerability, especially the issue of scarcity of resources. This was conveyed, for example, in concern about native species being more vulnerable to being lost or being destroyed, “to being depleted or actually having harvesting areas lost” (F2:2). Availability of wild foods manifested itself in another sense; the majority of participants assumed that wild products would not be readily found in mainstream consumer channels, such as large retail supermarkets. Therefore, in terms of their wild food consumption (though not necessarily in any other areas of consumption), participants considered that they were operating outside of conventional channels of provision:

I associate them [wild foods] being available for free or at minimal costs … They’re not part of the market economy, I associate wild products as being products that are out of the traditional food distribution system, and organic and local are not necessarily, and that’s what I find makes wild products to me unique. (F2:3)

I actually use a different category of purchase when I go to purchase wild foods, I am going to go to a farmers’ market or I’m going to go to a local

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fisherman … outside of regular shopping trips and outside of the conventional food production and distribution system. (F2:4)

The narratives shared with us by wild food consumers demonstrated sensitivity towards some of the key challenges underpinning local sustainable food systems and the common dilemma inherent in the use of wild foods. A significant concern was the fear that the increased gathering of wild foods was exploiting nature’s bounty in a way that was not sustainable. These issues are illustrated in the following comments:

I worry about, like for instance, I'm driving down the highway sometimes, and I see little tiny trucks absolutely loaded with salal [a native evergreen shrub], and how many of those people are going out into the bush and just taking it all. And it’s just the same thing with oysters on the beach; that you see people going down and they're taking every single size and I worry that it will all go! (F1:1)

Although we found that most participants experienced some form of learning that was primarily instrumental in nature, we found that the potential for transformational learning offered by engagement with wild foods differed amongst participants. There was evidence in the narratives shared by some participants, but not by all, that transformative change had occurred as a result of being involved with wild foods; this was illustrated by commentary about a deeper examination of food products and associated consumption habits. Transformational learning begins for an individual with some kind of internal or external trigger that signals dissatisfaction with his or her current ways of thinking and being (Marsick & Watkins, 2001). Mezirow (1991) referred to this as a ‘disorienting dilemma.’ The transformational learning experienced by some of our focus group participants echoes the experience of Kerton and Sinclair’s (2010) organic food consumers who used their food consumption to gain a broader understanding of local and global food systems. Just as engagement with organic foods provided the disruptive factor necessary for transformative learning for some organic food consumers, so engagement with wild foods was a similar catalyst for some forager-consumers. One of our focus group participants said, for example:

… looking around at what one sees is happening to the planet, and knowing what we are being told about what's happening to the planet, we have got to change our ways, we have got to think differently, act differently. My own feeling is that for the majority of us it's going to take a major disaster before we wake up to the fact that something very drastic has got to happen in the way that we change our lives, and you know that is a very negative thing, thinking if you like, but it seems to me that’s the way that people generally react, or don't react, because they're too comfortable and it's too much effort to do things which make them less comfortable, to do what should be done. And so, my thinking is that we are on a very tricky path, but the things that we can do in the way of growing our own food and encouraging the proper use and care of the soil and so on is extremely important. (F1:2)

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For participants experiencing transformational change the trigger was not a single event but, more so, a long cumulative process (Taylor, 2000). One female participant, for example explained she has “been concerned about the environment for a long time,” and has “recycled forever” (F3:2). Like most of the other participants, she makes a conscious effort to buy local foods and spoke of desiring some form of transformation. Numerous participants traced their current wild food consumption to dissatisfaction with mainstream lifestyles and the dominant food system, and to the desire to support local economies. To those participants who experienced some form of transformation, learning was central to their identity as individuals and consumers, as illustrated by the following narrative:

I am a dedicated locavore, I eat as much local food as possible and was raised on wild food—my father hunted for all the game and my sister and I were pressed into service picking berries for hours and hours …. And we fished for our own salmon and I still try and do that every year. I am always interested to see how other people are using natural and wild foods and I am always interested in ideas and sources … so anything to do more for the cause and to learn more is right up my alley. (F3:3)

Critical reflection is argued to trigger learning that is also emancipatory—that leads to action that brings about social and political change (Cranton, 1994; Foley, 1999; Merriam, 2001). Many focus group members’ comments demonstrated this type of emancipatory learning (bold highlights made by the authors):

…I try to think of this [food] institution as something that needs to be rethought. I believe in de-commodification, you know and supporting networks of sharing, and reciprocity, and the values of nurturing our environment but not necessarily throwing a market price on it. That’s part of, sort of, the way I think. (F2:5)

Ethically, you are supporting somebody who, well invariably there are people who don’t have a lot of money, they are doing something which they feel is useful, and you’re supporting them and also, you’re helping to prove that there is more available to all of us, than just what you can buy off the grocery shelves. (F1:2)

As a result, we can frame these wild food forager-consumers as ‘political change agents’ (cf. Andruske, 2000) as they attempt to both control and initiate change in response to external modern food systems. By actively contributing to AFNs, wild food forager-consumers become increasingly empowered and skilled in connecting with our food sources (cf. Carter, 2007). In the words of Levkoe (2005):

Food is more than just another commodity and people are more than just consumers. (p. 90)

This kind of food activism was the reason that some participants gave for contributing to this research study in the first place.

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Although we can clearly see that transformative learning was occurring as forager-consumers engaged with wild foods, we also note that their ability to take action on a new transformative insight may be inhibited by various external or internal constraints. Our discussions with wild food consumers suggest that the transformational potential of wild foods may relate to the consumer’s ability to participate in the specific act of gathering food. We would suggest that wild food consumers who primarily engaged with wild foods as purchasers and preparers rather than active wild food gatherers talked less about transformation. They self-identified more as observers, as digesters of information, rather than active participants in the food system. There was also a perception that in order to participate fully in the wild food experience, a larger personal commitment was required. If we accept the notion that people can be actively participating in shaping food systems, rather than remaining passive spectators on the sideline (Hassanein, 2003) it becomes imperative that people develop the knowledge and learn the skills necessary to actively participate and have an impact (Levkoe, 2005). Our encounters with consumers of wild foods suggest that they often frame their experience with wild foods in relation to their previous experience with other AFNs, such as organic foods. They identify similarities and differences, and use their emerging interpretations to make sense of wild foods and broader issues of sustainability—and as with organics, there are limits to wild foods acting as catalysts for change as alternative movements are often co-opted by mainstream interests (Low & Davenport, 2006; Polanyi, 1944). There are also other contextual factors that influence and to some extent limit the ability of wild food to act as a ‘source of learning.’ For example, the availability of appropriate resources (Marsick & Watkins, 2001) such as time and money to purchase wild foods (typically wild foods are more expensive than other kinds of food); the accessibility and availability of wild foods; the willingness of gatherers/producers and consumers to impart/share knowledge and to learn; and the capacity of individual actors to embrace new capabilities in our increasingly demanding lives.

CONCLUSIONS

This chapter contributes to the extant alternative food discourse by introducing wild food as an emergent AFN and as a source of learning. Wild foods—those derived from nature with a minimum of human intervention—present us with an opportunity to challenge the status quo of modern food culture on both personal and collective levels. The apparent lack of human modification and transformation of wild food (i.e., wild foods are not products of selective breeding, nor are they generally understood to be managed, although there are many examples of wild plant husbandry by indigenous peoples) intersects with modern concerns about sustainability by emphasizing both the bounty and the limitations of nature. Increasing consumption of products considered good for you and good for the environment places increasing strains on often fragile natural systems.

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The focus group participants expressed views that fit both the European and the American perspectives of what constitutes an AFN (sometimes holding both perspectives simultaneously). Interaction with wild food and other food networks had led some people to adopt strong oppositional stances against the industrial food system and a desire to engage with radically different modes of exchange between food producers and consumers (cf. Cox et al. 2008, p. 68). At the same time, participants also welcomed the emerging wild food supply as a means of filling in interesting niches within the existing food system, especially as expressions of localism and the importance of place with respect to food—small local businesses selling locally gathered wild foods that preserve local ecological knowledge. We have built on the work of scholars such as Kerton and Sinclair (2010) and predominantly focused on the individual perspective and individual learning and transformations—in other words how learning enables the individual to become more empowered and independent (Merriam, 2008). Although the participants in the focus groups considered broader community and societal implications in their reflections on the wild food movement, they did so from the position of individuals acting and learning within the food system rather than as representatives of various collectivities within the wild food network. Future scholarly work would benefit from a more explicit focus on theories of collective learning and a unit of analysis that focuses on collectivities rather than individuals. Kilgore (2010) has noted:

people collectively develop solutions to societal problems [and] it is the dominant shared meaning and identity of the collective that is most closely related to collective social action. (p. 196)

An explicit focus on the group as opposed to the individual invites us to examine the local learning communities of AFNs such as wild foods. A better understanding of the collective learning process of developing collective identity and the dynamic interaction and mutual development of individual and shared meanings (Kilgore, 2010, p. 200) may provide us with a clearer picture of how people construct a shared vision of food and agricultural justice and act together to promote and build shared visions of future sustainable food systems. Another interesting future research direction would be to explore whether direct involvement in the production-consumption nexus is a determining factor in how transformative the learning process catalysed by wild foods might be. Here we might envision a distinction between the active forager-consumer of wild foods as compared to the more passive consumer who buys wild food products that are available. Work in other arenas of ethical consumption (e.g., Low & Davenport, 2007) has posited that participants who engage across a wider spectrum of activities in these arenas demand more radical forms of change compared to those engaging in an armchair form of consumer activism. One reason may be that the former results in a higher degree of transformative learning than the latter—further research could test whether this is the case.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank the various individuals who supported and contributed to the original series of focus groups at Royal Roads University in 2011; the staff and associates of the Centre for Livelihoods and Ecology at Royal Roads University, in particular Brian Belcher and Sheldon Kitzul, and the many dedicated wild product consumers that so willingly and enthusiastically shared their experiences of gathering, preparing and consuming wild foods. The focus groups and other empirical work on wild foods were supported by a research grant from Royal Roads University.

NOTES

1 The Shop the Wild event was part of Buy BC Wild, an initiative by the then named ‘Centre for Non-Timber Resources.’ Primarily a directory, ‘Buy BC Wild’ was intended to support small-scale producers of wild foods and other wild products in BC, Canada to reach consumers.

2 The numbering refers to the focus group number (in this case number two) and the individual in that focus group (in this case individual number 1).

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Ingrid Kajzer Mitchell School of Business Royal Roads University Will Low School of Business Royal Roads University Eileen Davenport School of Humanitarian Studies Royal Roads University Tim Brigham Professional and Continuing Studies Royal Roads University

C. Etmanski (Ed.), Food Leadership, 125–140. © 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

CHRISTOPHER LANGER

8. MALADAPTIVE LEARNING

Incorporating Institutional Barriers into Nonprofit Community Garden Programming

In this chapter I explore the inimical relationships that can develop when nonprofit programme coordinators rely on institutional resources to run service programs for vulnerable populations. In such cases, coordinators are pushed to prioritize institutional regulation over clients’ actual needs, supplanting the realities of vulnerable populations with a generalized institutional understanding of clients’ needs. To illustrate how this occurs in actual nonprofit practice, I examine how nonprofit workers running community garden programmes in Toronto, Canada, access municipal park space and, in meeting the institutional conditions for this access, adversely affect their ability to meet their clients’ needs. In my research on community garden programmes (Langer, 2012), I spoke with a variety of nonprofit community garden coordinators (hereafter referred to as coordinators), whose names I have changed to protect anonymity. In this chapter I borrow insights from two coordinators whom I will call Kady and Sandy. At the time we spoke, Kady coordinated two gardens for a large, local nonprofit, and Sandy coordinated a few smaller gardens for a neighbourhood-based nonprofit. Both coordinators have voiced their frustration with how their clients’ needs are supplanted by the priorities of municipal government and the realities of nonprofit organizations. However, with their demanding workloads, coordinators often lack the time and energy necessary to reach a complex, critical understanding of how their work fits within various organizational frames, not to mention to take action to challenge the specific regulations that replicate the social inequality affecting their clients. Given coordinators’ authentic interest in helping people, the process by which they learn to supplant clients’ particular needs with institutional regulations can be seen as maladaptive learning. It is my hope that this chapter will provide a tool to help frontline nonprofit workers reflect more critically on the organizational frames they work within in order to more effectively challenge regulations that hinder their more benevolent goals. In order to map these frames, I have drawn on some key concepts, including workplace learning, critical institutional literacy, and ruling relations.

WORKPLACE LEARNING

Formal workplace learning, including structured courses, seminars, conferences, and other events that employees attend (often at the promise of free coffee and doughnuts) are a small fraction of the actual learning that occurs in the workplace.

