Anne Portman

Local food advocacy is a political and moral discourse that is meant to provide the foundation for understanding local food networks as sites of resistance against the norms and power of globalized industrial food-ways. In this context, the concept of the “natural” is frequently and un-critically invoked to argue for the ethical significance of participating in and advocating for local food networks. I argue that the conception of the “natural” at work is unquestioningly purity-based and is consistent with the construction of “nature” under traditional value dualism. This is problematic in that the dualistic framework serves to obscure many actual complexities within the “natural” and the “local” themselves, and in their relationships with their counterparts, the “cultural” and the “global.” Thus by leaving unquestioned certain assumptions about the meaning of the “natural” and how that meaning was constructed, local food advocacy is not as resistant as it might otherwise be. I suggest that local food advocates ought to utilize ecological and transnational feminist tools that are better able to acknowledge the complex and ever-changing character of the “natural” and the “local.”

Food sovereignty asserts the right of peoples to define and organize their own agricultural and food systems so as to meet local needs and so as to secure access to land, water and seed. A commitment to gender equity has been embedded in the food sovereignty concept from its earliest articulations. Some might wonder why gender justice should figure so prominently in a food movement. In this paper I review and augment the arguments for making gender equity a central component of food sovereignty. The most common argument is: if women constitute the majority of the world’s food producers, then agricultural policy is a women’s issue. And insofar as patriarchal social relations continue to dominate the globe, then changing agricultural policies will require explicit attention to gender injustice. I suggest that this is a good argument, but that an ecological feminist perspective can provide additional theoretical reasons for maintaining the centrality of gender justice in food sovereignty discourse. Moreover, ecological feminism can provide a robust theoretical framework that coheres a concept and movement with a wide set of concerns. My critique positions food sovereignty’s call to social justice as embedded in a truly radical re-thinking of dominant conceptual frameworks, and re-envisioning of political and ethical relations.