Event Date: November 24, 2016 - 4:00pm to 6:00pm
Location: FSS 4006, Pavillon des Sciences Sociales. 120, University Pvt.

Presented by CIPS, IPEN, and Food Lab LISF-LEILA

Rethinking the “Success” and “Failure” of Food Change Initiatives

What do “success” and “failure” mean in terms of initiatives aiming to transform the agrofood system? Harriet Friedmann will use transition and resilience theories to explore the emergence and dissolution of Local Food Plus, which after a decade of activities now exists only as a website, a board of directors, and a charitable number. Yet it created enduring change in its ten-year existence — in public procurement, in logistics for small farmers to reach consumers, in the understandings of farm and artisanal food suppliers, and in the University of Toronto, where it had its start — creating conditions that are now taken for granted.

Harriet Friedmann is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Fellow of the Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. Her publications span several disciplines and many aspects of food and agriculture, most recently food system transformation, urban regional foodsheds, the biosphere and ethnosphere, and the global political ecology of food. Friedmann serves on several editorial boards of food, agriculture, and global change journals and on several nonprofit boards: the Toronto Food Policy Council, USC-Canada, the Toronto Seed Library, and the International Urban Food Network. In 2011, she received a Lifetime Achievement award from the Canadian Association of Food Studies.