Community-based food initiatives

Community-based food initiatives : everyday solidarity and care to address food insecurity (Germany-Spain)

We invite you to attend the first webinar of the international network on food solidarities, held in partnership with the Food equity center.

🗓️ June 10th, 2 : 30 PM
📝Register here
📍 Instructions to attend online

1. Meike Brückner : crisis, community, cuisine : collective responses to food inequalities in Berlin, Germany

Meike will introduce her empirical work in community kitchens in Berlin and how they try to address food insecurity and food inequalities and build solidarity and equity. Drawing on the findings, she’ll carve out the following arguments :

• food insecurity has largely been framed as a problem of the Global South,
• environmental action of low-income households receives little recognition in the dominant sustainability discourse
• gender dimensions of and care work related to food security remain largely underexamined

Meike Brückner, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, working at the intersection of food justice, critical climate justice, and participatory research. She has an interdisciplinary research background, teaches agricultural science and gender studies, and was a finalist for the Preis für Gute Lehre (Prize for Excellent Teaching) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2024. Her current work, funded by the Berliner Chancengleichheitsprogramm, explores food privileges and precarities and their implications for (in)equality beyond the Global North–South divide.

2. Maria Alonso Martinez : How do the people that feed Europe feed themselves ? Informal food practices and everyday solidarity in Almería, Spain

She will present her work from a resilience perspective and beyond food exchange and community initiatives, including food bank donations, self-provisioning, shopping from other migrant-run food stores...

María is a researcher focused on food systems transformation, examining how everyday food practices, informal economies, and inclusive governance shape more just and sustainable futures. Her work integrates Social Practice Theories with lived experience methods to understand how people navigate their food security in rapidly changing food environments.

At Wageningen University, she works on the Better Diets and Nutrition project (BDN), funded by the CGIAR, where she investigates youth food environments in Ethiopia from a consumption perspective. Her research analyzes how ‘in-between’ spaces such as streets and school surroundings become sites of agency and negotiation in scarcity, and how these lived experiences can inform more context-sensitive policy interventions for sustainable and healthy diets.