Anglais

Articles

• Recycling, recovering and preventing “food waste” : competing solutions for food systems sustainability in the United States and France
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  Drawing on a distinction between “weak” and “strong” sustainability, this paper argues that “strong” prevention based on holistic changes in the food system is the most sustainable solution to food surplus and waste. It suggests that academics focus on strong food surplus prevention, but also that advocates encourage government and corporate actors to differentiate between weak and strong actions to diffuse strong sustainability across organizations and countries.

• Urban governance for food security : the alternative food system in Belo Horizonte
  23 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  With a population of 2.5 million people, the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, is a world pioneer in tackling food consumption, distribution and production as components of an integrated urban policy for food security. The paper gives a description of the main programmes and features of this policy arguing that over 15 years the city and its Municipal Secretariat for Food Policy and Supply have built a particular alternative food system. Marked by the comprehensive scope of its programmes ; its urban/rural focus ; the flexibility of the initiatives and, above all, by its commitment to social justice and equitable access to food, Belo Horizonte has developed a distinct mode of governance for food security. The unique ‘alterity’ of this food system is set further apart from those being attempted in Europe and in North America because it is government-driven. The paper discusses its strengths and current challenges.

• Convergence and divergence in food consumption ? Culture, Class and Place in Malaysian Urbanscape.
  22 décembre 2017, par Roxane

  Anindita Dasgupta is Associate Professor, and Head of School, School of Liberal Arts & Sciences, at Taylor’s University, Malaysia. She is the Book Review Editor for Millennial Asia : An International Journal of Asian Studies.

• Dietary diversity as a household food security indicator
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  Household food security is an important measure of well-being. Although it may not encapsulate all dimensions of poverty, the inability of households to obtain access to enough food for an active, healthy life is surely an important component of their poverty. Accordingly, devising an appropriate measure of food security outcomes is useful in order to identify the food insecure, assess the severity of their food shortfall, characterize the nature of their insecurity (for example, seasonal versus chronic), predict who is most at risk of future hunger, monitor changes in circumstances, and assess the impact of interventions. However, obtaining detailed data on food security status—such as 24- hour recall data on caloric intakes—can be time consuming and expensive and require a high level of technical skill both in data collection and analysis. This paper examines whether an alternative indicator, dietary diversity, defined as the number of unique foods consumed over a given period of time, provides information on household food security. It draws on data from 10 countries (India, the Philippines, Mozambique, Mexico, Bangladesh, Egypt, Mali, Malawi, Ghana, and Kenya) that encompass both poor and middle-income countries, rural and urban sectors, data collected in different seasons, and data on calories acquisition obtained using two different methods. ....[D]ietary diversity would appear to show promise as a means of measuring food security and monitoring changes and impact, particularly when resources available for such measurement are scarce.

• When collective action drives corporate social responsibility implementation in small and medium-sized enterprises : the case of a network of French winemaking cooperatives
  23 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  Increasing attention has been given to the engagement of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in corporate social responsibility (CSR), yet little is known about collective SME actions to implement CSR. We conducted 29 semi-structured interviews to investigate a network of 18 French winemaking cooperatives. These SMEs are particularly interesting because they have traditionally operated on values similar to CSR principles. The case study explores how collective action was able to drive CSR implementation in the cooperatives over time. Our results highlight the mechanisms of collective action related to social capital and their impacts on cooperative relationships with key stakeholders. We also provide managerial recommendations for this type of CSR network.

• Toward a new philosophy of preventive nutrition : from a reductionist to a holistic paradigm to improve nutritional recommendations
  27 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  The reductionist approach has been predominant to date in human nutrition research and has unraveled some of the fundamental mechanisms at the basis of food nutrients (e.g., those that involve deficiency diseases). In Western countries, along with progress in medicine and pharmacology, the reductionist approach helped to increase life expectancy. However, despite 40 y of research in nutrition, epidemics of obesity and diabetes are growing each year worldwide, both in developed and developing countries, leading to a decrease in healthy life years. Yet, interactions between nutrition-health relations cannot be modeled on the basis of a linear cause-effect relation between 1 food compound and 1 physiologic effect but rather from multicausal nonlinear relations. In other words, explaining the whole from the specific by a bottom-up reductionist approach has its limits. A top-down approach becomes necessary to investigate complex issues through a holistic view before addressing any specific question to explain the whole. However, it appears that both approaches are necessary and mutually reinforcing. In this review, Eastern and Western research perspectives are first presented, laying out bases for what could be the consequences of applying a reductionist versus holistic approach to research in nutrition vis-à-vis public health, environmental sustainability, breeding, biodiversity, food science and processing, and physiology for improving nutritional recommendations. Therefore, research that replaces reductionism with a more holistic approach will reveal global and efficient solutions to the problems encountered from the field to the plate. Preventive human nutrition can no longer be considered as “pharmacology” or foods as “drugs.”

• Should we go “home” to eat ? : toward a reflexive politics of localism
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  “Coming home to eat” [Nabhan, 2002. Coming Home to Eat : The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods. Norton, New York] has become a clarion call among alternative food movement activists. Most food activist discourse makes a strong connection between the localization of food systems and the promotion of environmental sustainability and social justice. Much of the US academic literature on food systems echoes food activist rhetoric about alternative food systems as built on alternative social norms. New ways of thinking, the ethic of care, desire, realization, and vision become the explanatory factors in the creation of alternative food systems. In these norm-based explanations, the “Local” becomes the context in which this type of action works. In the European food system literature about local “value chains” and alternative food networks, localism becomes a way to maintain rural livelihoods. In both the US and European literatures on localism, the global becomes the universal logic of capitalism and the local the point of resistance to this global logic, a place where “embeddedness” can and does happen. Nevertheless, as other literatures outside of food studies show, the local is often a site of inequality and hegemonic domination. However, rather than declaim the “radical particularism” of localism, it is more productive to question an “unreflexive localism” and to forge localist alliances that pay attention to equality and social justice. The paper explores what that kind of localist politics might look like.

• Resource over-exploitation and running out
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  Food systems around the world are highly dependent on both renewable and nonrenewable resources. Drivers such as population growth, urbanisation and climate change put a lot of pressure on resources that have become core issues for the future of food systems. Cropland availability is limited in most parts of the world, adding pressure for cropping intensification. Fossil energy and phosphorus shortages are expected to occur within a few decades, with particular impact in Low-Income (LI) countries where farmers are more vulnerable to volatile prices. The availability of very unevenly distributed freshwater resources shows a similar picture, with an increasing number of regions reaching alarming levels of water scarcity. Some world fish stocks have been overexploited and are now depleted. But the situation is not without hope. While we need to intensify food systems to meet the challenge of a growing population, new ways to produce with less impact on the environment and more resilience to climate change need to be widely adopted.

• The new nutrition science project
  27 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  To show that nutrition science, with its application to food and nutrition policy, now needs a new conceptual framework. This will incorporate nutrition in its current definition as principally a biological science, now including nutritional aspects of genomics. It will also create new governing and guiding principles ; specify a new definition ; and add social and environmental dimensions and domains.

• Peruvian cuisine’s slippery road to UNESCO (Raul Matta)
  24 mai 2017, par Clarisse

  An increasing number of strategies of cultural preservation acknowledge local particularities by including them in political and economic programmes. Recent research has demonstrated how governmental and private institutions work to stabilise, promote and manage the particularities of ’national’ foods and cuisines and the image of the countries themselves (Caldwell 2002 ; Karaosmanoglu 2007 ; Hiroko 2008 ; DeSoucey 2010). Food heritage emerges in this context...