The Effects of Spatial Scale and Aggregation on Food Access Assessment: A Case Study of Tucson,Arizona

Adequate access to healthy food has become a social issue due to the recent Great Recession and heightened levels of unemployment. Geographers have focused their attention on how to accurately evaluate food access and how to identify and delineate food deserts; that is, low-income neighborhoods where affordable and healthy food is lacking or limited. Findings of recent food access studies are, however, dramatically inconsistent. We argue that spatial scale and the level of aggregation used in constructing food access measures could account for a major portion of the varying results. We draw on an empirical study in the Tucson, Arizona, metropolitan area, to examine how varying geographic scales and aggregation methods affect food access assessment. We also provide an analysis to show how spatial scale and aggregation practices lead to inconsistent conclusions about food access and designation of food deserts.     

Farmers’ Dual Roles in Food Safety:Perceptions and Countermeasures

Farmers are both the producers and consumers of food, and as such have a dual role in food safety: they both generate risks and are exposed to them. Based upon a survey of the food production and consumption habits of 140 farm households and long-term research in two villages in Yunnan province, this study found that rural families are highly dependent on the market for food production and consumption. In their role as consumers, farmers are aware of food safety risks and concerned about them, but their ability to protect themselves is limited. They do so primarily by avoiding certain products and growing as much of their own food as possible. At the same time, in their role as producers, farmers engage in practices, primarily the overuse and inappropriate use of fertilizer and pesticides, that are damaging to food safety and the environment. There is therefore a disconnect in their roles as consumers and producers that needs to be addressed if policy goals for improving food safety and reducing the use of agricultural chemicals are to be achieved. Farmers need more information about food safety risks related to the products they consume themselves, and technical guidance on the safe use of farm chemicals when growing food for market. However, such measures will not be effective unless the external pressures on farmers are also addressed, through consideration of market incentives to use farm chemicals and the impact of consumer demand.     

Neoliberal subjectivities or a politics of the possible? Reading for difference in alternative food networks

Recent research on alternative food networks has highlighted the centrality of place-embeddedness as a strategy in constructing alternatives to conventional agri-industrial food systems, and has illustrated the political nature of these strategic localisms. Recently, critical human geographers and sociologists have drawn on relational theory to criticise the localism of alternative food networks as representing a politics of place which is unreflexive or defensive. Furthermore, some readings of alternative food networks argue that they reproduce the very neoliberal subjectivities that they seek to oppose. This article argues that agri-food scholars should be aware of the ways in which their readings of alternative food networks can guide and reproduce alternative food network practice. Drawing on Gibson-Graham's technique of 'reading for difference', I argue for a reading of alternative food networks that sees difference beyond the discursive field of neoliberalism. The article explores recent debates around governmentality as the mechanism through which neoliberal subjectivities are reproduced, and draws on a preliminary discussion of the alternative food network practice of the 100 Mile Diet in order to illustrate the arguments made .     

Suburban Food Security: Walkability and Nutritional Access in Metropolitan Detroit

This article explored the relationship between the local food environment and walkability in the socioeconomically diverse, inner-ring suburbs of metropolitan Detroit. The availability and cost differentials of food were surveyed using a modified version of the Nutrition Environment Measures Survey for Stores (NEMS–S), and a geographic information system–based method was designed to map walkability relative to licensed food retail establishments. Results showed that minority communities lack access to fresh produce and nutritionally adequate foods, which is compounded by limited mobility. By incorporating local-based economic incentives, low-income communities can better align neighborhood goals of obtaining nutritionally adequate food (and other services) with economic opportunity.     

Measuring Food Deserts via GIS-Based Multicriteria Decision Making: The Case of Tehran

The purpose of this article is to identify food deserts using a geographic information system (GIS)-based multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) approach in the city of Tehran. We have found that, compared to technocratic methods, GIS-based MCDM and taking into account people or their agents' opinions in the food deserts analysis leads to different results. Whereas measuring food deserts based on the distance to large retail food stores indicated that a large part of the northern neighborhoods of Tehran do not have access to large food stores, identifying the food desert through the GIS-based MCDM approach revealed that northern neighborhoods of Tehran have relatively good access to healthy, affordable food. In addition, results indicated that individual factors have a more effective role than environmental factors in food accessibility. Food accessibility analysis revealed that more than 26.6 percent of Tehran's people (2,049,796) are living in very low and low food accessibility areas. Accordingly, to achieve a relatively healthy and inclusive food environment, establishment of a food council, development of mobile food markets and farmers' markets, extension of public transport, enhancement of food literacy, and community-based development of small full-service grocery stores, especially in southern and western sections of Tehran, should be pursued. In addition, addressing Tehran's food desert issues would be incomplete without due attention to the wider political and economic environment.     

