Avant 2014

Articles

• The practice and politics of food system localization
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  As an apparent counterpoint to globalization, food system localization is often assumed to be a good, progressive and desirable process. Such thinking rests on a local–global binary that merits closer scrutiny. This paper examines the social construction of “local”, by analyzing the practice and politics of food system localization efforts in Iowa, USA. It argues that desirable social or environmental outcomes may not always map neatly onto the spatial content of “local”, which itself involves the social construction of scale. These contradictions in turn relate to differing political inflections discernible in food system localization. Localization can be approached defensively, emphasizing the boundaries and distinctions between a culturally and socially homogeneous locality needing protection from non-local “others”. But through the experience of new social and gustatory exchanges, localization can also promote increased receptivity to difference and diversity. More emergent, fluid and inclusive notions of the “local”, however, may challenge the very project of crafting and maintaining distinctive food identities for local places. These themes are explored through a case study of food system localization efforts and activities in Iowa, an American state that has been a stronghold of conventional commodity agriculture. Demographic and agricultural histories are drawn on to understand recent food system localization practice that has come to emphasize a definition of “local” that coincides with sub-national state boundaries. The emergence and popularization of the “Iowa-grown banquet meal” and the shifting meaning of “local Iowa food” further illustrate the potential tension between defensiveness and diversity in food system localization.

• Food aid after fifty years : recasting its role
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  This book analyzes the impact food aid programmes have had over the past fifty years, assessing the current situation as well as future prospects. Issues such as political expediency, the impact of international trade and exchange rates are put under the microscope to provide the reader with a greater understanding of this important subject matter. This book will prove vital to students of development economics and development studies and those working in the field.

• The new nutrition science project
  27 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  To show that nutrition science, with its application to food and nutrition policy, now needs a new conceptual framework. This will incorporate nutrition in its current definition as principally a biological science, now including nutritional aspects of genomics. It will also create new governing and guiding principles ; specify a new definition ; and add social and environmental dimensions and domains.

• L’exode rural et les migrations contre l’emploi rural ?
  4 janvier 2018, par Roxane

  Un des défis majeurs à venir sera de parvenir à nourrir durablement les urbains, car dans le même temps, la communauté scientifique s’accorde pour pronostiquer un avenir fait de risques de pénuries de ressources naturelles non renouvelables, liés notamment à l’urbanisation galopante.

• Comment mange le monde ?
  27 janvier 2012, par Clarisse

  A côté de la sous-nutrition existent des problèmes de malnutrition, par carence (la faim « cachée ») ou par excès (l’obésité). Ces questions de santé publique liées aux régimes alimentaires ne se posent pas partout de la même manière (certains régimes sont considérés comme modèles : Japon, Méditerranée) et on observe encore une grande variété de styles alimentaires dans le monde. Pourtant, une tendance globale se dessine vers une surconsommation calorique, avec une plus forte proportion de produits animaux et transformés.

• Présentation du numéro 31 de la revue Communications « La nourriture, pour une anthropologie bioculturelle de l’alimentation »
  27 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  "L’homme est un omnivore qui se nourrit de viande, de végétaux et d’imaginaire : l’alimentation ramène à la biologie mais, de toute évidence, elle ne s’y ramène pas ; le symbolique et l’onirique, les signes, les mythes, les fantasmes nourrissent, eux aussi, et ils concourent à régler notre nourriture. Dans l’acte alimentaire, homme biologique et homme social sont étroitement, mystérieusement, mêlés et intriqués."

• A conceptual model of the food and nutrition system
  27 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  The integrated model developed here included three subsystems (producer, consumer, nutrition) and nine stages (production, processing, distribution, acquisition, preparation, consumption, digestion, transport, metabolism). The integrated model considers the processes and transformations that occur within the system and relationships between the system and other systems in the biophysical and social environments. The integrated conceptual model of the food and nutrition system presents food and nutrition activities as part of a larger context and identifies linkages among the many disciplines that deal with the food and nutrition system.

• Sécurité alimentaire : un objectif hors d’atteinte ?
  27 janvier 2012, par Clarisse

  Beaucoup reconnaissent aujourd’hui que l’objectif du Millénaire pour le développement des Nations unies, qui visait à réduire de moitié entre 1990 et 2015 la proportion de personnes sous-alimentées dans le monde, est désormais hors de portée.

• Should we go “home” to eat ? : toward a reflexive politics of localism
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  “Coming home to eat” [Nabhan, 2002. Coming Home to Eat : The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods. Norton, New York] has become a clarion call among alternative food movement activists. Most food activist discourse makes a strong connection between the localization of food systems and the promotion of environmental sustainability and social justice. Much of the US academic literature on food systems echoes food activist rhetoric about alternative food systems as built on alternative social norms. New ways of thinking, the ethic of care, desire, realization, and vision become the explanatory factors in the creation of alternative food systems. In these norm-based explanations, the “Local” becomes the context in which this type of action works. In the European food system literature about local “value chains” and alternative food networks, localism becomes a way to maintain rural livelihoods. In both the US and European literatures on localism, the global becomes the universal logic of capitalism and the local the point of resistance to this global logic, a place where “embeddedness” can and does happen. Nevertheless, as other literatures outside of food studies show, the local is often a site of inequality and hegemonic domination. However, rather than declaim the “radical particularism” of localism, it is more productive to question an “unreflexive localism” and to forge localist alliances that pay attention to equality and social justice. The paper explores what that kind of localist politics might look like.

• Ultra-processed products are becoming dominant in the global food system
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  The relationship between the global food system and the worldwide rapid increase of obesity and related diseases is not yet well understood. A reason is that the full impact of industrialized food processing on dietary patterns, including the environments of eating and drinking, remains overlooked and underestimated. Many forms of food processing are beneficial. But what is identified and defined here as ultra-processing, a type of process that has become increasingly dominant, at first in high-income countries, and now in middle-income countries, creates attractive, hyper-palatable, cheap, ready-to-consume food products that are characteristically energy-dense, fatty, sugary or salty and generally obesogenic. In this study, the scale of change in purchase and sales of ultra-processed products is examined and the context and implications are discussed. Data come from 79 high- and middle-income countries, with special attention to Canada and Brazil. Results show that ultra-processed products dominate the food supplies of high-income countries, and that their consumption is now rapidly increasing in middle-income countries. It is proposed here that the main driving force now shaping the global food system is transnational food manufacturing, retailing and fast food service corporations whose businesses are based on very profitable, heavily promoted ultra-processed products, many in snack form.