Module 0: Introduction — Welcome to the Course

Overview and Course Philosophy

No human activity shapes the planet more profoundly than the way we feed ourselves. The food system — encompassing every stage from seed selection and land clearing through growing, processing, distributing, consuming, and disposing of food — is simultaneously one of the greatest drivers of ecological degradation and one of the most powerful levers available for transformative change. This course takes that dual reality seriously, exploring both the depths of the crisis and the creativity of responses already underway.

Professor Steffanie Scott frames the course around a visual concept map with four concentric rings. At the centre are the actors or stakeholders: civil society (individuals, NGOs, grassroots organizations), the state (government at all levels), the private sector (corporations and small businesses throughout the supply chain), and global governance institutions such as the UN, World Trade Organization, and World Bank. Surrounding this are the stages of the food supply chain — production (growing, raising, fishing, foraging), processing, distribution, consumption, and recycling or waste. The third ring captures the dimensions through which the food system can be assessed: biophysical and ecological, economic, health and nutritional, social, and political-governance. The outermost ring speaks to something less often acknowledged in academic discourse: the personal or spiritual connection to food and the land. Scott argues that people who cultivate gratitude for their food sources — who understand where milk actually comes from, who grew their produce, and under what conditions — tend to be more thoughtful and engaged consumers and citizens.

The food system can be described as a nexus issue, tightly connected to climate change, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, public health, labour justice, and cultural identity. The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES) has argued that without transforming food and land-use practices, the targets of the Paris Climate Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals cannot be achieved. Food systems account for perhaps more than a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, consume two-thirds of global freshwater, and release chemical and fertilizer runoff that threatens freshwater and marine ecosystems alike.

COVID-19 brought these vulnerabilities into sharp relief, revealing fragile supply chains, the precarious conditions of farm labourers, and the entanglement of food insecurity with unemployment and inequality. At the same time, the pandemic prompted a wave of renewed interest in home cooking, kitchen gardening, and community mutual aid — a reminder that crises can also catalyse reconnection.

Scott’s course is explicitly systemic and holistic in its approach, emphasizing complexity, messiness, and multilayered causality over linear, reductionist explanations. Students are encouraged to trace patterns, embrace ambiguity, and form their own well-reasoned positions on contentious questions. As one former student put it: “embrace the messy, look for patterns, stay curious.”

Module 1: Health, Ecosystems, and Our Food System — We Are All in This Together

Food Systems Thinking and Food Security

The concept of a food system is sometimes described as “hidden in plain sight”: once you learn to see the interconnected web of decisions, institutions, ecological processes, and social relations that bring food to your plate, it becomes impossible to unsee. The Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address — offered in Mohawk (Kenien’kéha) and in English at the opening of the module — grounds this systems thinking in an Indigenous tradition of relational gratitude. The Address names the elements that sustain life — the earth, the waters, the fish, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon, the stars — as relatives deserving of acknowledgment rather than objects to be exploited. This perspective challenges the dominant Western tendency to treat the food system as a supply chain for commodities and invites us to consider what it means to be responsible members of a living web.

A food system is, formally speaking, a complex system: one whose parts are so highly interdependent that they continuously reshape one another, creating a whole that is more than the sum of its parts and whose behaviour is often difficult to predict. Cities, ecosystems, and the climate are similarly complex. Understanding this complexity — rather than seeking simple, linear fixes — is foundational to effective food systems analysis.

The concept of food security has its own history of evolution. Until the mid-1970s, food security was primarily understood as a production challenge — grow more food, distribute it better, and hunger would be resolved. Subsequent decades brought a much richer understanding. The FAO’s widely accepted definition holds that 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. This definition encompasses four dimensions: availability (the physical supply of food), access (whether individuals and households can obtain it, through income, exchange, or social mechanisms), utilisation (the body’s ability to absorb and use nutrients, affected by cooking, hygiene, and health status), and stability (the durability of all three dimensions over time).

Malnutrition is the overarching term for all forms of nutritional failure, from undernutrition and micronutrient deficiency to overnutrition and obesity. Both ends of this spectrum represent failures of the food system and have profound implications for public health, healthcare costs, productivity, and quality of life.

A particularly important empirical finding concerns the racialization of food insecurity in Canada. Black households in Canada are 3.56 times more likely to experience food insecurity than white households, a disparity rooted in systemic racism and structural economic inequality. In 2021, Toronto developed a Black food sovereignty plan as a partial response to this crisis. The experience of Paul Taylor, Executive Director of FoodShare Toronto, illustrates how personal experience of food insecurity as a Black person in Canada informs and motivates advocacy for food justice. These disparities underline that food security is not merely a matter of agricultural supply but is deeply embedded in patterns of social inequality.

Health can serve as a particularly powerful motivational entry point for food system change, since many people who might resist framing their dietary choices in terms of environmental or social justice nonetheless respond to evidence about diet-related disease. The broader picture, however, is that health and well-being are inseparable from renewable, resilient, equitable, diverse, and interconnected food systems. Intervening at any one point in this system can have cascading effects across all the others.

