Commentary

Abstract

Perspective and power in the ethical foodscape From some vantage points, the contemporary foodscape appears littered with ethical alternatives. Consider, for example, the view from Union Square in New York City. Overlooking the square is a multistorey Whole Foods, offering the usual upscale array of organic produce, free-range meats, cage-free eggs, certified seafood, GM-free breakfast cereals, and biodegradable utensils to go with the take-out salad bar selections. Around the corner, Think Coffee brews organic, fairly traded, shade-grown coffeeö locally roasted in Brooklyn, to boot! On the opposite side of the square, a branch of the`Green-certified' Goodburgers chain promises customers antibiotic-free chicken and humanely raised beef. A few blocks south, the newly opened Otarian restaurant posts the carbon count of all its all-veggie fast food, none of which contains flown-in ingredients. And in the square itself, a thrice-weekly greenmarket overflows with produce, meats, cheeses, fish, and baked goods, all more-or-less local.From the perspective of someone seeking an ethically credentialed meal (leaving aside momentarily the question of whether the credentials are valid) Union Square's foodscape lacks for little. In this sense it is not unique even among neighborhoods in downtown Manhattan, much less in the global North more broadly. From San Francisco and London to Prague and Hong Kong, shoppers and diners who want values for money' do not have to search terribly far. In such places (as well as less urban ones) retailers both mainstream and alternative have not only quickly adapted to the demands of such consumers; they have also encouraged and refined them.But obviously they do not deserve all the credit for the rapid transformation of contemporary foodscapes. As the papers in this theme issue have shown, it is equally important to consider the forces operating on and beyond the market: the purchasing co-ops and fair trade NGOs; the school systems that have reformed their meal programs; the government initiatives to use food policy to address a range of socioeconomic, ecological, and especially health problems. Although Lang (2010) focuses on European Union and national-level policy making, New York is just one example of a city where municipal governments are attempting to build a healthier and more sustainable urban foodscape using a combination of labeling laws, procurement, tax credits, and education (Allday, 2008;Clapp et al, 2010; LDA, 2005).The literature analyzing these and related trends is now enormous. Yet as the preceding papers also demonstrate, the empirical terrain is hardly stable. Ongoing economic turmoil and the climate change threat are only two of the more obvious, macrolevel reasons why whatever seemed apparent a few years ago about particular food movements or problems may no longer apply. In this brief commentary I certainly will not attempt to survey all the questions that still need to be asked, as Goodman et al (2010) put it, about ethical food's``premises, promises, and possibilit...

Exploring the Staple Foodscape of Dar es Salaam

“…This is a foodscape that addresses many of the challenges of "Contemporary urban food provisioning" as described by Wiskerke and Viljoen [8] (pp. [21][22][23][24][25] and has the potential-due to the scale and number of actors involved in relatively equitable relations and low external input food production-to address them further. These include: the pressure on farm incomes; loss of skills and knowledge from the farming and food production sector; environmental degradation; food waste; fossil fuel dependency; climate change; water stress; loss of biodiversity; and soil degradation [8] (pp.…”

“…These include: the pressure on farm incomes; loss of skills and knowledge from the farming and food production sector; environmental degradation; food waste; fossil fuel dependency; climate change; water stress; loss of biodiversity; and soil degradation [8] (pp. [21][22][23][24][25].…”

“…An easy way of explaining the term foodscape would be to understand it as an assembly of its two components-food and scape-and thus define it as "the relationship between food, its spatial context and the viewer-the person to which this image appears" [22] (p. 210). Following this line of reasoning, Freidberg [23] argues that a foodscape is to be understood as the actual site where we find food. Lake et al [24] (p. 666) built on that by using foodscape as a synonym for food environment, which, according to the authors, "encompasses any opportunity to obtain food and includes physical, socio-cultural, economic and policy influences at both micro and macro-levels".…”

Bio-cultural anchorage of the prickly pear cactus in Tlalnepantla (Morelos), Mexico

“…agreements to take place on the quality of the product in question and even the adoption of technological improvements and innovations in agro-industrial transformation and marketing processes (Gill, 2006;Morris and Kirwan, 2011;Raynolds, 2009;Bowen, 2012;Freidberg, 2010). Nonetheless, as we mentioned in the introduction, the literature on the local and localization has not elaborated on an aspect of bio-cultural anchorage of foodstuffs that could explain the survival of embeddedness from the substantive economy mentioned by Polanyi and of course foodstuffs of a territorial nature, despite the push to diversify production.…”

A coastal foodscape: examining the relationship between changing fisheries and community food security on the west coast of Newfoundland

“…The foodscape: a new lens for understanding fisheries restructuring and community food security Because the landscape is an array of related features, so the foodscape is a spatial array of "the actual physical sites where we find food" (Friedberg 2010(Friedberg :1868. However, like landscapes, foodscapes are social as well as material (Mitchell 2001).…”