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Much of what we learn as employees is learned informally or incidentally (Boud & Middleton, 1997; Foley, 2004). This is especially true in the hectic world of nonprofit organizations, where budgets are often stretched thin, unpaid overtime is the status quo, and workers’ everyday responsibilities stretch far past their job descriptions. Casual water cooler chats, failed interactions with city officials, or a great meeting with a community group—activities that are not formally delineated as learning opportunities—are where much informal workplace learning occurs. This informal learning often occurs serendipitously, through chance encounters and random events that go a long way towards workers’ particular understanding of what their jobs are and how to do them (Marsick & Volpe, 1999, p. 7). A subset of informal learning, incidental learning, is often not conscious and has been defined as

a byproduct of some other activity, such as task accomplishment, interpersonal interaction, sensing the organizational culture, trial-and-error experimentation, or even formal learning. (Marsick & Watkins, 2009, p. 12)

Incidental learning is reflexive, usually considered merely doing one’s job. or finding a way to succeed where failure appears likely, and is usually not visible as learning (Boud & Middleton, 1997, p. 194; Marsick & Volpe, 1999, p.5). Foley (2004) points out that, within all education including incidental education is the potential for miseducation, which he describes as “closed, manipulative, and oppressive” (p. 5) and goes on to highlight that:

adult educators need to be aware of propaganda as a powerful and commonly used form of distorted and distorting education … the resources available for corporate and government propaganda, and the scale of it, often make the efforts of adult educators appear puny. (pp. 5–6)

Where Foley has highlighted an educational approach that is forced on people, maladaptive learning is a term I have used to focus on the reflexive learning people themselves do when they encounter institutional miseducation, incidentally placing themselves within institutional frames that supplant their own objectives.

CRITICAL INSTITUTIONAL LITERACY AND THE RULING RELATIONS

As a concept within adult education, literacy often extends past understanding the written word and into learning to understanding and navigating the social structures that surround us (Freire, 2002). For many, the goal of social literacy is to achieve a critical consciousness, an in-depth understanding of social and political structures and the ability to both identify the contradictions within these structures and act to challenge and change oppressive structures. In a similar way, institutional literacy can be defined as a critical understanding of institutions, their programs, and process that can aid people outside the institution in understanding how to navigate them to best serve their own interests as well as to challenge oppressive institutional structures more effectively. Often, within the conflicting priorities of clients in need, nonprofit service delivery, and institutions controlling resources

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the economic carrot shapes the development of skills for a quite narrowly defined form of literacy or for immediate employment. The learning is tied into government and charitable bodies that make up the welfare and social services. It is adult education for social service. (Foley, 2004, p. 254)

For nonprofit programme coordinators, in learning to best access institutional resources necessary to run programmes, there is no guarantee that clients’ needs are accurately reflected in the programmes that are ultimately created. For a coordinator running a service delivery programme, it is successfully accessing institutional resources and receiving payment for their work that allows them to provide services for clients. In this, clients’ needs become tertiary and may be displaced when they conflict with the priorities of nonprofits or resource granting institutions. Both nonprofit and institutional programs, policies, and their professional discourses are aspects of what Smith (2005) calls the ruling relations, those hierarchical relations that divorce the subject from the particular setting and relationships (p. 13). In creating nonprofit and municipal programmes to serve the general public, the specific experiences or needs of individuals, especially those who might be considered high needs, vulnerable, or similar terms, are often supplanted. This can result in a paradox for coordinators providing services: in accessing institutional resources in order to provide services to clients, coordinators must meet institutional regulations that may require altering their programs so that they no longer align with the needs of their clients. In McLaren’s (1992) words,

Critical literacy has grown out of an awareness that the ability to read and write in no way ensures that literate persons will achieve an accurate or ‘deep’ political understanding of the world and their place within it. (p. 319)

In such complicated programming environments, where work is done within a veritable Matryoshka doll of organizational frames, coordinators interested in meeting the needs of their clients must incorporate critical institutional literacy into their practice, building an understanding that:

practice is not simply determined by institutional or other technical-knowledge regulation. Rather, there are zones of everyday life in which approximations are more important than standards, in which vernacular blendings of word and deed predominate, in which people fashion senses of self and group through tactics of transgressing rather than ‘measuring up’ to official expectations. (Literacy and Literacies, Collins, pp. 106)

In critically reflecting on the frames within which coordinators work, we are able to better understand where and why programs fail to meet the needs of those they are supposed to help due to institutional regulation. This understanding can then be turned towards altering programs and practices to better develop “politically strategic plans and skills to move through daily institutional influences in both

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accommodating and resistant ways” and even “to create the illusion of consent to authority” (Collins, p. 268) when necessary.

ACCESSING SPACE FOR NONPROFIT COMMUNITY GARDEN PROGRAMS

For a broad definition of what community gardens are, we can turn to Ferris, Norman, and Sempik (2001):

[A] community garden … is in some sense a public garden in terms of ownership, access, and degree of democratic control … Some provide open space and greenery. Sometimes they provide cheap vegetables for a local community …. Urban gardening is widely seen to be a way of improving local food supplies as well as leisure and recreational activity. (p. 560)

Community gardens meant to address food insecurity require a good deal of outdoor space, which few nonprofit organizations own or have long-term access to, meaning nonprofits must gain and maintain access to public space for programmes. However, in cities like Toronto, public green space is at a premium. In Sandy’s words:

[A] huge barrier is space. So there’s just not much green space to start with, and there aren’t many parks, they’re not very big, they tend to be little tiny parquets. So, we’re already low on green space, we don’t have any vacant land, really. (as cited in Langer, 2012, p. 69)

Kady emphasized that this lack of public gardening space is a primary reason for her programme’s long waiting lists:

Community gardens have huge waiting lists, that’s for sure … if you don’t live in a place where you have land it’s hard to get in somewhere … a lot of space that potentially could be available for growing food is not. It’s tied up in grass basically. (as cited in Langer, 2012, p. 69–77)

The owner of the largest amount of undeveloped green space in Toronto is the City’s Parks, Forestry, and Recreation Division (referred to as the Parks Division herein), positioning it locally as the major gatekeeper to community garden programme development. According to the Parks Division, much of Toronto’s parks, forests, and other green spaces are inappropriate for gardening, as gardens must not interfere with “the community's enjoyment of other park functions: dog walking, sports, picnicking, etc.” (Toronto, 2002, p. 12). Placing gardens as an interfering presence—how can a garden interfere with a soccer field but not vice versa?—the Parks Division, which seems to prioritize larger sports fields, dog parks, and natural areas (as well as prioritizing the groups that use green space for these purposes) over community gardens when allotting space. In order to access what little suitable space is available; coordinators must work within the Parks Division’s regulatory frames, giving it tremendous influence over nonprofit community gardens operated within the municipal Community Gardens Program. This frame of influence is readily apparent in the written regulations the Parks

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Division teaches coordinators they must follow in order to access and maintain gardening programme space.

Regulation of Garden Programmes Through Boss Texts

The Community Gardens Program Toolkit (referred to the Toolkit herein) is a Parks Division document that is meant to educate potential garden coordinators to navigate the institutional processes of both applying for a new community garden on municipal land and how to maintain these gardens. While Kady programmed in a garden that predated the Community Gardens Program, her programme still held to the regulations within it. With its power to enforce its own institutional definitions of gardens as a space and gardening as an activity, the Toolkit fulfils a number of institutional purposes. It establishes an institutional understanding of community gardeners as people who are interested in leisure gardening rather than food production work. It explains the Community Gardens Program’s regulations which, in turn, enforce gardens as recreational programming by limiting size of and activities within gardens. The Toolkit also minimizes gardening as a means of food production among the many other benefits of community gardens that the text lists alongside food production, from exercise and socialization to discouraging loitering and other activities and individuals the municipality deems unacceptable (Toronto, 2012, p. 99–104). In learning to access the Community Gardens Program, Coordinators learn that successfully accessing institutional programme resources requires adapting in order to satisfy institutional regulation. Incidentally, this means displacing their clients’ need for adequate access to food. As nonprofit mandates generally prioritize addressing food insecurity (as does the organization Kady works for, as we shall discuss shortly), there is a tension already emerging between what a nonprofit wishes to do and what the City will allow. In nesting their programmes within the Parks Division’s Community Gardens Program, coordinators hook their programming work up into the larger municipal organization of urban development. This is evident in how the Toolkit connects itself to municipal boss texts (i.e., texts that bind individuals to institutional realities through policies, bylaws, or other means and lay out the frame of reference) under which an institution such as the City of Toronto conducts its vast and complicated work (Smith & Turner, 2014). On the first page of the Toolkit are the Parks Division’s Vision and Mission statements, which reference a higher level Divisional document, quoting that “Toronto will be known by the world as the ‘City within a Park’” (Toronto, 2002, p. 2). From this the reader understands that the Community Gardens Program is part of the Division’s work to pursue the goals within the Parks and Recreation Strategic Plan - City of Toronto: Our Common Ground (City of Toronto, 2004). While they represent the same Divisional mandate, the mandate text within the document Strategic Plan expands on the text within the Toolkit. The latter text’s objective of creating a Toronto that is influential and enviable to other large cities around the world (p. 2) is echoed in the prior text’s vision of Toronto as one of a

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few great world cities, battling for a leading place in the new globalized economy (City of Toronto, 2004, p. 7). The Mandate explains how the Parks Division and their programmes are intended to support the City’s economic development, while the Strategic Plan sets out how “in our community centres, parks, and natural places, we can make Toronto its best self” (City of Toronto, 2004, p. 8). The Parks Division’s key contribution to these municipal aspirations is framed as its ability to help improve international perception of Toronto as a location with an envious quality of life (City of Toronto, 2004, p. 9). Quality of life is a central concept in the text as it allows Toronto to “hold on to our own best and brightest while enticing the world’s [sic] to join us” (City of Toronto, 2004, p. 7). The best and brightest in turn are those who will help Toronto become “what economist Richard Florida has called Creative Cities” (City of Toronto, 2004, p. 7), people Florida (2002) has termed the creative class. The mandate reveals the institutional understanding that these people, who include professionals such as medical researchers, financiers, film producers, sports agents, and others working in affluent fields,

follow opportunities wherever they are, but choose most often to live and work in places which celebrate human diversity, in cities where quality of life is best. (p. 7)

This focuses the municipal understanding of what type of people make a successful city towards the supposed needs of this affluent, globetrotting professional class rather than poor people already living in Toronto. Just as the Toolkit connects to the Parks Division’s mandate, the mandate text itself is subsumed within a higher order of municipal boss text, somewhat intimidatingly titled in capital letters TORONTO – OFFICIAL PLAN. The Official Plan states a municipal interest in “position[ing] Toronto as a ‘Creative City,’ a leading international culture capital” (p. 3.31) and envisions each division and department’s role in this rebranding effort. In a section titled “Creating a Cultural Capital” (p. 3.31) we learn that:

Arts and cultural activities, including expressions of popular culture, crafts, and multiculturalism…enrich the day-to-day quality of life of Toronto’s residents and workers and play an important role in the look and feel of the City, our collective identity, and the image we project beyond Toronto’s borders…Strategic municipal support for our cultural capital will contribute to a healthy City economy, promote cultural tourism and help us to be competitive in attracting and keeping businesses, particularly in the relatively mobile knowledge based industries. (pp. 3.31–3.32)

The term cultural capital is inseparable from that of the creative city and the previously discussed quality of life: The institutional logic is that a creative city is an (economically) successful city. Creative cities have a high quality of life due largely to their high level of cultural capital. Toronto’s understanding is that, with these ingredients, the City will be “a magnet attracting new residents to the City

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and convincing existing residents to stay” (p. 3.31), a sentiment that is echoed in Strategic Plan and alluded to in the Toolkit.

