Food leadership: leadership and adult learning for global food systems transformation

181 Pages·2017·18.716 MB·English

by  Etmanski, Catherine

FoodLeadership
INTERNATIONAL ISSUES IN ADULT EDUCATION
Volume 23
Series Editor:
Peter Mayo, University of Malta, Msida, Malta

Editorial Advisory Board:
Stephen Brookfield, University of St Thomas, Minnesota, USA
Waguida El Bakary, American University in Cairo, Egypt
Budd L. Hall, University of Victoria, BC, Canada
Astrid von Kotze, University of Western Cape, South Africa
Alberto Melo, University of the Algarve, Portugal
Lidia Puigvert-Mallart, CREA-University of Barcelona, Spain
Daniel Schugurensky, Arizona State University, USA
Joyce Stalker, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand/Aotearoa
Juha Suoranta, University of Tampere, Finland

Scope:
This international book series attempts to do justice to adult education as an ever
expanding field. It is intended to be internationally inclusive and attract writers and
readers from different parts of the world. It also attempts to cover many of the
areas that feature prominently in this amorphous field. It is a series that seeks to
underline the global dimensions of adult education, covering a whole range of
perspectives. In this regard, the series seeks to fill in an international void by
providing a book series that complements the many journals, professional and
academic, that exist in the area. The scope would be broad enough to comprise
such issues as ‘Adult Education in specific regional contexts’, ‘Adult Education in
the Arab world’, ‘Participatory Action Research and Adult Education’, ‘Adult
Education and Participatory Citizenship’, ‘Adult Education and the World Social
Forum’, ‘Adult Education and Disability’, ‘Adult Education and the Elderly’,
‘Adult Education in Prisons’, ‘Adult Education, Work and Livelihoods’, ‘Adult
Education and Migration’, ‘The Education of Older Adults’, ‘Southern
Perspectives on Adult Education’, ‘Adult Education and Progressive Social
Movements’, ‘Popular Education in Latin America and Beyond’, ‘Eastern
European perspectives on Adult Education’, ‘An Anti-Racist Agenda in Adult
Education’, ‘Postcolonial perspectives on Adult Education’, ‘Adult Education and
Indigenous Movements’, ‘Adult Education and Small States’. There is also room
for single country studies of Adult Education provided that a market for such a
study is guaranteed.
Food Leadership
LeadershipandAdultLearningforGlobalFood
SystemsTransformation
Editedby
CatherineEtmanski
RoyalRoadsUniversity,Canada
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword vii
Jennifer Sumner

Introduction ix
Catherine Etmanski

Section 1: Indigenous Food Systems

1. Longhouse to the Greenhouse: The Path to Food Security at Six Nations 3
Adrianne Lickers Xavier

2. Indigenous Knowledge: Informal Learning and Food Security Practices
among the Acholi People of Northern Uganda 17
George Ladaah Openjuru

3. Fishing for Change: A Pedagogy of Native Food Sovereignty 37
Tristan Reader and Terrol Dew Johnson

Section 2: Leadership in Global Food Systems Transformation

4. Beyond Policy: Race, Class, Leadership and Agenda-Setting in North
American Food Policy Councils 55
Lindsey Day Farnsworth

5. Digging in: Food Literacy Communication & Sustainability Advocacy
in Community Sharing Gardens 73
Myriam Beaugé

6. Gujarat Agricultural Success: A Case of a Transformational Leader or
a Transactional Leader? 93
Sejuti Das Gupta

Section 3: Learning in Global Food Systems Transformation

7. Out of the Wild and into the Kitchen: Learning about Sustainability
through Wild Food Products 109
Ingrid Kajzer Mitchell, Will Low, Eileen Davenport and
Tim Brigham

v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
8. Maladaptive Learning: Incorporating Institutional Barriers into Nonprofit
Community Garden Programming 125
Christopher Langer

9. Conclusion: Emerging Trends and Future Directions for Leadership
and Adult Learning in Global Food Systems Transformation 141
Vanessa Goodall and Catherine Etmanski

