GPH 280AGlobal Food Sovereignty

Catalog

Despite the homogenization of cuisines encouraged by a globalized industrial agricultural system and the over-abundance of food it creates, most humans still rely heavily on small-scale food producers and local food webs. In this class, we take a surveyed look at these place-based food webs around the world through exploring the concept of food sovereignty and how it has been mobilized by peasant and Indigenous farmer movements, especially in the Global South and among the Global Majority. In juxtaposition with and distinction from a centralized and corporatized food system, we will consider the implications of these local food webs and movements on land, environment, and community and individual health. This course explores peasant and Indigenous-led food system development and maintenance, as well as responses to Western colonial models of eating, producing, and living built on neoliberal policies and logics. We will analyze the political, economic, and environmental challenges to food sovereignty initiatives and their implications for mainstream understandings of food, food production, and relationships with collective resources such as water, land, and people. Overall, this course introduces students to food sovereignty and the global food system through a range of readings and approaches including the economic, political, cultural, social, racial, and ecological, both now and in the past.