Fair, healthy and sustainable food systems
Food is at the heart of the key challenge facing humanity – creating sustainable, healthy ways in which everyone can have sufficient sustenance, in diverse communities that peacefully cooperate with each other.
Choices about how we feed ourselves this century are also choices about what kind of future we humans want, in the face of unprecedented challenges from climate change. Watch the Food Systems Academy guest lecture: Climate change and agriculture: adaptation and mitigation. See more about these issues on this and the Food Systems Academy websites.
Patents, power and the new enclosures
When common land accessible by the people was taken into private hands in England from the 16th century it began a period known as the enclosures. Today, through an expanding use of patents and other forms of 'intellectual property', a new set of enclosures globally is occurring rapidly of different kinds of commons such as in knowledge and genetics. Read more
Food ethics
Putting ethical concerns at the heart of decision-making on food and farming is the key aim of the Food Ethics Council. I stepped down from the Council in October 2021 having been a council member since 2000, and a trustee/director from 2003-17. Read more
Conversations and interviews
Check out my blog for a wide range of conversations with
Prof Philip James about food policies to tackle obesity,
M S Swaminathan on India’s green to greed revolution,
Dr Polly Russell on food history, Frances Moore Lappe on diets, myths about world hunger and democracy, Richard Wilkinson about why inequality matters, Helen Browning on organics, pigs and the future of farming, Susan George on hunger, debt, trade and finance,
Prof Jane Dixon on chicken, supermarkets, power and culture, Prof Jennifer Clapp on creating food security post COVID-19 and reaching zero hunger, Michael Fakhri, 4th Rapportuer on the Right to Food, on Trade Policy, the Right to Food & COVID-19, Joyce D’Silva on Compassionate meat eating – less and better respecting sentient animals,
Prof Anton Haverkort on Potatoes – Crop of the Future? Timothy A. Wise on ‘Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food’, Prof Neil Ward on Net Zero and the UK agri-food system, Francois Meienberg on Defending farmers’ rights, Dan Saladino on eating to extinction, Dr Irene Hoffmann on Safeguarding biodiversity for food and agriculture, Prof Alana Mann on an Australian perspective on food in a changing climate and Pat Mooney on ‘A Long Food Movement? Transforming food systems by 2045'.
There are also many interviews covering topics from the Svalbard Seed Vault to intellectual property and inequality, to oregano processing, to trading food, the gastroeconomy, Incredible edible, saving Mexico’s tomato agrobiodiversity, Europe’s green revolution and others since, gender and the right to food, livestock consumption, threats to seed sovereignty, slavery and today’s diet, Feeding Britain, Sitopia – how food can save the world, Pharma, food and innovation,Transforming Food Systems after COVID-19, the Vulnerabilityand Resilience of Pacific Island Food Systems, safe drinking water and sanitation essential for healthy food systems, Ireland's bid to be global sustainable food system leader, and more. There’s also a tour of Andrew Whitley’ Farm experiments with agroforestry and various cereal varieties, a set of reports from China about developments there including on protecting biodiversity and blogs about how real defence spending ensure good food for all.
The Food
System: a guide
Hungry for Change - final report of Fabian Commission on Food and Poverty
Quaker House, Geneva
Food Systems Academy
I curate the Food Systems Academy - an online open access education resource with a wide range of talks freely available:
- The Food System - An overview
- Food regimes and their transformation
- The crucial century, 1945-2045: Transforming food systems in a global context
- The Right to Food - An overview
- Food and thriving people in the 21st century.
- Changing our fatally flawed food system
- Sustainable diets and public health
- How to feed a city - and change the world
- Food, nutrition and poverty - An overview
- Gender issues in food and farming - An overview
- Seeds of contention, control or diversity? - Global rules, intellectual property and the future control of food
- Understanding intellectual property - 1. An overview and 2. How business lobbying changed the world
- From food regimes to food sheds - the case of Southern Ontario
- Biology and chemistry for peace not war
Guest lecture: Climate change and agriculture: adaptation and mitigation
The right to food
‘Save in situations of natural disasters or civil strife, the right to food is not the right to be fed; it is the right to feed oneself in dignity’ says Olivier De Schutter, the second UN Rapporteur on the Right to Food and contributor to the Food Systems Academy. Read more
How to farm?
At the heart of the choices we face are the questions of what is land for and of how to farm it. Read more
Food and health
Along with the air we breathe, food & drink are the parts of the environment we put into our bodies every day. What we consume affects our health (although these relationships are complex). Read more
Peace, food and the future
I think Food is a Key to Avoiding World War III and explored this idea in the summer of 2011 at various places in Canada and at the Canadian Association on Food Studies (CAFS) Conference and the Agriculture Food and Human Values Society (AFHVS) conference in Montana, USA. More recently, I interviewed Julian Cribb about his book Food or War, which explored many of these concerns. Read more. I have also written a couple of blogs on this - 1 and 2
Welcome
This site is designed to share my work. See my news and tweets here
I have worked on different aspects of the food system and development issues since the mid 1970s. Read more
Please let me know of any problems or if you can see ways to develop and improve it.
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Listen here
Check out the audio interviews with people I meet in the course of my research and use on my blog here.
Food future
Read my articles 'Food and thriving people: Paradigm shifts for fair and sustainable food systems' and 'Real Defence Spending Ensures Good Food for All'.