Module 2: Food and Ecosystems

Planetary Boundaries and the Political Ecology of Industrial Agriculture

Industrial agriculture has become one of the primary mechanisms by which human civilization is destabilizing the Earth system. The framework of planetary boundaries — nine biophysical limits within which humanity can safely operate — provides a rigorous context for understanding just how deep this disruption runs. Research by Campbell et al. (2017) demonstrates that agriculture has been the primary driver behind the transgression of two boundaries: biosphere integrity (including the ongoing catastrophic loss of biodiversity) and biogeochemical flows (the disruption of global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles through industrial fertilizer application). Agriculture is also a major driver of land-system change and freshwater depletion, and a significant contributor to climate change.

The eco-agri-food systems complex, as described by the TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) initiative of UN Environment, captures the vast and interacting web of ecosystems, agricultural lands, fisheries, labour, technology, culture, institutions, and markets involved in food production and consumption. Crucially, many of the economic interactions within this complex are “invisible” in standard market accounting — they constitute externalities, costs or benefits not reflected in market prices. When farmers use inorganic nitrogen fertilizers derived from fossil fuels, the resulting soil and air pollution, biodiversity loss, and coastal dead zones caused by nutrient runoff are not factored into the price of food. This invisibility is not accidental; it is structurally embedded in capitalist market logic.

Western University professor Tony Weis uses the concept of biophysical overrides to describe the battery of interventions that industrial agriculture deploys to maintain productivity despite the ecological damage it causes: antibiotics and growth hormones, chemical pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, and intensive irrigation. Each override addresses a symptom of a deeper dysfunction — the progressive decoupling of food production from the closed-loop ecological systems that made pre-industrial agriculture sustainable over millennia. Soil mining exemplifies this: when biological and physical soil materials are depleted faster than they can be replenished, soil transforms from a renewable resource into an increasingly exhausted one.

Historically, this trajectory began with what Robert Albritton calls the “Two Great Food Revolutions.” The first was the Neolithic domestication of plants and animals, which enabled the creation of food surplus and thus the division of labour, social stratification, and eventually the emergence of capitalism. The second was the industrial revolution in agriculture, which brought mechanization, chemical inputs, and global supply chains, dramatically increasing output but also increasing the ecological and social costs that are now coming due. The rise of capitalism introduced a fundamental tension: the profit motive of private enterprises operating in competitive markets drives them to externalize costs wherever possible, making food appear “cheap” while the true costs — borne by ecosystems, communities, and future generations — remain hidden.

The global flows of virtual water embedded in food commodities illustrate these irrationalities: water-intensive peppers and fruits labeled “Product of Israel” appear on Canadian supermarket shelves, representing the transfer of water resources from an already water-scarce region. Redundant trade — the simultaneous import and export of similar commodities between countries — adds further layers of energy and resource waste to global supply chains.

Eutrophication, the buildup of nitrogen and phosphorus in water bodies beyond natural levels, is one visible consequence of intensive fertilizer use: algal blooms proliferate, oxygen is depleted, and aquatic life collapses into “dead zones” in rivers, lakes, and coastal marine environments. Water footprinting — measuring the full lifecycle water use of agricultural products — helps quantify these impacts across green water (rainfall absorbed by soil), blue water (freshwater from rivers and aquifers), and grey water (the volume needed to dilute pollutants to safe levels).

Module 3: Food, Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Emissions, and Climate Crisis

The Food System’s Carbon Footprint and Climate Feedbacks

The relationship between the food system and climate change runs in two directions: food systems are major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change, and climate change in turn threatens the ecological foundations on which food production depends. Understanding both vectors is essential to designing effective responses.

Food system activities generate greenhouse gases at every stage of the supply chain. On-farm sources include enteric fermentation from ruminant livestock (producing methane, a potent short-lived climate forcer), nitrous oxide from nitrogen fertilizers and manure management, and carbon dioxide released when land is cleared and organic matter in soil is oxidized. Off-farm emissions arise from food processing, packaging, refrigeration, transportation, and retail. Perhaps most contested are the land-use change emissions associated with clearing forests or draining peatlands to expand agricultural land — particularly for soy and palm oil production — where estimates of the full emission debt vary considerably depending on assumptions about what vegetation the land previously held and over what time horizon the carbon debt is calculated. These methodological complexities have fuelled significant debates about the true contribution of livestock to overall food system emissions.

There are three broad perspectives on how food system emissions should be reduced. The first focuses on the production side, seeking technological efficiencies and better management practices (e.g., precision fertilizer application, improved manure management, high-yielding crop varieties). The second focuses on the consumption side, emphasizing dietary change — particularly reductions in animal product consumption — and reduction of food waste. The third advocates for system transformation, arguing that neither technological tweaks to industrial agriculture nor individual behaviour change alone can achieve the necessary scale of emissions reduction; instead, what is required is a fundamental redistribution of power in the food system, addressing the political-economic structures that entrench high-emission practices.

