Social Gastronomy and Food Sovereignty
Food is central to our social conditioning. It is over the dinner table where we learn to interact with friends and family.
Food calls on us to make consistent, daily decisions. It is a source of joy, sadness, and comfort that asks the essential question: "what are you able to feed yourself?"
This concept of ability is essential because it considers the importance of food access. What you can put on your dinner table may look drastically different, or maybe very similar, to your next-door neighbor. But if we #ThinkGlobal, how does your dinner plate look other than someone in a different country, region, or continent? This is where food sovereignty comes in.
Food sovereignty is a concept that brings democracy to food access. It requires large-scale, systemic change to make sure that we all can make autonomous decisions to access nutritious, local foods.
It asks us to create a new food system and envisions a world where “the people who produce, distribute, and consume food also control the mechanisms and policies of food production and distribution.” It is a movement based on empathy for sustainable change at a global and local scale. We all eat, and Food Sovereignty calls on us, as a society, to consider our neighbor’s right to determine the food they put on their table as equally important to our own.
Food Sovereignty requires acknowledging the intersectional and an understanding of how our social conditions overlap with our relationships with food. The economic, political, and cultural become the connected foundations of our interpretations of the food system.
If you think about it, food quality is determined by the resources available to the farmer and the richness of the earth it grows on. Our food buying decisions are determined by what we can afford and the culture that formed our buying preferences. These conditions, though seemingly separate, work with one another as ingredients for every meal.
Food Sovereignty, like the Social Gastronomy Movement, works across the entire food cycle. It equally considers food, agriculture, ecosystems, and cultures to ensure adequate food access across the world.
Food sovereignty considers direct food access and how access to resources such as clean water and land impacts our ability to define what we bring to the dinner table each night.
Food Sovereignty emerged as a reaction to globalization, unemployment, low wages, farmer bankruptcies, and the depletion of rural economies. As a way to challenge the status quo, it "offers a way of thinking which celebrates diversity and values the work of food production in all societies and places.”
Food sovereignty asks us to think radically and address the systemic conditions that have created global inequality in food access. From farm to table, it:
It aims to provide good food for all people
Values food providers
Localizes food systems
Makes decisions locally
Build knowledge and skills
Works with nature
Food Sovereignty and Social Gastronomy
Social Gastronomy and Food Sovereignty go hand in hand, united by the idea that food is a tool for nourishment, learning, and radical transformation.
Food is a daily reminder that we should be giving as much back to the earth as it gives to us. Food is an essential human right, and it is also a source of life and culture that a person’s social condition should never determine. Everyone must be able to enjoy and nourish themselves with food- equally.
Farmers Protests in India: A Historic Call for Food Sovereignty
Over the past few months, we have seen a monumental display of solidarity between farmers and a call for Food Sovereignty. Farmers in India have been protesting the government’s proposed neoliberal agriculture laws, known as the Three Farms Reform Bill.
According to Aljazeera, “The bills, passed by India’s parliament this week, make it easier for farmers to sell their produce directly to private buyers and enter into a contract with private companies. The government hopes private sector investments will stimulate growth.”
More than 53% of India's 1.3 billion citizens rely on farming for livelihood. For decades, they have sold their products in their home states. These ‘reforms’ would undo this system and benefit large corporations, having widespread repercussions. Those coming to the streets to protests have come together in the largest grassroots demonstration in history.
Nourishing this historic struggle for Food Sovereignty and human rights is the Sikh tradition of Community Kitchens, also known as 'langar.' There are also roadside markets and community-led hospitals.
We applaud this demonstration of service collective action. We stand with small farmers.