Poppy Nicol

The crucial roles that workers, especially seasonal and migrant workers, play in our food systems have come under renewed attention in recent years. The coronavirus pandemic resulted in food work­ers being recognized as critical or essential workers in many countries. In 2021, this coincided with the UN International Year of Fruits and Vegetables (IYFV), highlighting the importance of horticul­tural crops to healthy lives globally. Yet, workers’ quality of life in this most labor-intensive form of food production is often disregarded, or in the case of the UN IYFV, misconstrued. The agriculture-migration nexus—on which food systems depend—remains recognized as a challenge, yet there is limited debate about how it could be ameliorated and a lack of articulation of desirable alternatives. While alternative food and peasant movements propose food system transformation and alternative labor futures based on agroecology, labor lawyers and other advocates propose regula­tion and formalization of workplace regimes to ensure fair working conditions. Most recently, a third pos­sibility has emerged from agri-tech innovators: a techno-centric future with far fewer agricultural work­ers. These three archetypes of agricultural labor futures (agroecological, formally regulated, and techno-centric) have the potential to leave food scholars and activists without a unified, coherent vision to advance. Addressing this gap, this paper reports and builds on insights harvested from the international Good Work for Good Food Forum, organized by the authors with the aim of shaping consensus on positive visions for work in food systems. About 40 scholar-activists across three continents discussed the current challenges facing food workers and crafted a collective vision for good food work. This vision is documented in the form of nine principles supported by a framework of seven enabling pathways. We conclude by em­pha­sizing the need for a people-centered incor­poration of technology and a re-valuation of food workers’ contributions to global food systems. We offer the vision as a collective platform for action to advocate for and organize with workers in food systems.

The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and the spread of COVID-19 is explored using a social-ecological systems (SES) framework. From an SES perspective, the pandemic is the outcome of feedback loops and cascading interactions within an anthropologically disturbed system. However, the SES framework tends to overemphasize human agency as drivers of system disequilibrium. Drawing on posthumanism theory in social science, the agency of the non-human world also plays a critical role in disturbances in SES. Non-human agency is incorporated into the SES framework, applying it to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and the spread of COVID-19, and public health responses. The paper is interdisciplinary, and a non-systematic literature review was combined with Socratic dialogue to examine how human-induced changes trigger feedbacks in SES, such as SARS-CoV-2. The non-human world, embedded within a coupled system of material relations; the natural/biological element, that finds expression in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and in generating the genome novel recombinant, which aligns with the conceptualization of the non-human as “vibrant”, all play a role in shaping systems dynamics. This calls into question the anthropocentric view that human agency has the capacity to drive ecosystem dynamics. The implications for SES theory are discussed and we conclude with a case for a new ethics of interdependency to better serve SES analysis. The implications for practice, particularly considering projected future novel virus outbreaks, are discussed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted weaknesses in global food systems, as well as opening windows of opportunity for innovation and transformation. While the nature and extent of this crisis is rare, extreme climatic events will increase in magnitude and frequency, threatening similar societal impacts. It is therefore critical to identify mechanisms for developing food systems that are resilient to such impacts. We examine impacts of the crisis on UK food systems and how these further entrenched social inequalities. We present data on the experiences and actions of producers, consumers, and community organisers. The data were collected by adapting ongoing research to include surveys, interviews and online workshops focused on the pandemic. Actors’ responses to the pandemic foreshadow how enduring change to food systems can be achieved. We identify support required to enable these transformations and argue that it is vital that these opportunities are embedded in food justice principles which promote people-centred approaches to avoid exacerbating injustices prevalent pre-crisis. Learning from these experiences therefore provides insights for how to make food systems elsewhere more resilient and just.