Climate adaptation is equally important, since even aggressive mitigation cannot prevent some degree of continued warming over coming decades. The impacts of a warmer, more variable climate on food systems are wide-ranging. Wheat yields may decline as the crop loses the cold temperatures required for vernalization (the cold-induced triggering of flowering). Aquatic species may shift their ranges as ocean temperatures rise, disrupting established fisheries. Heat and water stress will increasingly affect livestock. At the post-harvest stage, higher temperatures accelerate spoilage, create new pathways for foodborne pathogens, alter pest and disease distributions, and require greater energy inputs for refrigeration. Transportation infrastructure — roads, ports, rail — faces disruption from extreme weather events.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a methodology for quantifying the environmental impacts of a product across its full lifecycle — from resource extraction and production through use and end-of-life disposal. LCA is an attractive tool for comparing the footprints of different foods and production systems, but it has significant methodological limitations in agriculture, where the choice of system boundaries, the allocation of impacts among co-products, and the handling of land-use change emissions can dramatically affect results.

An important and underappreciated intersection concerns soil depletion and nutritional quality. Modern agricultural breeding programs have prioritized yield, starch content, and pest resistance, often at the expense of vitamin and mineral density in crops. Research published in Scientific American has documented declining concentrations of key nutrients — proteins, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and vitamin C — in fruits and vegetables over the past half century. This raises troubling questions about food system priorities: the same push for productivity that has enabled cheap, abundant calories may have simultaneously reduced the nutritional value of those calories.

Module 4: Sustainable Diets and Healthy Food Environments

Defining Sustainability Across the Supply Chain and the Politics of Livestock

The concept of a sustainable diet brings together ecological, nutritional, cultural, economic, and social dimensions that frequently pull against one another, making it one of the most contested topics in food policy. The FAO’s 2010 definition provides a useful anchor: sustainable diets have low environmental impacts, contribute to food and nutrition security, and support healthy life for present and future generations; they are protective of biodiversity and ecosystems, culturally acceptable, economically fair, and nutritionally adequate. Achieving all of these simultaneously is no simple matter.

Canada’s 2019 revised Food Guide broke new ground by explicitly incorporating ecological sustainability alongside nutritional guidance — recommending substantially increased consumption of plant proteins, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, while de-emphasizing meat and dairy. This followed the influential EAT-Lancet Commission report proposing a “Planetary Health Diet” that could feed 10 billion people while remaining within planetary boundaries. The Commission’s modelling suggests that achieving this diet globally would require roughly halving red meat and sugar consumption in high-income countries while nearly doubling consumption of nuts, legumes, and vegetables. The agricultural and political resistance to such recommendations in beef-producing regions is predictable and intense.

The “meatification” of diets — the post-WWII rise in meat and dairy consumption in Western countries and its gradual spread globally — represents one of the most consequential dietary trends of the modern era. Raising animals for food requires dramatically more land, water, energy, and feed grain per calorie than growing food for direct human consumption. Livestock currently occupies roughly 80% of global agricultural land. Yet the place of meat in a sustainable diet remains deeply contested, partly because of genuine scientific uncertainty (pastured ruminants on marginal lands can play important roles in nutrient cycling and biodiversity), partly because of cultural and social dimensions (food is identity), and partly because of powerful economic and political lobbying by the livestock industry.

At the same time, the emerging discourse around plant-based eating and veganism carries its own complications. As Civil Eats journalist Cecily Mitchell has argued, the vegan movement has often failed to reckon with its own racial politics: “plant-based” and “ethical” eating discourse is frequently inflected with whiteness, classism, and a selective historical amnesia about which communities have historically relied on animal foods for cultural and nutritional sustenance.

Food environments — the physical, economic, political, and socio-cultural contexts in which people encounter and choose food — shape dietary behaviour at least as powerfully as individual knowledge or motivation. UW professor Leia Minaker has shown that “today’s food environments exploit people’s biological, psychological, social, and economic vulnerabilities, making it easier for them to eat unhealthy foods.” Fast food outlets and convenience stores are spatially concentrated in lower-income neighbourhoods, while full-service grocery stores with fresh produce are often absent — a pattern known as the food desert. Supermarkets deploy sophisticated product placement, pricing, and portion size strategies to nudge consumers toward higher-margin, lower-nutrition products.

Evidence-based food retail interventions include supermarket incentive programs (e.g., subsidies for fresh produce), zoning regulations restricting fast food outlets near schools, healthy corner store conversions, menu labelling, and mobile apps that help consumers navigate food environments. Structural interventions targeting the environment in which choices are made tend to be more cost-effective than individual behaviour-change programs, though they are often politically harder to implement due to industry opposition.

Module 5: Food System Controversies and the Global Food Economy

Competing Paradigms, Farm Crisis, and Structural Adjustment

Why do food system experts, policymakers, and activists so frequently disagree about solutions? Fraser et al. (2016) identify four broad positions that have structured debates over global food security. The first sees high-technology solutions — genetic modification, precision agriculture, synthetic biology — as essential for feeding a growing population sustainably. The second emphasizes distribution and access over production, arguing that the world already grows enough food and that hunger reflects poverty and political failure rather than inadequate output. The third focuses on reducing waste and pollution from the current industrial system through better regulation and cleaner technologies. The fourth advocates community-based food sovereignty as the foundational alternative.