Index 155

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JENNIFER SUMNER
FOREWORD
Food is central to human existence and touches countless aspects of our lives.
Reardon (2000) captures this centrality when he points out that food is
sustenance … a symbol, a product, a ritual object, an identity badge, an
object of guilt, a political tool, even a kind of money. Food determines how
tall we are, how healthy, the extent of our civic peace, the sorts of jobs we
hold, the amount of leisure we enjoy, the crowding of our cities and suburbs,
what we look for in life, how long we look to live—all of that and much
more. (p. 1)
As such, food is an endlessly exciting field of inquiry—a dynamic interdisciplinary
area and an entrée into larger issues of global importance. And since we all need to
eat, we all have a stake in the food systems we find ourselves in.
Add the field of adult education, and food becomes the subject of, and a catalyst
for, learning of every kind. We all learn to eat—for better or for worse—and this
pedagogical project lasts a lifetime. As young adults, we learn to prepare food for
ourselves as we leave the security of the family home. As parents, we learn to cook
for a family and share these skills with our children. As seniors, we learn to eat to
promote healthy aging.
Combine all of this with a focus on leadership studies and the possibilities
tantalizingly unfold. Food movements, community projects, Indigenous initiatives
and municipal governance suddenly take on new significance and strategic
importance. Learning leadership through food can have lasting repercussions, both
for individuals and for society as a whole.
Finally, mix this all together with global food systems transformation and you
have an unbeatable recipe for cutting-edge scholarship. Race, class, gender,
governance, advocacy, literacy, food security, food sovereignty and public
institutions all come into sharper focus at a time of ongoing food system failure.
This is the genius of Catherine Etmanski’s edited book, Food Leadership:
Leadership and Adult Learning for Global Food Systems Transformation. In an era
of intertwined social, environmental and economic challenges, this timely volume
takes the nascent study of food leadership and puts it to the task of learning our
way out of deeply unsustainable food systems and learning our way in to more
sustainable approaches to food production and consumption. In so many different
ways, it is a generative work that addresses real-life issues.
Fittingly, the book begins with a look at Indigenous food systems. The time has
come for settlers of all types to step back and consider the traditional food systems
that their ways of life have displaced. These food systems, although crippled by
colonization, represent living alternatives to the corporate food regime. Whether
vii
SUMNER
we look to central Canada, northern Uganda or the Sonoran Desert that straddles
the U.S. and Mexican borders, Indigenous food systems are poised for resurgence
and can provide a pedagogical opportunity for all of us to learn to live with each
other within the limits of the planet.
The middle section of the book looks at food leadership within a variety of
contexts. One of these is food policy councils, which can promote inclusive
leadership development activities aimed at food system change. Another is
community gardens, where leadership can take many forms and support food
system transformation. A final context is government and the development of
political leadership. Here we learn about the negative aspects of leadership: how it
can be used to serve elite interests, all the while professing common interests.
The last section of the book attends to adult learning in different contexts, with
an emphasis on transformative learning and maladaptive learning. One chapter
illustrates how the transformative learning potential of wild foods enables them to
become a powerful symbol in the struggle to find a more sustainable path. The
other chapter foregrounds the concept of maladaptive learning to illustrate the
perils facing those who run nonprofit food programs. In the course of negotiating
institutional regulatory environments, coordinators of these cash-strapped social
enterprises learn to sacrifice clients’ needs in order to carry out their programming.
This pioneering book speaks to all of us at a time of overwhelming confusion
and debilitating despair. Food leadership takes many forms and, as this book
illustrates, breaks open the narrowed “politics of the possible” (Guthman 2008, p.
1180) and invites us to learn to navigate global food systems transformation.
REFERENCES
Guthman, J. (2008). Neoliberalism and the making of food politics in California. Geoforum, 39, 1171–
1183.
Reardon, P. T. (2000, June 11). We are what we ate. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2000-05-11/entertainment/0006170192_1_hunger-food-french-
revolution

Jennifer Sumner
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
University of Toronto
viii
CATHERINE ETMANSKI
INTRODUCTION
Leadership and Adult Learning for Global Food Systems Transformation
Food. So much more than a human necessity, food is an entry point into culture
and tradition, health and well-being, small and large-scale business, ecology and
politics, science and the arts, poverty and land use, civil society, global trade, and
more. As such, from seed to table, the policies and practices related to all aspects
of the food cycle create rich sites for learning and multiple opportunities for
leadership.
The purpose of this book is to deepen our understanding and knowledge about
leadership and adult learning in food-related movements worldwide. With
contributing authors representing four countries and various Indigenous groups,
this book examines the diverse ways in which food activists, scholars, students, and
practitioners are already demonstrating, debating, and documenting leadership and
learning in the context of global food systems transformation. Furthermore, it
documents how these actions are supporting the innovation needed to address the
increasingly complex and interconnected socio-economic and environmental
challenges associated with food and agriculture.
As the editor of this collection, I come to food leadership and adult learning as
an educator, researcher, and engaged citizen with a special interest in food. For the
past six years, I have approached this topic from various angles: As a classroom
educator inviting adult learners out to the farm to enhance their learning and
leadership development (Etmanski & Barss, 2011); from the perspective of
critiquing the racialised and classed elements of the organic farming movement
(Etmanski, 2012a), while also arguing that small-scale organic farming is an
important site for social movement learning (Etmanski, 2012b). In 2015, I had the
opportunity to edit a special edition of the journal, Studies in the Education of
Adults, on the topic of food and adult learning. This special topic issue highlighted
the diverse works of adult educators in five articles. More recently my colleague
and I have documented the ways in which farmers have identified learning in the
context of alternative food networks (Etmanski & Kajzer Mitchell, in press 2017),
as well as the transformative learning experiences on behalf of participants in a
course taught by renowned food leader, Dr. Vandana Shiva (Etmanski, in press
2017). Using these earlier works as a foundation, this book expands the
conversation around food and adult learning into the field of leadership studies.
As will be discussed below, although food has been emerging as a topic of
interest in the field of adult education, it has been relatively underexplored in
leadership studies. Therefore, this book makes a timely contribution to this series
on International Issues in Adult Education insofar as the emphasis on both learning
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