Exploring the Creative City Development Discourse

Barnes, Waitt, Gill, and Gibson (2007) describe Florida’s treatise The Rise of the Creative Class … and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community, and everyday life as:

Resting on the observation that members of a ‘new’ upwardly mobile social class exercise their spatial and career mobility, to seek employment in places where the arts and creative industries are strong … [and include] ethnic diversity and arts precincts. The policy message is that places that have suffered industrial decline ought to aggressively plan for, and compete to attract, members of the new ‘creative class.’ (p. 337)

The ideas presented in Florida’s international best-selling book have “been among the most popular of recent economic development policy prescriptions embraced by cities” (Hoyman & Faricy, 2009, p. 311) looking to gain an advantage in the global economy. Toronto’s boss texts reveal that the City is one of many on this creative class bandwagon, the result being that

the focus of many city councils has shifted from helping city residents… (through provision of basic services and welfare) to place making and marketing … to attract new investors and creative class residents. (Barnes et al., 2007, pp. 335–336)

The Parks Division’s desire for Toronto to be known as the “city within a park” reveals the Divisional understanding of Toronto’s rebranding strategy. With Florida’s own assertion that creatives “define the quality of their live[s] by the experiences they consume” (Florida, 2002, p. 170) and are attracted to physically exerting, authentic (i.e., not part of the synthetic modern culture of mass consumption) forms of recreation (p.170). As community gardening certainly fits within this definition, it is easy to see it as a demand good that encourages creatives and their investment dollars to relocate to or remain in Toronto. Having already seen that this creative city discourse marginalizes poor communities in Toronto, it is no shock that Barnes et al. (2007) are not the only critics of Florida’s theories and how they are put into practice. In Struggling with the Creative Class, Peck (2005) looks more directly at how the creative class concept

is being read by city leaders … [observing that] there is a predisposition to accept the most controversial steps in [Florida’s] thesis—that creativity is the root cause of growth, and this is borne by a mobile class of elite workers (p. 765),

and that:

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Creative-city strategies are predicated on, and designed for, this neoliberalized terrain. Repackaging urban cultural artefacts as competitive assets, they value them (literally) not for their own sake, but in terms of their (supposed) economic utility…They provide a means to intensify and publicly subsidise urban consumption systems for a circulating mass of gentrifiers, whose lack of commitment to space and whose weak community ties are perversely celebrated. (p. 764)

The notion that creative city development strategies foster development through gentrification and displacement is echoed by others. Barnes et al. (2007) have observed that creative development sees populations such sex workers and elderly immigrants as redundant for their lack of economic utility (p. 350). In Toronto, Catungal, Leslie, and Hii (2009) found that the rebranding of Liberty Village neighbourhood as “an isolated ‘urban village’ … displaced both ‘risky’ people and behaviours” (p. 1096) which progressively included working class residents and eventually the less affluent creative professionals such as artists (p. 1099). For Toronto, such a dynamic creates two castes: the valuable creatives and the forgotten if not outright undesirable others. As many communities that would be considered non-creative by Florida contribute to Toronto’s authenticity, from Portuguese seniors with their front yard garden trellises and late night Korean-run eateries open after last call to the stylish, struggling artists populating small, independent cafés, their value is that of competitive assets that help build Toronto’s image for those who believe that quality of life includes the ability to cherry pick from the social, cultural, and economic enclaves where more marginalized and often more vulnerable residents live their everyday lives. Within this creative city development discourse, the value of community gardens is that they positively impact property values in poor neighbourhoods (Voicu & Been, 2008), and which often attract gentrifiers and artists as gardeners that are “seemingly motivated by their desire to clean up the community and create art space, as well as grow fresh food” (Saldivar-Tanaka & Krasny, 2004, p. 410) and who engage in “rearranging the public realm according to middle-class values” (Rosol, 2010, p. 557). Institutionally then, groups of Torontonians who provide gritty or colourful character to a neighbourhood—ethnic enclaves, artists, the occasional homeless person, and others who are all too often poor—are valuable as marketing tools, not as human beings.

Subsuming Poverty within Hunger

Returning to the actual work done by garden coordinators, we have previously discussed that there is a great deal of variation in terms of their purposes, structure, and the people and interests visible within community gardens. From tiny parquet gardens to large urban farms, communal gardens or individual plots, or gardens meant only to teach people to grow food elsewhere versus gardens meant primarily to feed, the nature of the space, the agriculture technology employed, and the regulations on the preceding factors influence what gardening actually means in

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terms of activities and outcomes. When gardens are run as programmes within nonprofits, the flexibility of what exactly is defined as a community garden allows garden coordinators to consider teaching using many types of structures and activities that constitute gardening as viable in order to fit their programmes within the regulatory frames of the Community Gardens Program (and, by virtue of this, into the larger frame of creative development). Of course, every garden has different outcomes depending on size, technology, crops, and other considerations. For garden coordinators, learning to fit their programmes within regulatory frames is learned incidentally—while they are often unaware of the specific regulations, policies, and plans that constrict their work, they have learned to successfully develop programmes within these regulations. But in not acknowledging the powerful frames that guide their work, coordinators seem to be left with hollow discursive explanations for why they cannot do what is needed. Kady spoke of a new garden programme she was organizing in a community housing complex (which is regulated by the Province of Ontario, not Toronto):

It’s just not looking like it’s going to be possible to do a garden there. We’re starting to talk about doing a container gardening project. However, that’s not what people requested, right? What they want is a garden (laughs) … I think a lot of it is organizing through many different players that—it’s a challenge, right, because you need to make sure everyone’s on the same page. (as cited in Langer, 2012, p. 71)

Kady’s explanation relies on an understanding of her nonprofit programming work as something that everyone—her, her clients, community housing staff, and the institution itself—want to work together to make a garden happen. But the assumption that she can get everyone on the same page to develop a garden misses that certain players have more say in what that garden will actually be— essentially, the institution that owns the space decides what page if any everyone will end up on. As gatekeepers to gardening space, they possess an inordinate amount of power to shape the garden. While Kady implied that residents wanted a real garden, i.e., one large enough to have individual plots, community housing staff would not allow it. Ultimately, a small sliver of land beside a parking lot was planted with flowers, demonstrating the power a landowning institution has to shift a garden project completely away from food production to beautification. Yet the garden was created despite not being able to meet the desires of residents. As a researcher, I was able to identify such points as these, where garden coordinators’ work within institutional space became difficult and use that to reflect critically on how and why this is. However, another layer of discursive displacement of poor residents’ experiences occurs not at the level of municipal regulation, but at that of garden coordinators themselves, where a food discourse-oriented frame initially obscures the realities of poverty.

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A Food-centric Discourse

Through various formal and informal avenues, including schooling and farming internships, potential community garden coordinators learn agricultural skills and come to understand that these skills can be applied to address various social issues, including helping poor urban communities. However, there exists a tension which a community gardener, Kady, observed that although her methods of addressing social issues were oriented towards hunger and running food programs, her understanding of the communities in which she worked was that poverty was a major concern:

It’s illegal for us to sell from the City land—because we’re in a park—so we can’t do that. Community gardeners are not loaded with tons of cash, so it would be a nice way to supplement some of the hard work that you do. (as cited in Langer, 2012, p. 38)

She continued that

there’ huge economic benefits as well, although presumably such benefits are largely theoretical as Sandy shared earlier that the lack of gardening space is a barrier she contends with. Not having to buy your vegetable in the summer is a big benefit. (as cited in Langer, 2012, p. 38)

Through working with poor Torontonians, Kady has learned that a major benefit of community gardening for poor, food-insecure Torontonians is economic. However, while food insecurity is primarily caused by poverty, Kady’s expertise is primarily as an urban agriculture educator. She understands poor Torontonians’ needs through this professional frame, where poverty comes to be defined in terms of a primary symptom, hunger, which can be addressed with agricultural programming. Conversely, if poverty itself was prioritized, addressing it within a community garden would be much more difficult without continued stable access to large spaces large enough to farm produce to sell and an overhaul of municipal bylaws in order to allow the sale of produce grown in parks. So, an initial barrier to addressing poor Torontonians’ needs is actually community gardeners’ food security discourse-oriented frame. In approaching food insecurity form the focal point of food, the reality that hunger is most often a symptom of poverty is obscured. In learning to define poverty as hunger, garden coordinators inadvertently begin the work of massaging the needs of poor Torontonians into the organizational priorities of those food nonprofits that employs them and, ultimately, into the City’s creative city development discourse.

Subsuming Hunger within Nonprofit Programmes

For each of us, the work we do is governed by institutional rules from job descriptions that outline our responsibilities to codes of conduct and more informal expectations. Every nonprofit worker’s job is a puzzle piece that fits into their organization’s larger work in pursuit of its goals. These goals are usually outlined

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in various mission, vision, and mandate texts, just as is the City’s work. The mission of Kady’s organization is “to increase access to healthy food in a manner that maintains dignity, builds health and community, and challenges inequality” (The Stop, 2014). Here, “access to healthy food” is stated as the primary goal, the aim being to create a certain type of access that achieves the more abstract secondary goals of maintaining dignity, building health, and so on. The tools the organization uses to increase access to food are their programmes and, in a sense, any food programme run for poor Torontonians accomplishes the primary objective of increasing access. However, such a definition of access obeys the letter rather than the spirit, ignoring that access must provide adequate healthy calories to address individuals’ hunger. Such abstract terms as dignified are easily conflated with adequate when discussing what sort of access to food is accomplished within a programme, as they have little meaning in and of themselves, tend to be hard to quantify and, in this, easier to argue that an organization has achieved. I argue that inadequate access to food is undignified; however, dignity in and of itself is an empty, nebulous concept that can be successfully met by a programme that still sends participants home hungry. In fact, the term hunger does not appear anywhere in the nonprofit’s vision or mission, although Kady was aware that her clients’ food insecurity was directly tied to poverty (as we will see in the following paragraph). The Stop’s programmes include a food bank, a type of programme that has been critiqued as “symbolic charity” (Tarasuk & Eakin, 2002) for not providing a regular, adequate nutritional supplement for poor Torontonians, it is reasonable to assume that the food security community gardens provide is more symbolic than material. Further demonstrating the organizational logic that programmes equate to increased access to food, participating in Kady’s garden programmes does not guarantee access to food, as they are an extension of her organization’s food bank and other programs.

We’re kind of a funny model because we don’t have plots…our vegetables are supplementing what’s going on in the food bank…maybe people who are very focused on ‘I need to grow this amount of food, I want these specific crops, and it’s all for me.’ It doesn’t cater to that (as cited in Langer, 2012, p. 37).

After subsuming poor Torontonians’ need for financial security within the theoretical understanding of food security, community members are hooked into the organization’s mandate as programme clients, in a sense their needs become understood as food programming related, not money, employment, or even food related. Within this frame, the nonprofit can equate the existence of community garden programmes with access to food, thus satisfying its primary goal. This is despite the fact that Kady’s gardeners may still not be able to access a meaningful amount of food through the program. Instead, they must access the produce they grow through other programmes, as Kady stated that the communally-grown produce was used in cooking programs rather than distributed among those who had worked to grow it. After doing gardening work, poor Torontonians must still

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access other programmes to receive food. As such, accessing food through Kady’s garden programme is arguably less accessible than getting food from a traditional food bank, as gardeners have no ownership of the fruits of their labour. In learning to translate the needs of poor Torontonians into terms their organization can act on, poverty becomes synonymous with hunger, hunger is addressed by food security programmes, and programming becomes synonymous with providing food. However, coordinators are well aware of the friction between their clients’ needs and institutional priorities. As garden coordinator Sandy shared candidly:

I would love to feel that the amount of food we were growing in this neighbourhood was actually making a dent in the produce available in the community. At the scale we’re at it’s much more like a demonstration and educational—it’s much more like that, even though we’ve done lots. In terms of the impact, the pounds of produce being put into [our neighbourhood], we wouldn’t be making that big of a dent. (as cited in Langer, 2012, p. 37)

Neither garden coordinator’s programmes directly address the needs of poor, food-insecure Torontonians for greater income equality. However, Sandy goes on to reveal that community garden programmes do seem better suited to more affluent residents, stating that there is

a class difference … People are more willing to come and just drop in [to programmes without private plots] and not necessarily see the benefit when they’re not living in poverty. (Personal communication, January 4, 2009)

For people who do not urgently need better access to food (i.e., creatives), garden education programmes offer countless benefits, from socialization and exercise to reduced crime around garden areas (City of Toronto Economic Development, Culture, & Tourism Department, 2002). But these more affluent classes are not the targets of food-oriented nonprofits, although nonprofit programmes are more suited to the needs of these more affluent classes than to those of poor Torontonians. This is a fundamental disjuncture between the needs of poor Torontonians accessing community garden programmes and the organization of these programmes within a creative city development frame. In my experience interviewing garden coordinators, they would often show frustration or awkwardness when discussing barriers to running programmes that better addressed hunger or poverty. When I asked her about how involved her organization was in anti-poverty activities, Kady offered the justification that

we’re going to focus on food. But I’m sure glad that there’s someone focusing on shelter, right? We can’t do everything. (Personal communication, January, 2009)

Being focused on the many facets of food programming leaves very little time for questioning if those programmes are effective in addressing food insecurity as a symptom of poverty. This is especially true when garden coordinators feel the pressure justify their programmes’ worth in searching for funding, as Sandy shared:

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The scramble for resources...the amount of my time that’s taken up scrambling for resources is astounding, you know? … I almost feel like I’m out of the stream of being able to advocate and create … in terms of agriculture organizations...we’re just way behind in having any stable sources of funding. … It creates burnout, it creates all kinds of issues. (as cited in Langer, 2012, p. 68–69)

It was a common sentiment that there was a lack of time and resources for the workers to address this themselves, though they saw the importance of knowing more about government policies and other contextual factors. As a third coordinator said to me during the course of my research,

Unfortunately, I’m pretty Toronto-centred. I only can get as far as I can get on my bike. (Personal communication, January 2009)

Garden coordinators are also centred on their own day-to-day work of providing food programmes. They do not have sufficient time and resources to reflect on their practice within the various frames it exists, so the trifold problem of poor Torontonians’ needs being displaced within community garden programmes persists.

