Paper exploring pedagogical applications through the use of food systems and urban farming labs.

Public health advocates, government agencies, and commercial organizations increasingly use nutritional science to guide food choice and diet as a way of promoting health, preventing disease or marketing products..We argue that in many instances such references to nutritional science can be characterized as nutritional scientism. We examine three manifestations of nutritional scientism: (1) the simplification of complex science to increase the persuasiveness of dietary guidance, (2) superficial and honorific references to science in order to justify cultural or ideological views about food and health, or (3) the presumption that nutrition is the primary value of food. This paper examines these forms of nutritional scientism in the context of biopolitics to address bioethical concerns related to the misuse of scientific evidence to make claims regarding the affect of diet on health. We argue that nutritional scientism has ethical implications (i) for individual responsibility and freedom, (ii) concerning iatrogenic harm, and (iii) for well-being.

This multidisciplinary literature review highlights the overlap between the domains of communication and food studies. The author traces the inextricably intertwined threads of communication and food throughout history, society, religion, and culture, before offering a rationale foe the introduction of a food studies course in a university communication curriculum.

Food industry and public health representatives are often in conflict, particularly over food labelling policies and regulation. Food corporations are suspicious of regulated labels and perceive them as a threat to free market enterprise, opting instead for voluntary labels. Public health and consumer groups, in contrast, argue that regulated and easy-to-read labels are essential for consumers to exercise autonomy and make healthy choices in the face of food industry marketing. Although public health and food industry have distinct interests and objectives, I argue that both contribute to the creation of the food label as a governmental strategy that depends on free-market logics to secure individual and population health. While criticism of ‘Big Food’ has become a growth industry in academic publishing and research, wider critique is needed that also includes the activities of public health. Such a critique needs to address the normalizing effect of neoliberal governmentality within which both the food industry and public health operate to reinforce individuals as ‘healthy consumers’. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, I examine the food label through the lens of governmentality. I argue that the rationale operating through the food label combines nutrition science and free-market logics to normalize subjects as responsible for their own health and reinforces the idea of consumption as a means to secure population health from diet-related chronic diseases.

This chapter draws attention to the fact that food is not only a (bio)ethical concern but also a biopolitical concern. The growing anxieties regarding climate change, market-failure, and food security at local and global levels re-frames food ethics from consumer choice to wider political and structural issues. In the first part I outline the limitations of bioethical discourses of choice and responsibility surrounding food and health. In the second part I argue that much of the bioethical discourse ignores the biopolitical dimension of food systems by merely encouraging individuals and populations to make healthy food choices. I do not argue that bioethical analyses are redundant or should be ignored. Rather, in the third and final part I argue for the inclusion of biopolitics as a crucial corrective for bioethics to critically respond to concerns surrounding food and that together a substantial political and ethical analysis of food is possible.

"In “‘Please, oh Snowman, what is toast?’: Memories and Nostalgia for Food in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake”, Manuel J. Sousa Oliveira takes Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003) as examples of dystopian novels which make use of the utopian function of remembering food. By exploring the tension between the dystopian present and the traces of utopia which can be found in meals from the past, Oliveira argues that this results in a critical nostalgia that opens up utopian possibilities. Therefore, by looking back to an age of plenty, past meals and food become an essential part of, on the one hand, comfort, and, on the other hand, resistance for the characters surviving in dystopia." - From the Introduction

Decisions about institutional food procurement take place in several public contexts, including public K-12 schools, public universities, public prisons, and hunger-relief agencies. They implicate numerous values, including animal welfare, cost, accessibility, convenience, cultural appropriateness, social acceptability, healthfulness, freshness, quality, workers' rights, localness, and environmental sustainability. Sometimes these contexts amount to democratic associations or are situated within a broader democratic context that makes democratic norms operative. Making institutional procurement decisions more fully comply with the norms of deliberative democracy can help to identify value conflicts, reduce the extent of those conflicts, and find a path to their appropriate resolution. Principled civic engagement practices can create equitable and inclusive environments in which democratic deliberation can take place. The resulting decisions can benefit in terms of legitimacy , respectfulness, and epistemic soundness.

Association for the Study of Food and Society and the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society 2019 Conference - "Finding Home in the "Wilderness": Explorations in Belonging in Circumpolar Food Systems Explorations in Belonging in Circumpolar Food Systems", Anchorage, Alaska, USA, June 26-29, 2019.