The food system’s decreasing ability to deliver food security has led to the emergence of food assistance initiatives. Food assistance is highly contested; as some argue, it is a “failure of the state”, while others regard food assistance to be an “extension of the welfare state”. Either way, research suggests that actors within food assistance are rethinking their role in the food system. In this paper, we study three food assistance initiatives, in the Netherlands, Italy and Ireland, that perform new food assistance practices while embedded in specific institutional contexts, and analyse their potential to transform the food system, drawing on Transformative Social Innovation theory. Building on transition and social innovation theory, this recently developed theory distinguishes different levels within systems, named “shades of change”, that are associated with societal transformation. By exploring these “shades” of change in the analysis, we describe aspects of the initiatives’ novel practices, and in relation to the initiative and institutional relations their motivations and expectations. We compare the three cases and discuss how food assistance practices relate to and change (or do not change) the food system. In particular, we elaborate on how these three food assistance initiatives contribute in various ways to local food and welfare system innovation. In doing so, we offer a novel perspective on food assistance initiatives. We argue that they show dynamics that have the potential for more substantial transformation towards food security over time, by building momentum through “small wins”

Italy), where she teaches a masters' course on policies for the food system policies. She completed a Ph.D. in 'Economics and Territory', University of Tuscia (Viterbo, Italy) with a thesis on multicriteria assessment of impacts on the EU food quality polity and Geographical Indications. She continued to worked for six years as a post doctoral researcher (University of Pisa, Italy) on European FP7 and H2020 multi actor research projects (FOODLINKS; GLAMUR; TRANSMANGO, SALSA, ROBUST). Her research interests focuses on food systems and food and nutrition security, socioeconomic and environmental impacts of sustainable agriculture and food, support policies for smallholder farming and rural development policies at local and regional levels, public food procurement, food supply chain economics and agrifood standards.

Localization is one process/outcome that is proffered as key to the ‘grand challenges’ that currently face the food system. Consumers are attributed much agency in this potential transformation, being encouraged from all levels of society to exert their consumer muscle by buying local food. However, due to the social construction of scale it cannot be said that ‘local food’ is a definite entity and consumers understand the term ‘local food’ differently depending on their geographic and social context. As such, the research upon which this paper is based aimed to provide a nuanced understanding of how consumers in the particular spatial and social contexts of urban and rural Ireland understood the concept of ‘local food’. A specific objective was to test the theory that these consumers may have fallen into the ‘local trap’ by unquestioningly associating food from a spatially proximate place with positive characteristics. A three-phase mixed methodology was undertaken with a sample of consumers dwelling in urban and rural areas in both Dublin and Galway, Ireland: 1000 householders were surveyed; 6 focus group discussions took place; and 28 semi-structured interviews were carried out. The results presented in this paper indicate that for most participants in this study, spatial proximity is the main parameter against which the ‘localness’ of food is measured. Also, it was found that participants held multiple meanings of local food and there was a degree of fluidity in their understandings of the term. The results from the case study regions highlight how participants’ understandings of local food changed depending on the food in question and its availability. However, the paper also indicates that as consumers move from one place to another, the meaning of local food becomes highly elastic. The meaning is stretched or contracted according to the perceived availability of food, greater or lesser connections to the local producer community and the relative geographic size of participants’ locations. Our analysis of findings from all three phases of this research revealed a difference in understandings of local food among participants resident in urban and rural areas: participants dwelling in rural areas were more likely than those in urban areas to define local food according to narrower spatial limits. The paper concludes with an overview of the practical and theoretical significance of these results in addressing the current dearth of research exploring the meaning of local food for consumers and suggests avenues for future research.

In a context of increasing urbanization, cities have become key sites for rebuilding food systems in order to deliver good food for all. Indeed, municipal governments around the globe are developing food policies to integrate different sectors and actors implicated in delivering food security outcomes. Despite the acknowledgement of the need to develop integrative plans and food governance approaches, sustainable food transitions are conditioned by specific socio-ecological configurations of individual cities. Furthermore, inclusiveness and integration are discursively deployed but challenging to implement on the ground. In order to understand these policy trajectories we mobilised a political ecology framework to explore how the specific configurations of nature and society express themselves in the process and outcomes of urban food policies. We selected two European cities: Cardiff and Cork. These cities represent distinct urban foodscapes and diverse state-civil society relationships. The results of this international comparative study indicate that the specific entry points of each city's policy trajectory condition the establishment of integral food policies. Our analysis shows how policy opportunities for success are shaped by existing sociocultural dynamics (e.g., social asymmetry, level of engagement from civil society, pre-existing policy environment, and degree of state involvement), as well as particular ecological basis (i.e., availability and access to spaces for growing, share of green spaces, local climate, etc.). Furthermore, the potential of urban food policies to effect change on the city's foodscape hinges on their capacity to leverage place-based assets, and transform the structural processes that create exclusive and food insecure spaces in the first place.