This article investigates the urban political ecologies of the apple in London city region. As one of the largest cities in Europe, London is a pertinent site to explore the challenges and possibilities of future food systems. The apple is used as a lens to explore the diverging urban political ecologies of corporate-led and community-led food systems. A mixed method qualitative research approach combines a series of semi-structured interviews with stakeholders involved in producing, distributing and trading apples with practice-based ethnographic fieldwork, responding to calls within urban political ecology for more situated and grounded approaches that build new understandings of socio-environmental practices. Research shows diverging practices and biophysical properties of the apple amongst producers supplying multiple retailers and those operating via a community-led trading mechanism, which includes a farmers’ market and fruit and veg box scheme. Fieldwork suggests apple production for multiple retailers is retail-led, placing increasing pressures upon producers. Biophysical properties of the corporate-led apple are becoming increasingly standardised; narrow in terms of varietal range, and; privatised, via the rise of club brand apples. In contrast, fieldwork suggests community-led trade is based upon producer-led, agroecological approaches to production, distribution and trade. Biophysical properties of the community-led apple are context-dependent and diverse in terms of varietal range, quality and size. Community-led trading is identified as a mechanism for scaling agroecology through cultivating community social and ecological relations and producer-led approaches. To become more than marginal, agroecology and community-led trade require enabling policy, planning and legislative frameworks.

Scaling agroecology has the potential to support more sustainable and just food futures. This article investigates a case of community-led trade operating in the city region of London. Drawing upon interviews with stakeholders and practice-based ethnographic fieldwork, challenges and opportunities for agroecology are examined. Three dimensions of scaling agroecology are identified as pathways to sustainable and just food futures in the city region: scaling out, scaling up and scaling deep. Findings suggest scaling out agroecology requires access to secure, affordable land and infrastructure for agroecological communities of practice, alongside investment in capacity building for agroecological communities of practice via learning platforms (such as training programmes) and knowledge exchange (such as farmer-to-farmer and trader-to-trader learning). Second, scaling up agroecology requires transformations in policy, planning and legislation that value and invest in agroecological practices and divest in unsustainable and unjust food systems, supported via translocal networks for exchange of good practice. Third, scaling deep agroecology requires investment both in transformative learning opportunities and networks that support agroecological communities of practices, including those with lived experience of food injustice. Findings have implications for the question regarding scaling agroecology in the city region.

Co-operative ways of working can be understood as people-centred approaches. This article considers how co-operative ways of working have the potential to support the scaling-out of sustainable and just food systems in the context of Wales through people-centred change. Drawing upon a series of interviews with stakeholders involved in the sustainable and the co-operative food sector within Wales and international case studies, opportunities and challenges facing the scaling-out of sustainable and just food systems are considered. Findings demonstrate the potential of co-operative and community-based approaches to sustainable production, processing, distribution, and trading of healthy food that is affordable, culturally appropriate, and based upon an ethic of justice and care for land, workers, and animals. Community supported agriculture, incubator farms, food hubs, and platform co-operatives are identified as key mechanisms for sustainable and just food systems. Capacity building through education, information, and training are further critical foundations for co-operative and people-centred ways of working. In order to accelerate sustainable and just food futures, community-based participation, networks for training, access to resources and land, and transformative forms of governance, including legislative change, are key. We conclude by highlighting implications for future research into policy transfer and food system transformation.

Exchange of duplicate specimens was an important element of the relationship between metropolitan and regional museums in the period 1870–1940. Evidence of transfers of botanical museum objects such as economic botany specimens is explored for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and six museums outside the capital: Cambridge University Botanical Museum, National Museum Wales, Glasgow Museums, Liverpool World Museum, Manchester Museum and Warrington Museum. Botany became an important element in these museums soon after their foundation, sometimes relying heavily on Kew material as in the case of Glasgow and Warrington, and usually with a strong element of economic botany (except in the case of Cambridge). Patterns of exchange depended on personal connections and rarely took the form of symmetrical relationships. Botanical displays declined in importance at various points between the 1920s and 1960s, and today only Warrington Museum has a botanical gallery open to the public. However, botanical objects are finding new roles in displays on subjects such as local history, history of collections, natural history and migration.