Sharing our Stories: Strengthening the Food Justice Movement in Southern Ontario’s FoodShed
Posted: March 12, 2012
Categories: Growing Good Food Ideas / Stories
Storytelling plays a central role building environmental and social justice movements. Digital storytelling is being used to document food movement building and to create spaces for dialogue between diverse players in the Southern Ontario FoodShed. Just as we have lost the capacity to produce and cook our own food, so too, we are given few opportunities to tell our own stories about food, including stories about reclaiming food as central to our lives. We hope to change the stories we tell ourselves about the food system by challenging dominant media representations of food and, simultaneously, opening conversational spaces for the diversity of voices attempting to build a more equitable and sustainable food movement in Southern Ontario.
The FoodShed Project brings together agrifood organizations in the public, private and nonprofit sectors working collaboratively with food scholar/activists and students to excavate, document and link groups in Southern Ontario’s community of food practice. It works toward a vision of a resilient Ontario agrifood system, that integrates native and diasporic populations, cuisines, and crops, and is centred on small scale, networked, culturally diverse enterprises.
The FoodShed Project is honored to share our growing anthology of digital stories to help reflect and inspire personal and collective efforts to transform the food system. Our digital stories are short reflections grounded in in life history and expressed through photography, music, audio, text or a combination of all four. We have explored a variety of experimental and collaborative approaches to digital storytelling . Explore some of our stories below or delve into the entire collection at Good Food Ideas – Stories .
Together, our stories resonate with the common political thread of food justice. According to Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi, the basic concept of food justice is .“simple and direct: justice for all in the food system, whether producers, farmworkers, processors, workers, eaters, or communities.”(223). The challenge of extending this food justice frame across the wide diversity of actors in the food system will require new ways of listening, expressing and connecting voices for justice across farms, markets, schools and other public arenas. Digital storytelling offers a powerful alternative media and education tool through which the personal dimensions of food justice can be voiced, networked with other players in the food movement and potentially engaged in a broader public dialogue. As a way of expressing and challenging our feelings about food and hearing about unfamiliar farming practices, approaches to urban agriculture or injustices at either end of the food system, digital storytelling is a powerful tool for food education and communication.
Would you like to help us build this movement? Are you involved in similar projects? Can we join forces? To learn more about The FoodShed Project and find out how to share your stories or get a copy of our digital story production guide, Telling Food and Eating Stories, please visit The FoodShed Project Page on the Canadian Association of Food Studies website.
Image: Opal Sparks, The Stop Community Food Centre Volunteer
Gottlieb, Robert and Anupama Joshi. Food Justice. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2010, 223 .