CONCLUSION: WEEDING OUR CONCEPTUAL GARDENS

In this final section of the chapter I discuss how adult education researchers, such as myself, have a role to play in helping build a stronger understanding of the institutional contexts of community gardens, food, and poverty at the levels of frontline community worker, nonprofit administrator, and municipal official. In Mezirow’s (Mezirow & Associates, 1990) own words:

We learn differently when we are learning to perform than when we are learning to understand what is being communicated to us. Reflection enables us to [correct] distortions in our beliefs and errors in problem solving. Critical reflection involves a critique of the presuppositions on which our beliefs have been built. (p. 199)

Garden coordinators display discontent with the combined effect that urban development goals, nonprofit priorities, and their own discourse have on their work with poor residents. Additionally, garden coordinators typically lack the resources to reach their own understanding of these dynamics, to reflect critically on them, or act to challenge regulations that replicate social inequality. Given this lack of resources, research may play a valuable role in facilitating this critical reflection work through mapping regulatory frames as I have done. Such maps have the potential to play roles as tools for busy workers wishing to reflect on their institutional learning without having to start from scratch. Essentially, I have tried to map out not just the institutional contexts of garden coordinators’ work, but how and why their presuppositions constrain the way they understand their work and the surrounding world. In doing this, I have identified three levels of the displacement of poor Torontonians’ occurring as coordinators work within

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nonprofit and municipal frames including, the regulation of garden programmes through boss texts; the influence of the Creative City Development discourse on garden programmes; and the subsuming of poverty within hunger and then subsuming hunger within the work of nonprofit programmes. Because the City is primarily interested in economic development, its policies and programmes inadvertently displace poor Torontonians. Because garden coordinators are primarily interested in food and gardening, they primarily address a symptom of poverty, hunger, instead of addressing poverty itself. Finally, because food-oriented nonprofit organizations need to justify their existence through developing and facilitating programmes, garden coordinators are pressured to develop community garden programmes for poor gardeners that adhere to municipal regulations that promote inequality rather than meeting gardeners’ needs. A question that follows from where my work leaves off is this: how does an adult educator encourage organizations and their workers to come to an initial awareness that their own practices and priorities help replicate structural inequality? While organizational maps may make critical reflection an easier task, making workers more likely to engage in reflection in the first place, workers are generally not going to face the “grief and mourning” (MacDonald, 2002, p. 172) that occurs when one realizes that one’s fundamental beliefs are not entirely correct and has to confront their own cognitive dissonance. It must be understood that, from an institutional sense, the system that garden coordinators are a part of works fairly well. But this is a system of gentrification and inequality that displaces Toronto’s most vulnerable populations. It is only from the perspective of poor, hungry Torontonians or from the moral perspectives of nonprofit workers that this organization becomes problematic. So how can an adult educator researcher initiate systemic change when coordinators, nonprofit administrators, and municipal staff do not necessarily have a strong enough reason do so? There is even reason to take pause and ask, as Baumgartner (2001) has:

What right do instructors have to encourage transformational learning? … Realizing that most adult educators are unprepared to manage the dynamics of helping relationships or the dynamics of transformative learning within the context of those relationships. (p. 21)

While as the writer of this chapter I am positioned as an adult educator beholden to these questions, so too are community garden coordinators in their role as adult educators. And if coordinators truly wish their work to address food insecurity and to enhance their clients’ lives, reflecting on the fundamental contradictions in the organizational frames they work within is vital. I strongly believe that adult educators have a place as advocates with the responsibility to assist in learning that promotes social equality. In the food movement at large, there is a great deal of room to look at the institutional contexts of food and the merging of critical reflection with approaches to incentivizing behavioural change and grassroots community development. There is also room to challenge institutions such as municipal governments when, in order to provide humanitarian services, we must ignore those humans with the greatest need for help. There is lots of work still to be

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done if we are to truly address social inequality through food, and this work begins with critically reflecting on our own practice within institutional frames. In the end, if we are truly interested in increasing poor residents’ dignity, these avenues of thought must be pursued.

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Saldivar-Tanaka, L., & Krasny, M. (2004). Culturing community development, neighbourhood open space, and civic agriculture: The case of Latino community gardens in New York City. Agriculture and Human Values, 21(4), 399–412. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10460-003-1248-9#

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Christopher Langer Toronto, Canada

C. Etmanski (Ed.), Food Leadership, 141–153. © 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

VANESSA GOODALL AND CATHERINE ETMANSKI

9. CONCLUSION

Emerging Trends and Future Directions for Leadership and Adult Learning in Global Food Systems Transformation

Leadership and learning are deeply interconnected. As shown by the contributors in this collection, reflective leaders learn through taking action. In this vein, Zuber-Skerritt (2002) has argued, “action learning, in brief, is learning from concrete experience and critical reflection on that experience” (p. 114). Therefore, this kind of self-reflective, experiential learning is helpful in promoting a more informed and conscious approach to leadership. It is hoped that readers of this book and people working in the multiple, interconnected movements in support of global food systems transformation will find synergy in the ideas shared throughout this book and perhaps find ways to adapt and apply the lessons learned in their own particular contexts. As described in the introduction, the idea that food is a productive site for adult education, learning, and pedagogy has already begun to take hold (e.g., Flowers & Swan, 2012, 2015; Sumner, 2016). As the authors in this book have shown, learning from the experience of diverse leaders working toward global food systems transformation can likewise provide rich insights. This final chapter presents some of the emerging trends and future directions at this intersection of food leadership and adult learning. It begins with a brief discussion of the themes drawn from the chapters of this edited collection, then moves into an overview of the possible futures of food leadership and adult learning. In particular, it outlines two emerging trends: First, it articulates the necessity to interrogate the concept of food security and second, it identifies means to innovate and evaluate the impact of food systems programs. As a potential future direction for leaders and educators in this area, the final part of this chapter invites readers to learn leadership lessons from the practice of permaculture. It concludes with a call for leaders and educators to look to their plates for inspiration in their work.

THEMES EMERGING FROM THIS BOOK

When read independently, each chapter makes a unique contribution based on the particular context from which they authors’ key insights emerged. When read side-by-side, however, we begin to see several emerging themes. For example, many of the chapters document lessons learned in the context of particular food-related programming (e.g., the chapters by Beaugé; Langer; Lickers Xavier; Reader & Johnson) and food-related policy councils (Day Farnsworth). Beyond programmes

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and councils, we can also see a clear movement among Indigenous peoples worldwide who are reclaiming their traditional teachings and food-related practices (Lickers Xavier; Openjuru; Reader & Johnson). This trend is reflected in American Indian Quarterly’s special issue on the recovery of Indigenous knowledge (Vol. 28, No. 3/4; see Waziyatawin Wilson, 2004). In Chapter 7, Kajzer Mitchell, Low, Davenport, and Brigham add that this movement to return to traditional teachings about food extends beyond Indigenous communities through a growing interest in wild food harvesting. As both Openjuru and Kajzer Mitchell et al. demonstrate, the area of wild food harvesting presents a source of further action and investigation. Programming, policies, Indigenous food reclamation and wild food practices, then, are key areas where food leadership and learning are taking place. The chapters by Day Farnsworth (Chapter 4), Beaugé (Chapter 5), Das Gupta (Chapter 6), and Langer (Chapter 8) discuss the unintended consequences of food programmes, policies, and practices. In Chapters 4 and 6, by Day Farnsworth and Das Gupta respectively, we can see that people are grappling with how the ideology of neoliberalism is impacting food security, especially insofar as it promotes exclusion through bureaucratisation and the market-driven liberalisation of global agricultural policy. Das Gupta and Day Farnsworth similarly suggest that within the food movement, it is clear that the actions of seemingly well-meaning individuals and/or policies can have harmful effects, and that leaders in these various contexts would do well to pay attention to the diversity of their constituents. Beaugé (Chapter 5) and Langer (Chapter 6) add to this the awareness that food security efforts can sometimes contribute to the gentrification of neighbourhoods and cities, thus potentially undermining food security for people living in poverty. Moreover, Reader and Johnson (Chapter 2) and Kajzer Mitchell et al. (Chapter 7) remind us that tension can exist where market forces encourage people to sell their grown or harvested food to the highest paying customer, rather than eating it themselves. As such, food movements, like other social movements, contain internal dilemmas and contradictions, and can generate both liberating and oppressive practices. The final theme worth noting is the reality that many of these chapters were the result of graduate level research (Beaugé; Das Gupta; Day Farnsworth; Langer; Lickers Xavier, as well as Goodall in this conclusion). This trend suggests that although food leadership remains a nascent field, it is rapidly expanding through the research and practical interests of the next generation of scholars, a trend likewise documented by Murcott (2015, pp. 2–3). A parallel trend has already been seen in the intersection of adult education and food, as documented in earlier edited works, for example, by Etmanski (2015), Flowers and Swan (2012, 2015), and Sumner (2016). Moreover, food is becoming a focal point in disciplines beyond leadership and adult education, as exemplified through recent special journal issues (e.g., Issue 114 of Feminist Review; see Hemmings, Al-Ali, & Wearing, 2016). As Kaak (2012) identified, food systems transformation requires the leadership of visionaries who are prepared to work across disciplines and perspectives. Therefore, these emerging themes provide beacons not only for the fields of leadership and adult education, but also for scholars and practitioners in other

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fields who are seeking to better understand how food could or already does present a window into their own work.

THE POSSIBLE FUTURES OF FOOD LEADERSHIP AND ADULT LEARNING

Although food systems can be broken down into professional and academic silos—agriculture, food sciences, cultural studies, nutrition, business, cooking—as has been shown throughout this book, food is a cumulative product of diverse and interconnected systems of knowledge and ways of knowing. It is more than just a commodity that is traded and purchased and it is more than just the calories consumed. Food, in whatever form it is served, is a product of vast historical processes and is a reflection of the culture and environment from which it emerged. Food, including its presence and absence, transcends institutionalised boundaries and singular human experiences. As suggested in the preface, introduction, and by contributing authors such as Openjuru and Lickers Xavier, at a personal level, food intersects the home economy, with health, culture, politics, gender, spirituality, geography, identity, and more. Moreover, as Langer suggested, at a societal level, food (and the ability to access it) inherently relates to issues of social justice, including poverty alleviation, equality, and community (see also Ramp, 2014, p. 121–122). Conceptually, then, food is deeply connected to these broader individual and social processes and is difficult to isolate from them. As a result, food systems transformation calls for holistic approaches to understanding how food is connected to and affected by a diversity of lived experiences. Accordingly, within academia, this demand is reflected by interdisciplinary approaches to food studies that are cognisant and adaptive to the idea that the global food system consists of interdependent and independent food systems that cannot be uniformly defined. They are unique and, while the contributing authors to this book have highlighted the shared challenges that the industrial food system has imposed upon local food systems, solutions to the challenges they face cannot be met with strict disciplinary or generalised approaches (Provincial Health Services Authority, 2008, p. 11). These parameters, though demanding, present the field of leadership with the opportunity to guide food systems transformation through collaborative efforts. Leadership, as an area of study, is characteristically interdisciplinary and actively encourages engagement across the social and natural sciences. As a skillset and a process, leadership is the ability to influence and guide a people, an organisation, or a movement towards a shared vision (Chiu, Dansereau, Seitz, Shaughnessy, & Yammarino, 2013, p. 804). Thus, for those inspired to make changes in how food is produced, accessed, and consumed, there are ample occasions and entry points for (co)-guiding the process. From the address of acute and chronic food shortages through global policy level advocacy or local food banks and nutrition programs, to the building of community through food projects such as gardens and community kitchens, through to the implementation of long-term solutions such as the development of local supply-chains that support small-scale food producers, work within food systems draws from diverse knowledge and skillsets that span both the

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academic and applied fields. This work, whether at the grassroots, national, or international levels of analysis, has the potential to fulfil a litany of expressed needs that, through innovative leadership, can tackle the root causes of food insecurity and shift food systems towards resiliency and inclusivity. The following sections outline three future directions for leaders and educators in this area: (1) interrogating the concept of food security, (2) uncovering means to innovate and evaluate the impact of food systems programs and (3) applying lessons from the practice of permaculture to the way leaders operate.

