Abstract
For many, food is a unique and necessary space for adult learning and social change. Scholars, educators, and activists from the Global South and North have embraced the nexus of food and learning to resist the everyday experiences of struggle and oppression that intersect with the complexity of our food system politics. This nexus includes critiquing and dismantling the ways in which neoliberalism, patriarchy, and White supremacy inform our educational practices and food system agendas. Thus, the work of food system transformation is often located in sites of learning fueled by social movement activity where community food security, food sovereignty, and agroecology are core discourses and movement strategies. In Food Leadership, these elements are variously addressed with the inclusion of the broad concept of leadership. This edited collection consists of eight papers organized in three sections: Indigenous food systems, leadership in global food system transformation, and learning in global food system transformation.
Catherine Etmanski first situates the context of the book with three brief arguments. The author claims the text serves as an organized response to the innumerable challenges of the globalized system of industrial agriculture. The globalization project and its impacts on the food system are significant but not the focus of this text. Importantly, the marginalization of people and knowledge serves as an entry point in which the writers explore the interconnectedness of food, struggle, and the social lives of adult learners worldwide. Etmanski also points to the growing interest in the scholarly topic of food as a site of adult learning with particular attention given to North American (e.g., Sumner, 2016) and Australian (e.g., Flowers & Swan, 2015) adult educators. This literature is lean yet approached from various angles including but not limited to food pedagogies, transformative learning, and social movement learning perspectives. Although the intersection of adult learning and food has materialized, Etmanski purports little research has focused on the role of leadership for food system transformation. It is this last argument that provides the book’s vision to articulate the role of educator-leaders in mobilizing communities to counter the politics and practices of the globalized food system.
The first section offers three chapters elucidating research conducted within Indigenous communities that emphasize both traditional food and knowledge practices. The authors draw upon informal learning, the concept of knowledge democracy, critical pedagogy, and community-based research frameworks to explore some of the most pressing food security and food sovereignty issues faced by two Indigenous communities in North America and one community in Northern Uganda. This section of the book is the most varied in illustrating adult learning and education perspectives and the least organized for food leadership ideas, but it introduces common themes touched on throughout the book and communicates that the “realization of indigenous knowledge” (p. 17) is a vital component for not only local food system transformation but also for cultural resiliency.
The second section of the book comprises three chapters on food leadership in different community contexts. Through their respective research, the authors exemplify the struggles of and potential for food policy councils, food literacy advocacy in community sharing gardens, and national agricultural policy to promote the values of social justice. Although the authors provide critical glimpses of people and organizations grappling with food system inequities, this section is the most unbalanced with loose connections to leadership principles and theories. The exception is in chapter 6, where the author draws upon the body of transformational leadership theory to critically explore the nature and impact of India’s agricultural policies on farmers and the ruling class by recent state leaders.
The third section includes two chapters on learning in global food systems transformation and the conclusion for the text. In chapters 7 and 8, theories of adult learning and critical pedagogy are present but lightly explained and situated within an explicit analysis of power in practice. The authors keenly concentrate on the crucial issues of sustainability, alternative food networks, and nonprofit community gardens as sites of adult learning but do so with limited reference to theoretical traditions such as transformative learning, workplace learning, and critical literacy studies. These chapters, however, open productive space for more work on ideas about adult education’s role in food movements, as social movements that “contain internal dilemmas and contradictions, and can generate both liberating and oppressive practices” (p. 142).
Overall, this edited collection is meaningful to adult educators who may be unfamiliar with food systems as a legitimate space for adult learning and leadership inquiry. To be used in relevant adult education and leadership studies coursework, the book offers an accessible and introductory perspective on the compatibility of leadership and adult learning in understanding food movement knowledge and practice globally. Additionally, the purposeful inclusion of adult learning and leadership theories supports the larger field of food systems research through the context of critical praxis.