The biotechnology debate illustrates these fractures. Bill Gates, in his influential essay “Gene Editing for Good,” argues that CRISPR and related tools represent an historic opportunity to accelerate crop improvement and help smallholder farmers in the global south adapt to climate change and resist pests. The Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, by contrast, points to the corporate consolidation of seed systems, the erosion of seed saving traditions, the development of herbicide-resistant “superweeds,” and the limited evidence for yield benefits of GM crops in complex agro-ecosystems as reasons for caution. Neither position is without merit or evidence; the gap reflects deeper disagreements about who controls agricultural knowledge, who benefits from agricultural innovation, and whose farming systems are being “fixed.”

The farm crisis in Canada and globally is the product of structural forces that have concentrated agricultural value in the hands of large agribusiness corporations while driving family farms into debt and bankruptcy. Nettie Wiebe traces how the industrialization and trade liberalization of agriculture benefited grain trading companies, input suppliers, and food processors while eroding the economic viability of independent farms. Farm incomes have stagnated or declined while costs for seeds, machinery, fuel, and credit have risen, creating a cost-price squeeze that consolidates land ownership and squeezes out smaller operators.

Jennifer Clapp, professor at the University of Waterloo, identifies four interlocking forces behind the expansion of the world food economy: state-led global dissemination of the industrial agricultural model; agricultural trade liberalization (the opening of national markets to commodity imports, eliminating tariffs, and removing subsidies); the rise of transnational corporate actors throughout the food and agriculture sector; and the intensification of financialization — the treatment of food commodities as financial instruments traded by banks, hedge funds, and pension funds. Financialization is particularly consequential because it links food prices to speculative dynamics far removed from actual supply and demand, creating price volatility that is devastating for poor food-importing countries.

The documentary Life and Debt (2001) provides a vivid case study of how these dynamics played out in Jamaica. Faced with mounting debt and rising interest rates in the 1980s, Jamaica was subjected to IMF structural adjustment programs that required devaluation of the currency, elimination of food subsidies, removal of trade barriers, and privatization of agricultural institutions. The result was the flooding of local markets with subsidized US dairy, chicken, and grain products that Jamaican farmers could not compete with, destroying domestic food production capacity and creating long-term food import dependency. The film’s central tension — between “the right to buy” cheap imported food and “the right to be food self-reliant” — captures a question that remains unresolved in global food governance.

Module 6: Food Localism, Labour, and Justice

Community-Supported Agriculture, Local Food Debates, and Migrant Workers

The concept of food localism — eating food grown near where you live — has attracted substantial popular enthusiasm and equally substantial academic criticism. Its appeal is intuitive: local food reduces transportation energy, reconnects consumers to producers and landscapes, supports local economies, and can preserve farmland near cities. The Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, in which consumers pay a farm at the start of the season in exchange for a weekly share of produce, embodies many of these values. Zhenzhong Si’s research on CSA in China demonstrates how this model simultaneously addresses food safety concerns (Chinese consumers have been profoundly shaken by a series of food safety scandals), supports ecological farming practices, builds direct consumer-farmer relationships, and contributes to rural livelihoods.

The localist argument is not without its critics, however. University of Toronto geographer Pierre Desrochers contends that the global food trade, with its economies of scale and comparative advantages in production, is actually more efficient and environmentally beneficial than localism in many respects. On the other side, farmer and author Brent Preston argues in his TEDx talk “The World Needs LESS Food” that food system sustainability requires not more production but smarter, more ecological production and fundamentally different relationships between food producers and consumers.

One of the most invisible and troubling dimensions of the “local” food system concerns the workers who actually produce that food. Approximately 50,000 migrant agricultural workers come to Canada each year, primarily from Jamaica and Mexico, through the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) and the Temporary Foreign Workers program. These workers perform essential and physically demanding labour — picking strawberries, harvesting tobacco, tending greenhouse vegetables — under conditions of profound structural vulnerability. Their immigration status is tied to a specific employer, meaning that if they complain about working conditions, report abuse, or organize collectively, they risk being “repatriated” — a power that employers can and do exercise. They typically lack access to permanent residency pathways, face language and cultural barriers in seeking help, have limited knowledge of their legal rights, and work in an enforcement environment that has historically prioritized employer needs over worker protection.

Cultural and language barriers, negative perceptions of police (often rooted in experiences in their home countries), lack of information about reporting abuse, and the precarity of their status combine to create near-total vulnerability. The NFB documentary El Contrato depicts the daily realities of Mexican migrant workers in Ontario’s agricultural sector with documentary precision. The uncomfortable irony is that advocates for local food and fair trade have largely ignored the rights of the workers who harvest that local food, creating a profound blind spot in otherwise progressive food movements. Genuine food justice demands that the rights and dignity of agricultural workers be placed at the centre of any claim to “ethical” eating.