Interrogating the Concept of Food Security

Food security, as a concept, field of inquiry, and course of action, can be used to describe both efforts to maintain the global (industrial) food system and actions that seek to democratise or transform how (local) food is produced, accessed, and consumed. As demonstrated by the contributing authors, definitions and applications of food security are incongruently applied between the scales of analysis (local to global) and actors who are engaged in addressing issues of food security. Yet, while these differences prevail in the overarching politics of food, it is imperative to remember that the concept of food security exists along a spectrum of definitions that are inherently influenced by the prevailing cultural, economic, and political landscape of the times and by those who apply the definition. For example, the first definition of food security was developed at the 1974 World Food Conferences, held in Rome, Italy. Situated within the context of the 1973–1974 global oil crisis, the term arose amidst a global discourse of food shortages, price stabilisation, and famine (Messer, 2013). Defined as the “availability at all times of adequate world food supplies of basic foodstuffs to sustain steady expansion of food consumption and to offset fluctuations in the production and price” (p. 389), food security, both as a term and a solution to the volatility of global food resources, was framed as an issue of supply. However, since this time, the definition of food security has evolved substantially. As academics, practitioners, and governments have recognised the complex nature of food security—identifying that a lack of food security is not simply about having a shortage of food on the market—its definition has broadened to address not only the supply (availability) of food but also the demand (accessibility) of food, as well as its cultural relevance. In recognition of this shift, Simon Maxwell, whose 1996 essay, Food Security: A Post-Modern Perspective, identified over 200 definitions of food security, wrote that “in the years since the World Food Conference of 1974, the concept of ‘food security’ has evolved, developed, multiplied and diversified” (Maxwell, 1996, p. 155–157). Maxwell saw this shift occurring parallel to ontological changes made within the field of international development and poverty alleviation. In particular, Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and philosopher who is widely known for his book Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), is credited as having moved food security discourse from one of availability (supply) to that of accessibility (demand). According to Messer

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(2013), Sen’s work revealed that “acute food shortages (famines) are not caused by absolute lack of food, food production failures, or food availability decline, but rather a lack of effective demand and market failures and distortions” (Messer, 2013, p. 395). Sen confirmed that famine will occur irrespective of plentiful stocks of food on the market, and that social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental entitlements all influence the propensity for a lack of food security (Midgley, 2013, p. 431). This shift in understanding, particularly the social (or human-led) processes that result in a lack of food security, has been carried forward in successive definitions, including one to have emerged from the 1996 World Food Summit,

Food security, at the individual, household, national, regional and global levels [is achieved] when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. (FAO, 2003, p. 28)

This robust definition addressed access both in terms of a household’s capacity to afford food and to physically (from health and geographic perspectives) procure food. Finally, it is this legacy that led to the widely-referenced definition that was first used by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in the 2001 State of Food Insecurity Report. According to this document, food security is defined as “a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (FAO, 2003, p. 28, italics indicate our emphasis). Although this oft-cited definition may not fully account for Indigenous people’s deep connection to the land (Lickers Xavier, this volume), the notion of food preferences is an attempt to acknowledge the existence of cultural food needs beyond availability/supply and accessibility/demand. Despite this evolving understanding of food security, Eric Holt-Giménez (2011) has argued that the concept itself is limited in supporting global food systems transformation. In his view, food security typically describes access to any kind of food and is generally reflective of reformist efforts to integrate less harmful practices into existing mainstream market structures. Conversely, the concept of food sovereignty is more closely associated with a radical trend to fundamentally restructure the dominant industrial agricultural system in favour of people who are poor and underserved by the status quo (Holt-Giménez, 2011). As such, food security can theoretically be achieved within the existing industrial agricultural system, whereas food sovereignty demands radical change. As Lickers Xavier’s chapter suggested, this difference between food security and food sovereignty is particularly helpful for leaders working in Indigenous contexts. Etmanski (2012) argued that food

cannot be viewed in isolation from other forms of Indigenous knowledge. Instead, it must be understood holistically in the context of interdependent relationships between land, language, culture, arts and crafts, health, spirituality, lifestyle, and general ways of being in the world. (p. 495)

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The movement of Indigenous food sovereignty therefore strengthens Indigenous people’s “ability to respond to our own needs for healthy, culturally adapted Indigenous foods” (Indigenous Food Systems Network, n.d., section on Indigenous Food Sovereignty, para. 1). Innovative leaders and educators working to support people in a range of settings, especially Indigenous settings, to secure access to nutritious and culturally appropriate food would do well to understand the nuanced implications of these concepts. Such leaders and educators are also advised to take stock of the impact of their efforts in achieving greater food security, a topic to which we now turn.

Innovation and Impact of Food Security Initiatives

As the field matures, the work conducted under the wide umbrella of food systems transformation is coming under increasing pressure to offer creative solutions, to show results, to measure change, and to improve outcomes towards the acquisition of food security—a task that many food organisations and service providers are taking seriously (Barton, Wrieden, & Anderson, 2011, p. 589). Within the context of British Columbia (B.C.), two recent examples stand out. A first example comes from the Greater Vancouver Food Bank (GVFB) who, in an attempt to address the ongoing need and demand for their services, is evaluating its role as an emergency food provider. By assessing how the organisation can transition away from a charitable framework towards a model of social innovation, the GVFB is looking at opportunities to support the development of long-term community food security within its area of service. As one of the 550 registered food banks in Canada (Food Banks Canada, 2016, p. 1), the GVFB is taking a critical step towards redefining the role of food banks (Greater Vancouver Food Bank, 2016, pp. 1–4). This intention is clearly outlined in their 2016 report Social innovation in food banks: An environmental scan of social innovation in Canadian and US food banks

The realization that food banks are no longer only serving emergency food needs, but rather contending with chronic food insecurity calls into question how food banks can better serve the long-term health, social justice, and resilience of communities. Many food banks are increasingly recognizing that they need to advocate and act around the systemic causes of poverty and food insecurity in order to create real, lasting change. (2016, p. 1)

According to the GVFB, food banks can adopt numerous types of social innovation within a diverse array of their systems of operation. From a service delivery perspective, the engagement of emergency food programs with other social programs or food projects, such as food literacy workshops, is considered an innovative approach to supporting individual skill development and increasing the sense of community and inclusion within a food bank (Greater Vancouver Food Bank, 2016, p. 24). From a procurement perspective, social innovation can come as an increase in the quality of food purchased, grown, or donated to a food bank. As the linkage between the consumption of healthy foods and long-term physical and mental health are well documented, food banks, such as the GVFB, are responding

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to criticism that unhealthy, processed foods need to be replaced with nutrient-dense alternatives (Rideout, Ostry, & Seed, 2006, p. 235). Thus, by deciding to parallel “their nutrition guidelines with provincial healthy eating frameworks” (Greater Vancouver Food Bank, 2016, p. 22) that focus on reducing the risk of preventable chronic diseases and injuries, the GVFB exemplifies how leadership in food systems transformation can dramatically shift the purpose and outcomes of food banks in Canada (B.C. Ministry of Health, 2014, pp. 2–3). Overall, this is a powerful example of food systems leadership that reflects a deep understanding of the context that results in food insecure individuals and communities. Although food banks in Canada were initially developed to mitigate acute, not chronic food insecurity, this shift from addressing short-term to long-term food needs stands to put the GVFB and their resources in a better position to create healthier, more food secure individuals and communities (Tarasuk, Dachner, & Loopstra, 2013, p. 1413). Moreover, the very recognition that food insecurity needs to be met with long-term solutions that tackle root causes, calls for further food leadership, advocacy, and policy reform at local, national, and international levels. A secondary example of social innovation within the food system in B.C. is taking shape in the form of social procurement. A practice that supports the idea that “tax payed funded contracts should enhance, rather than diminish social value in our communities” (Hamilton, 2015, p. 3), social procurement advocates for the public sector to support local businesses to obtain government contracts. Although social procurement is not exclusive to the food sector, it is an opportunity for local governments (at least in a Canadian context) to support food producers and processors and, as a result, invest in their local economy, society, and environment. Benefits of this type of policy framework include, but are not limited to, the encouragement of entrepreneurship, the development of employment opportunities, increased support for social inclusion, and––in the case of food contracts––increased access and consumption of local foods (Lehtinen, 2012, p. 1059). On Vancouver Island, B.C., The Village of Cumberland is leading the way by institutionalising the province’s first municipal social procurement policy. In the summer of 2015, the “Cumberland Council approved a social procurement framework which will form the basis of a future policy to leverage public dollars to achieve desirable and targeted social impact for the Village through its future competitive bid and purchasing activities” (Village of Cumberland, 2015, pp. 1). The Village of Cumberland—which worked with local advisors and took cues from other local governments who have implemented similar social or public procurement policies—affirmed,

By expanding the traditional understanding of ‘best value’ in procurement, to include the generation of positive societal benefits, alongside high quality and competitive bids, The Village of Cumberland is working to maximize community benefits and deliver improved socio-economic returns for local taxpayers, within the existing spend. (Village of Cumberland, 2015, p. 9)

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Inspirational and innovative, these are but two approaches to facilitating food systems transformation that seek to actively bring social and economic value to local communities through food. Whether the entry point for change is through a re-conceptualisation of what the act of charity means within the food sector, or the development of local policy that supports local producers, the avenues for supporting and creating stronger and more vibrant food systems are plentiful. In celebrating these achievements, it is important to recognise that these innovations did and cannot occur without individuals and communities who deeply understand how food systems are defined and operate, and how they (as leaders) will hold themselves, and others, accountable to the process of change. From this, questions have emerged around the idea of what it means to be accountable to food systems transformation. What specifically is it that leaders will or should hold themselves responsible to? Is it a specific definition of food security, the need to meet and deliver upon established goals, or is there something else? One answer to these questions speaks to the idea of conceptualising or understanding how to evaluate the impact of the work conducted under the banner of food systems transformation. Is it possible, given the interconnected and complex nature of work in this field, to accurately and effectively measure the impact of programs that are designed to influence healthier and more demographic food systems? Furthermore, are there examples from within or outside the field that that can help lead the way in answering this question? At this point, given the relative youth of the food systems field, methods for understanding or evaluating the impact of food programs from a food systems or food security perspective (particularly those contextualised at the local or grassroots level of analysis), are in relative stages of infancy. However, the experience of and the tools that have been created by governing bodies and international organisations offer insight into how this question can be approached. For example, at the international level, organisations such as the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization have conducted extensive work into conceptualising, developing, and testing models and tools for evaluating undernutrition, dietary diversity, consumption trends, and more (Cafiero, Melgar-Quiñonez, Ballard, & Keppel, 2014, p. 231). At the national level, many governments (including Canadian and US governments) have implemented a Household Food Security Survey Module to evaluate “insufficient or inadequate levels of food access, availability, and utilization” experienced by household members (Health Canada, 2012, pp. 2). At regional levels, governing bodies, including B.C.’s Provincial Health Service Authority, have also developed guides to assist localised food systems organisations to conduct baseline food security assessments (Caraher, Lang, Osry, & Seed, 2013, p. 459) that are used to guide policy and community directives around food (Jones, Ngure, Pelto, & Young, 2013, p. 484). Finally, at the grass-roots levels, food networks, such as the Cowichan Food Security Coalition in Duncan, Canada, have developed annual Food Security Report Cards that are used to evaluate and understand trends and challenges within their local food system. Qualitative and quantitative data are collected to inform progress made in alleviating food insecurity. The results are

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used to guide the future of food systems programs and solutions in the community (Cowichan Green Community, 2014). These tools, although instrumental in defining levels of food insecurity and in identifying areas that could benefit from short and/or long-term food-based programs, were designed to deliver baseline food security assessments, not impact assessments that analyse the impacts that result from food programs (Knight, 2012, p. 30). This does not reflect a failure of those who are engaged in food systems work or who are responsible for developing methods for evaluating food security. Rather, this gap is but a necessary phase in the development of the field. Accordingly, for those organisations engaged in food systems transformation and that are interested in understanding the impact of their work, the development of food-focused systems of evaluation could be of use. To date, a few studies have been conducted in the English language to test pilot models for evaluating the impact of grassroots food programs. For example, CookWell, a food security program in the United Kingdom offers food literacy and cooking workshops for adults, sought to develop a standardised questionnaire for evaluating their program (Barton, Wrieden, & Anderson, 2011, p. 589). Additionally, FoodMate, a food literacy program in Australia that offers at-risk youth nutrition education, sought to analyse the dietary intake, dietary quality, cooking confidence, and food independence of twenty-one program participants through pre- and post-program questionnaires (Barbour, Davidson, & Palmero, 2016, p. 122). Both organisations recognised that having access to tested and valid evaluation tools would increase their collective understanding of program outcomes and impacts. However, existing methods available to these organisations were considered burdensome on staff time and resources, and too complicated and/or time consuming for participants (Barton et al., 2016, p. 593). At the end of their studies, FoodMate’s pilot questionnaire proved inconclusive due to a high drop-out rate of participants. Conversely, CookWell’s questionnaire, although complex and time consuming to develop, proved to be a viable and replicable method for evaluating cooking classes. Accordingly, despite setbacks in the research process, both studies concluded that there is merit in continuing to develop food security evaluation methods for grassroots food programs. Moreover, they agree that the development of further evaluation methods for their programs would be best facilitated through community-university partnerships where multiple viewpoints, skillsets, resources, and time can be most effectively shared (Barbour et al., 2016, pp. 127–128; Barton et al., 2011, p. 593). Overall, the available literature has not yet provided concrete answers to the question of how food organisations can conceptualise or develop models for holding leaders in food systems transformation accountable to their work and goals. Instead, it presents one way to starting the conversation about impact and future solutions.

