Popular Education and Community Food Security: Contemplating Spaces for Food Systems Change

There are many problems that result from the contemporary industrial food system, vested as it is in capitalist interests, the scientific paradigm, and continual expansion and progress (Handy and Fehr, 2010). One such problem largely created from this system, is food insecurity, which particularly affects vulnerable and low-income communities McIntyre, 2003). Due to cuts in social provision and welfare, the effects of food insecurity have become exacerbated, while food banks and other charitable solutions have taken on the responsibility of addressing it (Riches, 2002). However, these initiatives have failed to substantially reduce food insecurity and have largely depoliticized issues of hunger while helping to marginalize and stigmatize people who cannot afford food. With the understanding that there are immense limitations and shortcomings within food security policy in Canada, and Toronto more specifically, this paper is dedicated to better understanding the community organizing realm, particularly what community food centres (CFCs), and community food organizations are doing in response to food insecurity in Toronto. As the community sphere has responded to food insecurity, this topic is worth researching in order that we can optimize these spaces. This paper explores the role of current spaces for food security on the community organizing level, while endeavouring to understand what makes these spaces meaningful, and envisioning how these community spaces might become more ideal. Within this paper, the concept of meaningful or ideal is distinguished based on three main categories from existing literature: food security, popular education, and community organizing and social movements. Lastly, I look at some of the challenges that community organizations currently face, and may face in moving toward more meaningful or ideal work. The methodologies employed are semi-structured interviews with employees of CFCs in Toronto, as well as an arts-based workshop with community members from the Riverdale Food Working Group’s (RFWG) three good food markets (GFMs), designed to better situate their personal experiences within spaces for food-getting. It is through these primary explorations that I better distinguish what is considered meaningful and ideal in the context of community work for food security. My primary data, in conjunction with the literature, suggest that scales of local and global, and inside-outside organizing related to food security, are fluid and flexible concepts, and CFCs are able to operate in and outside of these “categories” in order to get their work done. Conversely, the primary data and literature suggest the concept of process is prioritized above outcome-based instances of food-getting in relation to process-based organizing and participatory foodgetting. Thus, this criterion is integral to the orchestration of CFC spaces. It is important to note that this paper is inherently process-based, and thus, hearing the voices of those who are involved in community food work, as well as those who may be marginalized and excluded from dominant narratives and systems of food-getting, was as important as any findings. Lastly, this paper is structured as popular education praxis: theory, action, and reflection, and it is my hope that it will continue a cycle of dialogue, critical awareness, and further action