Module 7: Food Secure Cities and Regions

Urban Planning, Food Policy, and Overcoming the Charity Model

Cities are not merely sites of food consumption; they are increasingly recognized as critical arenas for food system transformation. The field of urban food system planning seeks to integrate food-related considerations — agricultural land preservation, access to healthy food, processing and distribution infrastructure, waste reduction, community gardening — into the full range of municipal governance from zoning bylaws to public health strategy. Desjardins, Lubczynski, and Xuereb’s case study of Waterloo Region demonstrates both the possibilities and the difficulties of this work. Incorporating food policy into Regional Official Plans requires navigating a dense regulatory landscape, building political will across multiple agencies and levels of government, and managing tensions between commercial interests, developer rights, and public health goals. The result — a Waterloo Region Food Charter supporting community markets, urban agriculture, and food literacy — represents years of sustained advocacy and research.

Community gardens offer one illustration of the multifunctionality of urban food initiatives: they provide fresh vegetables, support mental health and stress reduction, build community cohesion, improve neighbourhood aesthetics, and reconnect urban residents to seasonal food production rhythms. By 2013, Waterloo Region hosted at least 53 garden locations with over 1,200 plots — a tangible infrastructure of food resilience.

Addressing food insecurity in cities requires confronting the inadequacy of the charity model. Nick Saul, author of The Stop, argues in his TEDx talk “Why Food Won’t Solve the Problem of Hunger” that food banks, however well-intentioned, are structurally incapable of reducing food insecurity because they address symptoms rather than causes. Food insecurity is fundamentally a problem of income inadequacy — a structural economic problem requiring structural solutions: affordable housing, accessible childcare, living wages, and ultimately policies that address the root causes of poverty. What Saul proposes instead are Community Food Centres that combine emergency food provision with food literacy programs, cooking groups, and community gardens in ways that build dignity, skills, and social solidarity alongside immediate food access.

The Mobile Good Food Market in Toronto, a partnership between the City, FoodShare, United Way, and the CAMH/University of Toronto Food Initiative, exemplifies an alternative approach: bringing fresh, affordable food directly to low-income neighbourhoods where residents face multiple barriers to accessing grocery stores — distance, transit access, income, mobility. Rather than expecting the food-insecure to navigate a system designed around private automobile ownership and middle-class budgets, this model brings the system to people.

Food insecurity among university students is a phenomenon that often goes unacknowledged. The national organization Meal Exchange found that 2 in 5 university students across five Canadian campuses experienced moderate or severe food insecurity — a finding that directly challenges assumptions about higher education as a middle-class experience insulated from economic precarity.

Indigenous peoples in Canadian cities face particularly acute food insecurity, with rates roughly double the national average for off-reserve populations and reaching 50% or higher in many on-reserve contexts. The video Wi’kupaltimk: Feast of Forgiveness, created by Mi’kmaw master’s student Salina Kemp in Halifax (Kjipuktuk), traces the historical and contemporary dimensions of food insecurity experienced by urban Indigenous peoples, celebrating the resilience of Mi’kmaq food traditions and documenting the losses imposed by colonization, residential schools, and the disruption of relationships with land and water.

In the global south, urban food security faces the additional pressure of climate crisis. UW professor Bruce Frayne has shown that the dynamics of climate change and rapid urbanization are converging spatially, as growing cities in sub-Saharan Africa face increasingly unpredictable rainfall, heat stress, and water scarcity that ripple through every stage of the urban food system — from peri-urban agriculture to food processing (dependent on water and energy), cold chain logistics, and household cooking practices.

Module 8: Indigenous Food Systems and Food Sovereignty

Biocultural Innovation, Gift Economies, and Settler-Indigenous Relations

“We are food. It becomes us. It comes from the land. We are the land. This is what it means to be Indigenous.” Dawn Morrison’s words, from the Secwepemc tradition, articulate a relational ontology that places food not as a commodity or even a resource, but as a living relative — part of a web of reciprocal relations that sustains all life.

The concept of biocultural innovation — farmer-led, knowledge-embedded, community-specific responses to ecological and social challenges — is central to this module’s engagement with global food security. Research by Swiderska et al. (2018) for the International Institute of Environment and Development documents how most farmer-led innovation remains invisible to scientists and policymakers who focus on formal research institutions and technological packages. Yet such innovation, which often involves seed preservation, inter-cropping, traditional ecological knowledge, and community-managed landscapes, can simultaneously boost biodiversity, enhance resilience to climate variability, support livelihoods, and strengthen social capital. These biocultural approaches can address multiple Sustainable Development Goals simultaneously in ways that top-down technological interventions rarely achieve.

Winona LaDuke, executive director of Honor the Earth, speaks powerfully about the politics of seed sovereignty — the fight to maintain community control over traditional seed stocks in the face of corporate intellectual property regimes that seek to patent plant genetic material and restrict farmers’ rights to save and share seeds. Seeds are not merely agricultural inputs; they are repositories of millennia of human-plant co-evolution, encoded with knowledge about local soils, climates, pests, and cultural values.