Learning Leadership from the Practice of Permaculture

The above sections have discussed themes emerging from the chapters in this book and have identified several trends related to food security definitions, innovations,

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and impacts. While it is hoped that these previous sections serve to amplify the good work and leadership actions that currently exist, this final section makes an offering of what could be. This final section of the conclusion considers what we might learn about environmentally-sound leadership—from ethics to values, systems thinking, and organisational design—from the practice of permaculture. The practice of permaculture (permanent+culture) is an approach to organic farming coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren (Mollinson & Holmgren, 1978; Mollinson, & Slay, 1997). Since its founding in the 1970s, it has become “an international movement and ecological design system” (Ferguson & Lovell, 2014, p. 252). Looking at ecosystems more holistically, proponents of permaculture promote an ethic of caring for the earth and for people, as well as an equitable approach to sharing resources, setting limits that respect the earth, and redistributing surplus during times of abundance (Permaculture Principles, n.d.). Proponents of permaculture also emphasise whole systems thinking through a series of design principles. These include: – Principle 1. Observe and interact – Principle 2. Catch and store energy – Principle 3. Obtain a yield – Principle 4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback – Principle 5. Use and value renewable resources and services – Principle 6. Produce no waste – Principle 7. Design from patterns to details – Principle 8. Integrate rather than segregate – Principle 9. Use small and slow solutions – Principle 10. Use and value diversity – Principle 11. Use edges and value the marginal – Principle 12. Creatively use and respond to change (see Permaculture Principles,

n.d., for more information on what each of these principles entails). In an era where climate change threatens not only our food supply, but also our very human existence on this planet, it makes good sense to learn about leadership from an ecological approach to systems thinking and design. This is particularly so given that the field of leadership already draws significantly from systems thinking (e.g., Laszlo, 1996; Meadows, 2008; Senge, 2006; Stroh, 2015; Wheatley; 1994). Although these principles were originally intended to design gardens, farms, landscapes, and food systems, leaders can likely see possible connections for the design of their organisations, whether they be in the business, government, or non-profit sectors. The analogy becomes helpful when we ask, for example, what might my organisation look like if we were to produce no waste? Or, how can leaders preserve and build up their own energy in an era where demands seem to come from all directions at all times? In fact, some readers may recognise many of these principles already at play in their own approach to leadership (e.g., strategically taking a big picture view before digging into details as in Principle 7, leveraging the value diversity as in Principle 10, or creatively using change as per Principle 12). Rather than viewing each principle on its own, it is the potential cumulative

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effect of applying all principles to the practice of leadership that holds great possibility.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

At the closing of this book, this invitation for leaders to learn—either practically or metaphorically—from a holistic farming practice is offered as food for thought. In turn, it is hoped that this food, along with other ideas presented throughout the book, will nurture the movement for global food systems transformation. Whereas much leadership theory continues to be developed from cases in business, social movements, or other, more traditional leadership sectors, this book invites leaders and educators to look to their plates and, by extension, to local, small-scale farmers and to nature itself as sources of inspiration in their work.

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INDEX

Abioye, A., 22 Abraham, R., 7 Acholi people, Uganda

about, xiv, 18, 32, 33 agricultural methods, 25, 26 ceremonies and rituals, 25, 30, 31 communal land ownership, 29 community-based research (CBR),

xiv, 19, 20, 23, 24, 32 environmental issues, 31, 32 food security, 17, 22, 23 food staples, 25, 27–30 gender roles, 25 historical background, 18, 22, 23 industrial agriculture, 28, 30 informal learning, 18, 23–25 knowledge democracy, xiv, 17–

19, 32, 33 practice, defined, 23, 24 preservation and storage, 26, 30 research project, 17, 18, 23, 24 seeds, 26 sharing of food, 30–32 spirituality and food, 29, 31, 32 traditional food practices, xiv, 24,

25 Western ideologies, 31, 32 wild foods (hunting, gathering),

27, 28, 31 action research, 19, 20 adult learning. See informal learning;

learning AFNs. See alternative food networks

(AFNs) Africa

food security and Western knowledge, 22

Indigenous/indigenous terminology, 21

See also Acholi people, Uganda agricultural methods

collective field cultivation, 25

fallow system, 25 flood-based farming, 39, 40, 44 greenhouses, 4, 13, 14, 43 intercropping, 25 mound agriculture, 10 Three Sisters (beans, corn,

squash), 9–12, 42 See also industrial agriculture

Albinsson, P.A., 114 Alinsky, Saul, 66 Alkon, A. H., 59 alternative food movement

about, 55 consumer-producer relations, 111,

112 misguided approaches in, 59, 60 systems thinking, 64, 65 urban agriculture, 64 whiteness and cultural dominance,

59 See also alternative food networks

(AFNs); community gardens; food policy councils (FPCs)

alternative food networks (AFNs) about, 55, 109–112 alternative, as term, 112 consciousness-raising, 113 consumer-producer relations, 111,

112 European vs. American

approaches, 111, 112, 119 leadership types, xiii link of nature and culture, 111 scholarship on, ix, xii sustainability, 111 transformative learning, 113, 114,

116–119, 138, 139 See also community gardens; food

policy councils (FPCs); wild foods

INDEX

156

American Indian Quarterly special issue, 142

Australia food policy councils, 55 historical trauma in Indigenous

peoples, 37–39, 46 scholarship on food and learning,

xii

Balasescu, A., 73, 86–87 Barnes, K., 131, 132 Bass, B. M., 94 Bateson, G., 110 Baumgartner, L. M., 138, 139 beans, 9–12, 42 Beaugé, Myriam

on community sharing gardens, xv, 73–91

Bharucha, Z., 115 boss texts, xvi, 129–132, 138

See also nonprofit organizations with institutional funding

Bradbury, Hilary, 20 Breman, J., 100 Brigham, Tim

on wild food products, xv, 109–123, 142

BUG (Building Urban Gardens) Blitzes, Vancouver, 77

Burns, J. M., 94 business community

food deserts, xi, 60 government contracts for local

businesses, 147 Buy BC WIld, 120n1 Byres, T.J., 96

Canada

food policy councils, 55 See also community gardens,

Toronto, Canada; Edible Garden Project, Vancouver, Canada; food policy

councils (FPCs); wild foods, Victoria, Canada

Canada, Indigenous peoples historical trauma and cultural loss,

7, 37–39, 42, 46 See also Haudenosaunee (Six

Nations); Our Sustenance, Six Nations, Canada

Carm, E., 75, 76 ceremonies, Indigenous peoples

Acholi gender roles, 25 Haudenosaunee (Six Nations), 6,

11 oral tradition, 22, 41 physical activity in, 39 relation to food systems, 41 Three Sisters (corn, beans,

squash), 11 Tohono O’odham ceremonies, 40

Chambers, L., 7 Chang, C. T., 87 Chaudhury, S. R., 114 Chicago Food Policy Advisory

Council, 67 children’s education, Indigenous. See

schools, Indigenous Churchill, W., 37 cities. See community gardens;

community gardens, Toronto, Canada; Edible Garden Project, Vancouver, Canada; food policy councils (FPCs); urban agriculture

class. See food policy councils (FPCs); poverty; social class

Cleaver, H.M., 96, 97 climate change. See environment collaborative action research, 19, 20 colour, people of. See race and

ethnicity commercial food production. See

industrial agriculture community-based research (CBR),

xiv, 19, 20, 23, 24, 32 community gardens

INDEX

157

about, 128, 132, 133 access to public space, 128 as beautification, 133 coordinators, 125, 127–129, 132–

134, 136–139 diversity of, 132, 133 for food production, 133 food security gardens, 135 government regulations, 128–131 incidental learning, 126, 133 marginalized populations, 138,

139 See also Edible Garden Project,

Vancouver, Canada community gardens, Toronto,

Canada about, 125 city plans and regulations, 128–

131, 133–135, 138 clients’ lack of ownership of

produce, 136 clients’ needs vs. city regulations,

xv, xvi, 125, 129, 136, 137 creative city development

discourse, 130–132, 138 critical institutional literacy, xvi,

125–128, 137–139 dignity of participants, 135 economic impact of community

gardens, 132 education vs. food security, 136 food banks, 135, 136 funding, 136, 137 gentrification, 132, 142 goals of, 135–136 institutional literacy, 126, 127 limited space, 128 maladaptive learning, xv, xvi, 125 marginalized populations, 138,

139, 142 research project, 125 ruling relations, 125 social class, 136 waiting lists, 128 workplace learning, 125, 126

See also community gardens; nonprofit organizations with institutional funding

consumers activism by, 111, 112 critical reflection by, 113, 114 ethical purchasing, 111 wild food foragers vs. passive

consumers, 116, 117, 119 CookWell, U.K. program evaluation,

149 corn, 8, 9–12, 42 corporate food production. See

industrial agriculture creative class, R. Florida’s, xvi, 130–

132 critical approaches

critical consciousness, 126 critical institutional literacy, 125–

128 critical literacy, 127 critical reflection, xvi, 113, 114,

137–139 culture and food

about, 143 festivals and harvests, 43, 114,

115, 120n1 food sovereignty, 42, 48–50, 145,

146 Indigenous historical trauma and

cultural loss, 37–42 oral tradition, 11, 22, 41, 45, 46 Western vs. Indigenous food

systems, 47, 48 Cumberland, Canada, 147

Daily Bread Food Bank, Ontario, 8,

9 Dammana, Siri, 7 Das Gupta, Sejuti

on leadership in Gujarat, xv, 93–106, 142

Davenport, Eileen on wild food products, xv, 109–

123, 142

INDEX

158

Day Farnsworth, Lindsey on food policy councils, xv, 55–

71, 142 Declaration of Nyéléni, 49, 50 Dewey, John, 44, 45 diseases

food-related diseases (diabetes), 5, 9, 10, 41

food systems and healing, 47, 48 diversity. See race and ethnicity;

social class Dixit, A. N., 97 domain-based leaders, xiii dominant agriculture paradigm. See

industrial agriculture Doxtater, M., 6, 10–12

Edible Garden Project, Vancouver,

Canada about, xv, 74–76, 88, 89 community with shared values, 74,

75, 82, 83, 86, 87 concept map, 77, 78 cultural diversity, 88, 89 delivery of food, 77, 78, 82, 83 dignity of clients, 79, 82, 83 ecological stewardship, 79–82 expansive learning, 75, 76 food literacy, xv, 74, 79, 88 goal to grow and donate food, 74,

87 multisensory experiences, xv, 76,

77–80, 88 networked leaders, xv, 76–78, 88,

89 research project, xv, 75–77 sharing gardens (donated areas),

74, 84, 85 social service partners, 74, 77, 78 sustainability, 74–76, 79–86 See also community gardens;

nonprofit organizations with institutional funding

Edmonds-Cady, C., 87

education. See informal learning; learning; schools, Indigenous

Egbergongbe, H. S., 22 embarrassment. See stigma environment

about, x, xi climate change (Uganda), 23, 30 food security (Uganda), 17 food waste, x, xi industrial agriculture’s impact on,

x, xi systems thinking, 46–48

ethnography, defined, 24 Etmanski, Catherine

conclusion by, xvi, 141–153 introduction by, ix–xviii

European vs. American AFNs, 111, 112, 119

expansive learning, 75, 76

FAO (Food and Agriculture

Organization), UN food security, 4, 22, 23, 145, 148

farmer’s markets, 4, 14, 59 farms, commercial. See industrial

agriculture Fiddler, T., 7 Florida, Richard, 130–132 Flowers, R., xii, 109, 110, 142 food

about, vii, ix, 110, 111, 141, 143 food democracy, 114 human-nature connection, 111,

113 identities and food, 109–111, 117 interdisciplinary approaches, vii,

ix, 143, 144 as metaphor, 110 as site for adult education, 141 See also culture and food

Food, Inc. (film), xii food banks

Daily Bread Food Bank program, Ontario, 8, 9

INDEX

159

Greater Vancouver Food Bank (GVFB), 73, 146, 147

social innovation, 146, 147 statistics on, 146 stigma of, 82, 83 The Stop, Ontario, 8, 9, 135 systems thinking, 64

food justice about, 58, 143 AFNs and civic virtues, 111 defined, 58 food deserts, xi, 60 food policy councils, 55, 56 food waste, x Indigenous food sovereignty, 42,

