This paper argues that food should be a more central focus of critical geographical research into urban poverty and that the concept of "foodscape" can contribute to this literature. We utilize the concept in a study of the daily practices of accessing food among low-income residents of the Downtown Eastside neighborhood of Vancouver, BC. We highlight how food access for the urban poor involves a complex and contradictory negotiation of both sites of encounter and care and also exclusion and regulation. Focusing on foodscapes emphasizes the social, relational, and political construction of food and thus highlights not simply food provision but also questions of existing power structures and potentialities for future change. Therefore, we discuss efforts to question the existing food system in Vancouver, to resist the gentrification processes that threaten the Downtown Eastside's food resources, and to build alternative strategies for urban food justice.
Participation in a food box program can provide some benefit in terms of increased fruit and vegetable consumption for those who use the program regularly. Increasing the frequency of the box and encouraging continued use may improve these effects.
IntroductionEvelyn is a woman in her forties who has lived her entire life in the Appalachian coalfield community of McKee County, Kentucky. (This is a pseudonym as are all the names in the paper.) Like many women in the region, she married a miner in her teens and was a mother and wife for almost twenty years. She did not work outside the home during those years. Today, however, she is divorced, is working toward an Associate's Degree in business; and is the owner of a small antique store. When asked about the changes she has experienced in the last several decades, she shakes her head and replies,`A ll at once there just were all these things for women. Before, few women worked outside of the home. If your husband mined, you took care of the children, the house, the man ... . But it's changing all around me.'' Evelyn's life and the lives of her neighbors have been profoundly changed in recent decades. The change is intertwined with processes of economic restructuring that have produced both sharp reductions in levels of unionized, secure mining jobs and the expansion of service industries in the coalfields.The changes in Evelyn's life have been intertwined with a restructuring of the place in which she lives. Her life and those of her neighbors are shaped by politicalê conomic change occurring at higher geographical scales. Nonetheless, individuals and communities are not passive objects of restructuring processes. Rather, decisions about how to cope with change and to maintain and support certain characteristics of
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