Dawn Morrison identifies four foundational principles of Indigenous food sovereignty: the sacredness of food as manifested in relationships with land, water, plants, and animals; the ongoing and continuous work of Indigenous peoples in maintaining healthy and culturally appropriate food systems; the daily maintenance of those systems by Indigenous communities; and the need for Indigenous influence over food and agricultural policies at all jurisdictional levels. Morrison also contests the very term “food sovereignty” as borrowed from a primarily Western political framework, arguing that Indigenous food sovereignty is rooted in a fundamentally different understanding of what it means to be in relation with the land.

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Gift of Strawberries” chapter from Braiding Sweetgrass offers a philosophical complement to Morrison’s political analysis. Kimmerer draws a distinction between a gift economy — grounded in reciprocity, gratitude, and the recognition of mutual obligation — and a commodity economy, in which everything, including food, becomes property to be owned and traded. In a gift economy, when the earth offers strawberries, the appropriate response is gratitude and a corresponding obligation to care for the systems that make such gifts possible. Kimmerer invites readers to ask: do you see the earth as property or as a gift? How might that question change how you relate to your food?

The food insecurity of Indigenous peoples in Canada is not a mystery; it is a predictable outcome of centuries of colonization. Settler agriculture displaced Indigenous land uses, residential schools severed children from land-based food knowledge and practices, “conservation” policies (such as game sanctuaries) restricted access to traditional hunting and fishing territories, and environmental contaminants in Arctic ecosystems have made traditional foods unsafe to eat in some communities. In this way, loss of “country food” — the nutritionally dense wild foods that sustained Indigenous peoples for millennia — is inseparable from the broader story of colonial dispossession and its ongoing legacies.

Repairing the relationship between settler society and Indigenous peoples around food and land is not merely a matter of policy; it requires, as Morrison and Wittman argue, a fundamental shift in how settlers understand their relationship to the land they inhabit — moving from entitlement to reciprocity, from ownership to stewardship, and from extractive to regenerative modes of relating to the natural world.

Module 9: Food from the Land and Sea

Fisheries Geopolitics, Wild Foods, Controlled Environment Agriculture, and Agroecology

Food systems extend far beyond the ploughed field. This module turns attention to food sourced from oceans, freshwaters, forests, and other wild landscapes, and asks what it would mean to govern these food sources sustainably given the pressures of growing global demand, climate change, and geopolitical competition.

China’s experience in marine fisheries is a case study in the tensions between food security imperatives and ecological sustainability. Zhang Hongzhou’s research documents how China’s vast fleet — the world’s largest — has fished its own coastal waters to near-collapse and has expanded into the distant waters of West Africa, the South Pacific, and the South Atlantic, often without adequate oversight. The Chinese government’s “blue granary” strategy aims to feed an increasingly protein-hungry population through both capture fisheries and the world’s largest aquaculture sector. Yet fish farms generate concentrated nitrogen and phosphorus emissions that create hundreds of oceanic dead zones globally. Labour abuses — including child labour, forced labour, and trafficking — are rife throughout the global fisheries sector, from harvesting to processing. In a somewhat surprising policy turn, China announced between 2017 and 2022 that it would cut its fishing fleet, reduce marine catch quotas, reduce fishing fuel subsidies, retrain fisherfolk, and take stronger action against illegal fishing — a significant, if partial, shift toward sustainability.

Wild foods — not just fish but also game, insects, fungi, berries, roots, and leafy plants — contribute far more to global food and nutritional security than is acknowledged in mainstream food policy discourse. Bharucha and Pretty (2010) estimate that wild foods provide crucial dietary diversity for hundreds of millions of people, particularly in rural and forested areas, and that more than 50% of the world’s daily protein and calorie requirements come from just three crops (wheat, maize, and rice), creating a precarious dependence on a narrow genetic base. The threats to wild food availability — loss of forest and wetland habitats, diminishing local ecological knowledge, climate change altering species distributions — represent a largely invisible food security crisis. The Vuntut Gwich’in people of Alaska and Yukon, whose traditional food system is built around the Porcupine caribou herd, face a particularly stark version of this threat: climate change is altering the timing of caribou migrations, the condition of the land, and the social fabric of communities adapted to seasonal food patterns over thousands of years.

Controlled environment agriculture (CEA), including vertical farming, aquaponics, and hydroponics, represents a techno-optimist response to the limitations of conventional agriculture. Year-round production, significant reductions in water use compared to field agriculture, elimination of synthetic pesticides, proximity to urban consumers — these are genuine advantages. But CEA also faces substantial challenges: high up-front capital costs (which tend to concentrate ownership in large corporations), massive electricity demands (particularly for artificial lighting), and questions about whether a food system in which you “don’t need to know how to farm” to access fresh herbs represents genuine food system transparency or a high-tech version of the same disconnection between people and their food sources that characterizes industrial agriculture.

The IPES-Food report From Uniformity to Diversity identifies the structural lock-in factors that keep industrial agriculture dominant despite its accumulating failures. These include: the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a small number of agribusiness corporations, seed companies, and food retailers; public research funding systems that prioritize yield-maximizing crop varieties; trade rules that disadvantage diversified, small-scale farming; and intellectual frameworks (the “yield gap” concept, for instance) that define the problem as insufficient production and therefore prescribe more of the same industrial intensification. Breaking out of this lock-in requires not just better technologies or farming practices but a shift in the governance and power structures of the food system.