48–50, 145, 146 interdisciplinary approaches, 143,

144 social movements and internal

contradictions, 142 systems thinking, 64, 149–151 transformative learning, 138, 139 women in food systems, 50n3 See also alternative food

movement; alternative food networks (AFNs); food policy councils (FPCs); poverty

food leadership. See leadership food literacy

about, 74, 79 critical consciousness, 126 critical literacy, 127 defined, 74, 126 Edible Garden Project, xv, 74, 79,

88 institutional literacy, 125, 126, 127 multisensory experiences, xv, 76,

77–80, 88 FoodMate, Australian program

evaluation, 149 food policy councils (FPCs)

about, xv, 55, 56, 68, 69, 142 critical questions, xv, 56

diversity and inclusivity, 57, 58, 63, 64, 66–68

educational initiatives, 66, 67 expectations of, 63–65 food justice, 58 funding, 57, 58, 62 goals, 58, 64, 65 grassroots coalitions, 57, 58, 60–

62, 68, 69 leadership development, 65–68 meeting protocols and agendas,

58, 59, 61–63, 66, 67 membership, 58–61, 63 misguided approaches, 59–61 political context, 57, 58, 61, 68, 69 race and social class issues, 56–61,

64, 66, 67 research project, xv, 56, 57 scholarship on, 57 statistics on, 55, 64 systems thinking, 64

Food Security (Maxwell), 144 food security/insecurity

about, 4, 22, 23, 144–146 advocacy for systems

transformation, 146, 147 causes of insecurity, 144, 145 FAO statements on, 4, 22, 23, 145,

148 food preferences, 145 future directions, 141 impact of initiatives, 146–149 Indigenous food systems, xiv, 4, 5,

11, 17, 145, 146 innovations, 146–149 program assessments, 141, 148,

149 scales of analysis, 48, 144, 148 social procurement, 147, 148 See also food banks; food systems

transformation; poverty; stigma

FoodShare Toronto, 9 food systems transformation

about, x, xi, 46–48, 142

INDEX

160

accountability, 148 critical consciousness, 126, 127 critical institutional literacy, 126,

127 critical questions, 148 forager-consumers as change

agents, 117 industrial vs. natural food, 111 innovations, 146–149 interdisciplinary approaches, 143,

144 leadership for transformation, xiii,

142 permaculture approach to systems

thinking, 149–151 program assessments, 141, 148,

149 scales of analysis, 48, 144, 148 scholarship on, ix, x, xi–xiii, 142,

143, 148 systems thinking, 46–48, 64, 149–

151 unintended consequences, 142 visionary leaders, xiii, xiv, 142 See also leadership; learning

food waste, x forager-consumers, 116, 117, 119

See also wild foods formal and informal learning. See

informal learning; learning; schools, Indigenous

Forum for Food Sovereignty, 49, 50 FPCs. See food policy councils

(FPCs) Francisco, Anthony, 45–47 Freire, Paulo, 44, 45

Gallagher, D. R., xiv Ganz, Marshall, 65 gender

gender roles (Acholi), 25 scholarship on, xii women in food systems, 50n3, 97

Gidwani, V., 97

GMO (genetically modified foods), x, 8–10, 26

Goodall, Vanessa conclusion by, xvi, 141–153

good food movement. See alternative food movement

Goodman, D. and M., 111 Gottlieb, R., 67 government. See public policy Graedel, T. E., 86 grassroots movements

about, 73, 74 food policy councils (FPCs), 57,

58, 60–62, 68, 69 leadership types, xiii Native Americans, 38, 39

Greater Vancouver Food Bank (GVFB), 73, 146, 147

greenhouse gases, x Green Revolution, xi, 95, 97, 104n3 Growing Power, xiii Gujarat, agriculture

about, xv, 96, 97 cash crops, 96, 97, 99, 101 cotton (BT), 97, 99, 101 critical questions, 93 dairy farms, 98 elites, 95, 100–102 farm credit system, 99 floriculture, 98, 99 food insecurity, xv, 93 food justice, xv, 97 Green Revolution, 104n3 high value crops, 98, 99 industrial agriculture, xv, 95–102,

104n3 infrastructure, 97, 98, 104n4 labour laws, 102, 103 leadership, 93–96 market access, 100 Modi’s pseudo-transformational

leadership, 101–103 policy vision, 100, 101 poverty, 93, 97 research project, 95, 96

INDEX

161

seeds, 97, 99 small farmers and labourers, 97–

103 See also India; Modi, Narendra

Gujarat Green revolution Company (GGRC), 98

Guthman, J., 59 GVFB (Greater Vancouver Food

Bank), 73, 146, 147

Hager, P., 21, 22 Halliday, J., 21, 22 Hassanein, N., 112 Haudenosaunee (Six Nations)

about, xiv, 3–5 agricultural practices, 6, 9, 10 culture and food, 4–6, 10–12, 15 economic leakage, 6, 7 food options, 6–8 food security, 4–6, 11 GMO threat to traditional foods, 8,

9 identity and food, 4–6 interdependence, 3, 10, 11 Longhouse (belief system), 6, 11 “Longhouse to the greenhouse,” 3,

4 poverty and gardening, 7, 8 staple foods, 6, 9–12 Three Sisters (corn, beans,

squash), 9–12 traditional knowledge, 3, 6 See also Our Sustenance, Six

Nations, Canada health

food-related diseases (diabetes), 5, 9, 10, 41

food systems and healing, 47, 48 Herrick, C., 59 Holmgren, David, 149 Holt-Giménez, E., x, 145 human rights. See food justice hunger as symptom of poverty, xvi,

12, 134, 135

See also food security/insecurity; poverty

hunting, 27, 28 See also wild foods

illnesses. See diseases incidental learning, 126 India

about, 93–95 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 103,

104n1 food insecurity, xv, 93 Green Revolution, 104n3 infrastructure, 97, 98 political leadership trends, 104n1 poverty, 97 rural-urban migration, 101 tribals, as term, 97 See also Gujarat, agriculture;

Modi, Narendra Indigenous peoples

about, xiv community-based research (CBR),

xiv, 19, 20, 23, 24, 32 culture and food, 4, 5, 7, 11, 12,

17 economic leakage, 6, 7 food-related health problems, 5, 9,

10, 41 holistic and interdisciplinary, 21,

145 identity and food, 4–7 knowledge creation, 20, 21 knowledge democracy, 17, 19, 20 systems thinking, 46–48 traditional knowledge, xiv, 6, 20,

21, 142 See also Acholi people, Uganda;

Haudenosaunee (Six Nations); oral tradition; schools, Indigenous; Tohono O’odham Nation, United States

Indigenous food systems about, xiv, 41, 142, 145, 146

INDEX

162

culture and food, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 17, 47, 48

Declaration of Nyéléni, 49, 50 dual economies (subsistence and

markets), 7, 48–50 economic leakage to non-

Indigenous food sources, 41 educational programs, xiv, 4 food leadership, xiv food policy councils, 55 food security, xiv, 4, 5, 11, 145,

146 food sovereignty, 37, 38, 42, 48–

50, 145, 146 future trends, 142 in global food system, 48–50 GMO threat to traditional foods,

8–10, 26 interdependence as value, 3, 9–11,

41, 145 knowledge democracy, xiv loss of Indigenous food systems,

41, 42 scholarship on, 142 staple foods, 9–12 sustainable subsistence, 7, 10, 11 systems thinking, 46–48 Three Sisters (corn, beans,

squash), 9–12, 42 Western vs. Indigenous food

systems, 46–48 wild foods, 112, 115, 118, 142 See also Acholi people, Uganda;

New Generation, Tohono O’odham, United States; Our Sustenance, Six Nations, Canada; schools, Indigenous

industrial agriculture about, x, xi, 97, 111 floriculture, 98, 99 food leadership, xiii GMO contamination of non-GM

crops, x, 8–10, 26

Green Revolution, xi, 95, 97, 104n3

in Gujarat, xv, 95–102 input centricity, 96, 97 negative impacts of, x, xi scholarship on, xiii in Uganda, 28, 30

informal learning about, 21, 22, 125, 126 experimentation, 44 farmer-educators, xiii formal vs. informal, 21 hands-on training, 44 incidental learning, 126, 133 interdisciplinary learning, 21, 22 intergenerational learning, 13, 22,

25 knowledge democracy, 17 oral tradition, 22, 45, 46 “teach a man to fish,” 43–44 types of leaders, xiii wild food consumers, 114 workplace learning, 125, 126

insecurity, food. See food security/insecurity

institutional literacy, 126, 127 interdependence

Indigenous value systems, 3, 9–11, 41, 145

Three Sisters (corn, beans, squash), 9–12

intergenerational learning, 13, 22, 25 International Leadership

Association, xiii Iroquois. See Haudenosaunee (Six

Nations)

Johnson, Terrol Dew

on New Generation program of Tohono O’odham, xiv, 37–52

justice, food. See food justice Jyotigram Yojana (JGY), 97, 98

INDEX

163

Kaak, Paul, xiii, xiv, 142 Kajzer Mitchell, Ingrid

on wild food products, xv, 109–123, 142

Kelloff, A., xii Kerton, S., 113, 115, 116, 119 Kesavan, P.C., xi Khan, M. H., 95 Kill the Indian, Save the Man

(Churchill), 37 knowledge

expansive learning, 75, 76 food systems and interdisciplinary

approaches, 143, 144 knowledge systems, 23 lay vs. scientific, xii literacy, defined, 74 recovery of Indigenous

knowledge, 142 Western vs. Indigenous food

systems, 47, 48 knowledge democracy

about, 19 community-based research, 19, 20,

32 critique of Food, Inc., xii defined, 17 Indigenous knowledge (Uganda),

32, 33 Kuhnert, K., 95

Ladner, Peter, 86, 87 Langer, Christopher

on maladaptive learning, xv, xvi, 125–140

language loss and food, 39 Leach, E.R., 111 leadership

about, xii–xiv, 65, 66, 94, 95, 143, 144

behaviouralism, 94 civic engagement, 65, 66 contested concept of, xiv defined, 143 domain-based leaders, xiii

elitism, 95 expansive learning, 75, 76 farmer-educators, xiii, xiv food policy councils (FPCs), 65–

68 innovators, xiii, xiv, 146–149 interdisciplinary approaches, 143,

144 Kaak’s matrix of, xiii, xiv, 142 learning and leadership, 141 mobilisers, xiii, xiv moral qualities, 94 networked leaders, xiii, xiv, xv,

76–78, 88 permaculture approach to systems

thinking, 149–151 Plato’s philosopher-king, 94 pluralism, 95 researchers, xiii scholarship on, ix, x, xiii, xiv, 94,

95, 142, 143 settlement, 95 systems thinking, 149–151 transactional vs. transformational,

93–96 visionary leaders, xiii, xiv, 142 Weber’s qualities (charisma,

legality, and tradition), 94 learning

about, xi, xii, 143, 144 critical reflection, xi, 44–46, 50 expansive learning, 75, 76 Freire’s approach, 44, 45 historical trauma in Indigenous

peoples, 37–39, 46 incidental learning, 126, 133 marginalised people, xi miseducation, 126 models for food programs, xiv, 50 performance vs. understanding,

137 physical activity, 5 scholarship on, ix, x, xi, xii, 109,

110, 142, 143 “teach a man to fish,” 43, 44

INDEX

164

Western vs. Indigenous food systems, 47, 48

workplace learning, 125, 126 See also informal learning;

schools, Indigenous legends. See oral tradition Levkoe, C. Z., 111, 112, 114, 117 Lewis, P., 95 Lickers Xavier, Adrianne

on Indigenous food programs, xiv, 3–16, 141, 142, 145

literacy, food. See food literacy Lopez, Danny, 39 Los Angeles Food Policy Council,

58, 67, 68 Loutet Farm, Vancouver, 74 Low, Will

on wild food products, xv, 109–123, 142

MacRae, R., 110, 111 Madison Food Policy Council, 56

See also food policy councils (FPCs)

maladaptive learning about, xv, xvi, 125, 126 boss texts, xvi, 129–132 client’s needs vs. institutional

regulations, xv, xvi, 129, 142

miseducation, 126 See also community gardens,

Toronto, Canada; nonprofit organizations with institutional funding

Malarvannan, S., xi Manuel, Frances, 39 Matsuoka, M., 67 Maxwell, Simon, 144 McClintock, N., 64 McCullen, C. G., 59 McLaren, P., 127 mentorship. See informal learning Mexico

