Routledge Handbook of Food as a Commons: (Routledge Environment and Sustainability Handbooks)

This Handbook provides the first comprehensive review and synthesis of knowledge and new thinking on how food and food systems can be thought, interpreted and practiced around the old/new paradigms of commons and commoning. The overall aim is to investigate the multiple constraints that occur within and sustain the dominant food and nutrition regime and to explore how it can change when different elements of the current food systems are explored and re-imagined from a commons perspective. The book sparks the debate on food as a commons between and within disciplines, with particular attention to spaces of resistance (food sovereignty, de-growth, open knowledge, transition town, occupations, bottom-up social innovations) and organizational scales (local food, national policies, South–South collaborations, international governance and multi-national agreements). Overall, it shows the consequences of a shift to the alternative paradigm of food as a commons in terms of food, the planet and living beings. Chapters 1 and 24 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: the food commons are coming… PART I: REBRANDING FOOD AND ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES OF TRANSITION 2. The idea of food as a commons: multiple understandings for multiple dimensions of food 3. The food system as a commons 4. Growing a care-based commons food regime 5. New roles for citizens, markets and the state towards an open-source agricultural revolution 6. Food security as a global public good PART II: EXPLORING THE MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS OF FOOD 7. Food, needs and commons 8. Community-based commons and rights systems 9. Food as cultural core: human milk, cultural commons and commodification 10. Food as a commodity PART III: FOOD-RELATED ELEMENTS CONSIDERED AS COMMONS 11. Traditional agricultural knowledge as a commons 12. Scientific knowledge of food and agriculture in public institutions: movement from public to private goods 13. Western gastronomy, inherited commons and market logic: cooking up a crisis 14. Genetic resources for food and agriculture as commons 15. Water, food and climate commoning in South African cities: contradictions and prospects PART IV: COMMONING FROM BELOW: CURRENT EXAMPLES OF COMMONS-BASED FOOD SYSTEMS 16. The ‘campesino a campesino’ agroecology movement in Cuba: food sovereignty and food as a commons 17. The commoning of food governance in Canada: pathways towards a national food policy? 18. Food surplus as charitable provision: obstacles to re-introducing food as a commons 19. Community-building through food self-provisioning in Central and Eastern Europe: an analysis through the food commons framework PART V: DIALOGUE OF ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES OF TRANSITION 20. Can food as a commons advance food sovereignty? 21. Land as a commons: examples from United Kingdom and Italy 22. The centrality of food for social emancipation: civic food networks as real utopias projects 23. Climate change, the food commons and human health PART VI: CONCLUSIONS 24. Food as commons: towards a new relationship between the public, the civic and the private