Module 10: Enacting Change — Food Policy, Food Movements, and Food Justice

Agroecology, Food Sovereignty, Urban Agriculture, and Racial Justice

If Module 9 diagnosed the lock-in factors keeping industrial agriculture in place, Module 10 asks how the lock can be picked — how diversified, agroecological food systems can be built at scale, and who is doing that building.

The IPES-Food report argues that what is required is not a “tweaking” of industrial agriculture but a paradigm shift toward diversified agroecological systems that optimize biodiversity, minimize chemical inputs, stimulate ecological interactions, and build long-term soil fertility. Evidence is accumulating that these systems can achieve total outputs competitive with industrial agriculture, particularly under environmental stress and in global south contexts where additional food production is most urgently needed. They also deliver ecological co-benefits — carbon sequestration, biodiversity, water retention — that industrial systems cannot.

Food sovereignty provides the political framework within which many advocates for this transition operate. Developed through the global peasant movement La Via Campesina and enshrined at the 2007 Nyéléni Forum, food sovereignty asserts “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.” Food Secure Canada has elaborated seven pillars of food sovereignty: food for people (not profit); building knowledge and skills (including traditional knowledge); working with nature; valuing food providers; localizing food systems; putting control locally; and recognizing food as sacred. These pillars stand in deliberate contrast to the logic of the global agri-food market, which treats food as a commodity like any other, prioritizes efficiency and return on investment, and concentrates governance power in the hands of corporations and international financial institutions.

Urban agriculture sits in a complex and sometimes contradictory position within this political landscape. On one hand, community gardens, rooftop farms, CSAs, and food forests represent grassroots practices that reconnect urban residents to food production, build community, and create channels for food access that partially bypass corporate supply chains. On the other hand, Samuel Walker’s research in Vancouver and Detroit demonstrates that urban agriculture can serve as a “sustainability fix” for neoliberal city governments — providing green branding, justifying reduced social service spending, and sometimes facilitating gentrification. Nathan McClintock’s analysis of urban agriculture’s “radical, reformist, and garden-variety neoliberal” dimensions captures this inherent tension: urban agriculture is simultaneously an outgrowth of capitalist crisis and a partial reaction against it, operating across multiple political-economic scales at once.

The lesson is not that urban agriculture should be abandoned, but that it cannot substitute for structural economic change. As McClintock argues, “food justice requires increased entitlements — jobs and living wages, not just a garden or grocery store in every neighbourhood.” Urban agriculture is one tool among many, and its impact depends critically on how it is embedded within wider frameworks of justice, equity, and democratic governance.

Perhaps the most important intervention in this module is its centering of racism as foundational to the food system. Eric Holt-Giménez and Breeze Harper argue that calls to “fix a broken food system” rest on the false premise that it once worked well for everyone — whereas in fact the capitalist food system has always worked precisely as intended: concentrating wealth and power, while passing the costs on to racially marginalized groups. People of colour bear disproportionate burdens of pesticide exposure (as farmworkers), diet-related disease (as residents of food deserts), food insecurity (as systematically low-wage workers), and exclusion from the leadership and benefits of alternative food movements. The FoodShare panel discussion “Black Women on Black Food Sovereignty” — featuring Karen Washington, Leticia Deawuo, Deirdre Woods, and Cheyenne Sundance — grounds these systemic patterns in lived experience, linking #landback demands, unpaid care labour, Black food histories, and the urgent need for food systems that centre the leadership and agency of communities of colour.

Module 11: Towards Circular Economies — Food Waste and Recovery

The Scale of Waste, Circular Systems, and the Limits of Charity

Approximately one-third of all food produced globally is lost through spoilage, over-production, or consumer waste before it can be eaten. The energy, water, land, labour, and financial resources embedded in that wasted food represent a staggering misallocation of planetary resources — particularly in a world where nearly 800 million people are chronically undernourished and where agriculture is already straining against multiple planetary boundaries.

The circular economy offers a conceptual alternative to the dominant linear economy, in which materials flow from extraction through production to disposal. In a circular system, waste streams are redesigned as inputs to other processes, packaging is reusable or compostable, and organic matter is returned to soil rather than buried in landfills or incinerated. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s 2018 report Cities and Circular Economy for Food identifies cities as critical leverage points for this transition, drawing on case studies from Ghent (Belgium), Toronto (Canada), Porto (Portugal), and Porto Alegre (Brazil). The report proposes three urban ambitions: sourcing food grown regeneratively and locally; redesigning the concept of “waste” out of the food system; and producing and marketing healthier food products.

The sources of food loss and waste differ systematically between high-income and low-income countries. In low-income countries, most loss occurs early in the supply chain — during harvest, storage, and processing — due to inadequate infrastructure, limited refrigeration, poor road networks, and weak supply chain management. In high-income countries, by contrast, loss is concentrated at the retail and consumer stages, driven by cosmetic standards (supermarkets reject misshapen vegetables), date labelling confusion, over-purchasing, and a culture in which food is perceived as so cheap that waste carries little consequence. Canada’s food waste problem has been estimated at $31 billion annually — roughly $1,400 per household — making it both an economic and an ecological scandal.