Sonoran Desert (U.S. and Mexico), 39, 40

See also Tohono O’odham Nation, United States

Mezirow, J., 113, 114, 116, 137 Micheletti, M., 111 Milwaukee Food Council, 58, 67 miseducation, 126 Modi, Narendra

about, xv, 93, 94, 101–103 Chief Minister of Gujarat, 93, 94,

97 industrial agriculture, xv, 102 leadership style, xv, 96, 97 motivation of, 93, 95, 100 policy vision, 100, 101 Prime Minister, 94, 103 promotion of industrial elite, 97,

100, 102, 103 transactional vs. pseudo-

transformational, 101–103 See also Gujarat, agriculture

Mollison, Bill, 149 Morales, A., xii “More than the Sum of Their Parts”

(Day Farnsworth), 57 Morrison, Dawn, 41, 42, 48 mound agriculture, 10 multinational corporations. See

industrial agriculture municipal government. See public

policy Murcott, A., 142 myths. See oral tradition

Native Americans

grassroots movements, 38, 39 historical trauma and cultural loss,

37–42, 46 See also Indigenous peoples;

Tohono O’odham Nation, United States

neoliberalism creative cities, 132

INDEX

165

exclusion through bureaucratisation, 142

gentrification, 132, 142 impact on food security, 64, 142 industrial agriculture, xi marginalized populations, 132 market-driven policies, 142 scholarship on, xii

New Generation, Tohono O’odham, United States

about, xiv, 37, 42, 43, 50 critical reflection, 44–46, 50 experimentation, 44 festivals and events, 43 flood-based farming, 39, 40, 44 food justice curriculum, 47, 48, 50 food sovereignty, 37, 42, 48–50,

145, 146 historical trauma and cultural loss,

37–42 informal learning, 43, 44 restaurants and job training, 43 scales of programs, 48, 50 school meals, 43 systems thinking, 46–48 “teach a man to fish,” 43, 44, 50n3 transformative education, xiv, 42–

46 wild foods, 42

Ng, E., xii non-formal learning. See informal

learning nonprofit organizations with

institutional funding about, xv, xvi, 125–128 access to resources, 127 boss texts, xvi, 129–132 client’s needs vs. institutional

regulations, xv, xvi, 125, 127, 129, 142

critical institutional literacy, 125, 126, 127

critical reflection on practices, xvi, 125–128, 137–139

educational role in systemic change, 138, 139

goals of, 134, 135 government regulations, 128–131,

134, 135 institutional literacy, 126, 127 maladaptive learning, xv, xvi, 125 neoliberal bureaucratisation, 142 research project, 125 ruling relations, 125, 127 transformational learning, 138,

139 workplace learning, 125, 126 See also community gardens,

Toronto, Canada; food policy councils (FPCs)

non-timber forest products (NTFP), 112

North America food policy councils, 55 See also food policy councils

(FPCs) North Shore Community Garden

Society, Vancouver, 74, 78, 82 Nyéléni, Declaration of, 49, 50

Ocitti, J. P., 24 Ontario

governance of community gardens, 133

See also community gardens, Toronto, Canada; Toronto, Canada

Ontario, Indigenous peoples. See Haudenosaunee (Six Nations); Our Sustenance, Six Nations, Canada

O’odham. See Tohono O’odham Nation, United States

Openjuru, George Ladaah on Indigenous knowledge in

Uganda, xiv, 17–35 oral tradition

creation story (Haudenosaunee), 11

INDEX

166

cultural loss (Tohono O’odham), 39, 41

food stories (Tohono O’odham), 45, 46

informal learning, 22 organic foods and farms

critical reflection by consumers, 116

food leadership, 110 Indigenous food programs, 14 permaculture, 149–151 scholarship on, 115

Our Sustenance, Six Nations, Canada

about, xiv, 3–5, 13–15 community and kitchen gardens,

4, 8 critical questions, 4 educational programs, 4 Elders as leaders, 7, 8 farmer’s market, 4, 14 food choices, 6 food security, 3, 4, 5, 11–13 food sovereignty, 3, 145, 146 future trends, 14 GMO threat to traditional foods, 8,

9 greenhouses, 4, 13, 14 historical background, 3 interdependence, 3, 10, 11 physical activity, 5 poverty and gardening, 7, 8 research project, 3, 12, 14, 15 school gardens, 13, 14 seed savers, 4, 8, 13, 14 Three Sisters (corn, beans,

squash), 9–12 traditional knowledge, 3, 4, 6, 14,

15 See also Haudenosaunee (Six

Nations)

Packer, M. M., 58, 61 Pancho, Katherine, 38

participatory action research (PAR), 19, 20

Peck, J., 131, 132 pedagogy. See learning; schools,

Indigenous permaculture, 141, 149–151 pesticides, xi physical activity, 5, 39, 40 Pimbert, Michel, 48 population trends, 73 poverty

about, 59, 60 advocacy for systems

transformation, 146, 147 alternative food movement’s

misperceptions, 59, 60 boss texts and nonprofits, xvi,

129–132, 138 food deserts, xi, 60 food security, 142 hunger as symptom, xvi, 134–138 Indigenous peoples, 7, 8, 41 neoliberal policies, 64 stigma of, 12 systems thinking, 64 See also food policy councils

(FPCs); food security/insecurity

Poverty and Famines (Sen), 144, 145 Power, E. M., 17 Preece, J., 20–22 preservation and storage

Indigenous knowledge, 26, 27, 30 seed selection, 26 Three Sisters (corn, beans,

squash), 9 Pretty, J., 115 processed foods. See industrial

agriculture Public Allies, 67 public policy

asset-based approaches, 60 boss texts, xvi, 129–132 food deserts, 60

INDEX

167

Indigenous food sovereignty, 40, 41, 145, 146

Indigenous leadership, 13, 14 regulation of community gardens,

128–131, 134, 135 See also Gujarat, agriculture

quinoa, 49 Quintana, M., xii

race and ethnicity

alternative food movement, 59 anti-racism training, 67 community sharing gardens, 88,

89 food policy councils, 58–61, 67 scholarship on anti-racism, 59 whiteness and cultural dominance,

58–61 See also Indigenous peoples

Reader, Tristan on New Generation program of

Tohono O’odham, xiv, 37–52

Reardon, P. T., vii Reason, Peter, 20 residential schools, 37–39, 46 Rhode Island Food Policy Council,

61 The Rise of the Creative Class

(Florida), 131, 132

Sardar Sarovar Dam (SSD), 98 Schmitz, Paul, 65, 66, 68 schools, Indigenous

gardens and greenhouses, 13, 14, 43

historical trauma and cultural loss, 37–42, 46

informal learning, 21, 22 intergenerational learning, 13 residential schools, 37–39, 46 school meals, 43 school policies on junk foods, 12

teaching strategies, 13, 14 traditional knowledge, 13, 14, 21

seeds about, xi GMO threat to Indigenous foods,

8–10, 26 Indigenous knowledge, 26 Indigenous seed savers, 8, 13, 14 industrial agriculture, xi, 99 Western vs. Indigenous food

systems, 47, 48 Seeds of Sustainability (Beaugé), 75 self-directed learning, 113, 114

See also informal learning Sen, Amartya, 144, 145 sensory ethnography, 76 shame. See stigma Shane, A.M., 86 shea trees, 27, 28 Shiva, Vandana, ix Shop the Wild, Victoria, 114, 115,

120n1 Sinclair, J., 113, 115, 116, 119 Sinha, A., 102 Six Nations

historical background, 3, 6 See also Haudenosaunee (Six

Nations); Our Sustenance, Six Nations, Canada

Slocum, R., 58, 59 Socha, T., 7 social class

food policy councils, 59–61 scholarship on, xii See also food policy councils

(FPCs); poverty; race and ethnicity

social justice and food. See food justice

social literacy, 126 social media, xii, 112 social procurement advocates, 147 Sonoran Desert (U.S. and Mexico),

39, 40 sorghum, 26

INDEX

168

Sosulski, M., 87 sovereignty, Indigenous food, 42,

48–50, 145, 146 See also Indigenous food systems

spirituality food and spirituality, 29, 31, 32 informal learning, 22

squash, 9–12, 42 Stang, Jamie, 46, 47 stigma

community sharing gardens, 82, 83

food banks, 82, 83 of poverty and hunger, 12, 134,

135 The Stop program, Ontario, 8, 9, 135 storage. See preservation and storage storytelling. See oral tradition Struggling with the Creative Class

(Peck), 131, 132 Studies in the Education of Adults

food issue, ix, xii, 110 Sud, N., 100, 102, 103 Sumner, Jennifer, xi, xii, 109, 113,

142 sustainability

ethical considerations, 73, 86, 87 expansive learning, 75, 76 flattened model, 87 leadership, 88, 89 life without economic growth, 86,

87 systems thinking, 116 transformative learning, 113, 114,

116–119 wild foods and awareness of, 109,

110 Swan, E., xii, 109, 110, 142 systems, food. See food systems

transformation; Indigenous food systems

systems thinking, 46–48, 64, 149–151

“teach a man to fish,” 43, 44

Three Sisters (beans, corn, squash), 9–12, 42

Tohono O’odham Nation, United States

about, xiv, 39, 40, 50n1 ceremonies and rituals, 40, 41 community action group (TOCA),

xiv, 42, 43 disease and illness, 41 economic leakage to non-

Indigenous food sources, 41, 50n1

elders as visionary leaders, 39 flood-based farming, 39, 40, 44 food sovereignty, 40, 48–50, 145,

146 food staples, 40, 42, 47 historical trauma and cultural loss,

37–42 informal education, 38 oral tradition, 39, 45, 46 physical activity, 40 poverty and unemployment, 41,

50n1 traditional knowledge, xiv, 40 wild foods (hunting and

gathering), 40, 42 See also New Generation, Tohono

O’odham, United States Toronto, Canada

creative city development discourse, 130–132

place in global economy, 130–132 plans and regulations for

community gardens, 128–131, 133–135, 138

See also community gardens, Toronto, Canada

traditional culture. See Indigenous peoples; Indigenous food systems

transactional vs. transformational leadership, India, 93–96

transformative learning disorienting dilemma, 116

INDEX

169

nonprofits with institutional funding, 138, 139

wild foods, xv, 109, 110, 112–114, 116–119

See also food systems transformation

tribal food systems. See Indigenous food systems

Uganda

historical background, xiv, 17, 18 Indigenous/indigenous

terminology, 21 See also Acholi people, Uganda

United Kingdom food policy councils, 55

United States food policy councils, 55 See also food policy councils

(FPCs) United States, Indigenous peoples

historical background, xiv, 37–41 Sonoran Desert, 39, 40 See also New Generation, Tohono

O’odham, United States; Tohono O’odham Nation, United States

University of California, Santa Cruz, 59

University of Wisconsin-Madison Community & Regional Food Systems Project, 56

See also food policy councils (FPCs)

urban agriculture alternative food movement, 64 community gardens, 128, 132, 133 See also community gardens;

community gardens, Toronto, Canada; Edible Garden Project, Vancouver, Canada; food policy councils (FPCs)

Vancouver, Canada, 73–75, 89 See also Edible Garden Project,

Vancouver, Canada Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH),

74, 88 Victoria, Canada, 110

See also wild foods, Victoria, Canada

visionary leaders, xiii, xiv, 39, 142 vulnerable populations. See food

policy councils (FPCs); food security/insecurity; poverty; race and ethnicity; stigma

Weber, Max, 94 Welsh, J., 110, 111 Welton, M., 114 Western knowledge. See knowledge Wheatley, Margaret, 66 Whitbeck, L. B., 39 whiteness and cultural dominance,

58–61 See also race and ethnicity

wild foods about, xv, 109–112, 118, 119 commercialization of, 110, 117 costs and distribution, 115, 116,

118 defined, 109, 115, 118 future trends, 142 human-nature connection, xv, 113 Indigenous cultures, 112, 115,

118, 142 informal vs. formal learning, 114,

115 scholarship on, 109, 110 in Sonoran Desert, 40, 42 sustainability awareness, xv, 109,

110, 115, 116 transformative learning, xv, 109,

110, 112–114, 116–119 in Uganda, 27, 28 See also alternative food

movement; alternative food networks (AFNs)

INDEX

170

wild foods, Victoria, Canada about, 110–113, 118, 119 American vs. European AFNs,

111, 112, 119 cash-economy production, 112,

117 change agents, 117 consciousness-raising, 112, 113 costs and distribution, 115, 116,

118, 120n1 critical questions, 113, 114 defined, 109, 115, 118 festivals and cultural events, 114,

115, 120n1 forager-consumer vs. passive

consumer, 116, 117, 119

future research, xv, 119 non-timber forest products

(NTFP), 112 research project, 110, 114–117 subsistence consumption, 112 sustainability awareness, xv, 109,

110, 115, 116 transformative learning, xv, 109,

110, 112–114, 116–119 workplace learning, 125, 126

Zahaf, M., 7 Zaid, Y., 22 Zuber-Skerritt, O., 141