Gleaning — the collection of surplus food from farms, orchards, and other food production sites — represents one form of food recovery with a long history. Jennifer Marshman and Steffanie Scott’s research on gleaning in Ontario demonstrates that modern gleaning organizations do more than recover food: they build food literacy, create connections between urban volunteers and agricultural landscapes, foster community cohesion, and contribute to multiple stages of what the researchers call the Food Security Continuum, from immediate food provision through to systemic food system redesign.

However, food recovery and charitable redistribution face important structural limits. Dachner and Tarasuk’s analysis is pointed: charitable food assistance — food banks, gleaning programs, donation drives — cannot improve household food security because it does not address the root cause, which is inadequate income. Scaling up food charity without addressing economic structures perpetuates the need for charity without eliminating it. Food banks are already operating at capacity and cannot absorb more donations without substantial infrastructure investment. The fundamental limitation of the charity model is that it depoliticizes poverty, treating it as a logistical challenge (matching surplus food to hungry people) rather than as a structural outcome of labour markets, housing costs, and social policy.

The Plant in Chicago offers a different vision: a former meat-packing facility converted into a net-zero closed-loop urban food production hub housing 16 co-located food businesses. Brewers’ spent grain feeds mushroom cultivation; fermentation gases generate biogas for on-site energy; aquaponic systems connect fish production with vegetable growing; and an anaerobic digester converts food waste into energy. By analysing and redesigning the flows of materials, energy, and water between co-located businesses, the facility demonstrates that circular principles can be practically applied at urban scale, while also serving as an educational and community resource.

Module 12: Conclusions and Food Futures

Systems Change, Sustainable Dietary Guidelines, and the Road Ahead

The final module steps back to survey the terrain covered across the course and ask: given the complexity of the food system and the scale of the challenges, what kinds of change are actually possible, and how might they be brought about?

The food system’s contribution to climate change, biodiversity loss, water depletion, social inequality, and public health crises is clear. What is less clear is how to navigate the wicked problem nature of food system change — where interventions in one dimension frequently create trade-offs or unintended consequences in others. More food production for the global poor may require more land conversion. Reducing animal product consumption in wealthy countries may have complex economic effects on pastoral communities in low-income countries. Prioritizing local food may disadvantage tropical farmers who depend on export income. Navigating these trade-offs requires not just better technical analysis but genuinely democratic and inclusive deliberation about whose values and priorities shape the food system.

Mason and Lang (2017) offer a framework of eight broad policy responses to dietary unsustainability, ranging from tax and fiscal measures through regulatory and trade interventions to voluntary industry self-regulation, “choice architecture” (nudging consumers through food environment design), and education and information approaches. No single mechanism is sufficient, and different combinations will be appropriate in different national and cultural contexts. What Mason and Lang insist on, however, is the inadequacy of leaving the transition to sustainable diets entirely to voluntary individual choice — the dominant paradigm in liberal food policy. The food system’s unsustainability is structural and systemic; remedying it requires structural and systemic intervention.

The concept of Sustainable Dietary Guidelines (SDGs²) — proposed by Tim Lang alongside the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals — argues that the SDGs cannot be achieved without simultaneous transformation of the food system, and that this transformation requires clear, evidence-informed dietary guidelines that send strong signals throughout the supply chain. The SDGs² framework creates a virtuous circle: dietary guidelines that favour low-carbon, high-biodiversity, water-efficient foods create incentives for food producers, retailers, and policymakers to invest in production systems and supply chains that can deliver those foods equitably and at scale.

The food system is also embedded within the United Nations SDGs more broadly, touching on goals around zero hunger, good health and well-being, clean water, climate action, life on land, reduced inequalities, and sustainable cities, among others. Efforts to map food system interventions onto the 17 SDGs, including Scott’s own research on agroecology in China, demonstrate that genuinely agroecological approaches can generate co-benefits across multiple goals simultaneously — for gender equity, poverty reduction, biodiversity, climate mitigation, and local economic development.

Throughout all 12 modules, the course has returned repeatedly to the same set of structural questions. Who controls the food system, and in whose interests? What are the real costs of cheap food, and who bears them? How can the power and momentum of industrial agriculture be redirected toward more diverse, equitable, and ecologically sustainable systems? What roles do the state, the market, and civil society each play in this transformation? And how does transforming the food system require confronting not just agricultural policy but the deeper structures of capitalism, colonialism, and racial hierarchy that have shaped the food system over centuries?

Scott concludes the course not with a definitive answer but with an invitation: to continue exploring, to take the ideas encountered here into whatever professional and personal contexts graduates inhabit, and to cultivate what she calls “thought leadership” on sustainable food — the capacity to analyze these complex systems, communicate clearly about the trade-offs and possibilities, and engage in collective action toward transformation. In her words: “Go forth and eat well.”