Measuring Space–Time Access to Food Retailers: A Case of Temporal Access Disparity in Franklin County,Ohio

Typical measures of food access use spatial-only methods to identify nearby food outlets and the quantity, quality, and variety of food available. This measure of spatial access falls short in explaining the effect that the operating hours of food retailers have on food access. Our study aims to complement the spatial dimension of access measures by bringing time in as a new constraint on food access. To this end, we developed three measures of spatial, temporal, and spatiotemporal access and correlated these measures with socioeconomic status (SES) in a case in Columbus, Ohio. Findings from our analysis of food access disparity suggest that low-SES neighborhoods in Columbus are not at a disadvantage of spatial access, but their limited temporal access is a more pressing concern. Implications drawn from the study would assist community advocates, local governments, and other stakeholders in deriving a better understanding of the local foodscape that are not only mediated by space but also time.     

Domestic Residential Garden Food Production in Melbourne,Australia: a fine-grained analysis and pilot study

Even though cities cover approximately only 3 per cent of the earth's land area, they are often located on what previously was prime agricultural land. In line with what was common historically, many cities around the world are now deliberately seeking to promote and expand agricultural production within their borders. Pressure for change is coming from a number of sources, including both governments and private citizens. Potentially, community gardens and domestic backyard food production have an important role to play in this process, but while there now exists a sizeable body of research on the former, there is a serious lack of data on current productive practices in private domestic gardens. While other researchers have asked householders to estimate garden production, we believe this to be the first project to carefully document measured output by multiple households. The paper presents the results of a fine-grained study of 15 selected householders in metropolitan Melbourne. Participants collected detailed daily information about their food production over a three-month period. In addition, two of the respondents had been keeping daily production records continuously for one or more years. The results demonstrate enormous diversity in the food harvested, as well as some extremely high levels of productivity from relatively small domestic spaces. Participants were also questioned about their motivations for engaging in backyard food production and dealing with surpluses.     

中国餐饮业食物浪费的资源环境问题综述

近年来食物浪费以及食物浪费的资源环境问题越来越成为全球关注的焦点,尤其是在发展中国家,食物浪费成为威胁食物安全的另一关键因素。尽管如此,在中国,人们仍然对食物浪费缺乏认识,尤其是餐饮业中消费者的食物浪费。因此,基于国内主流媒体报道的大量餐饮业食物浪费的案例数据资料,本研究针对餐饮业中的食物浪费做了系统的阐述。针对餐饮业食物浪费的初步估计,本研究揭示了我国餐饮业食物浪费的严重性。通过分析国际上大量食物浪费的相关文献资料,本研究具体阐述了食物浪费的资源环境代价。最后,本研究基于生命周期评价方法提出了针对餐饮业食物浪费及其资源环境效应研究的概念框架,以便更有效地减少食物浪费。     

The Suburbanization of Food Insecurity: An Analysis of Projected Trends in the Atlanta Metropolitan Area

Although general patterns of food insecurity in the United States are known, few studies have attempted to estimate small area food security or account for ongoing socioeconomic changes. Here we address these issues by producing small area estimates of food insecurity in the Atlanta metropolitan area using two methodologies: fixed effects modeling and demographic metabolism. In both cases, we use county-level data from the Current Population Survey to determine the association between food insecurity and demographic predictors. These associations are then applied to tract-level data from the 2009 to 2013 American Community Survey and projected data for 2020 to create small area estimates of food insecurity. We find broad consensus between our two methods. For both time periods, food insecurity is highest in southern sections of the city of Atlanta and its neighboring suburbs. Projections to 2020, however, show that food insecurity rates are projected to increase in outer-ring suburbs east and west of the city while decreasing in the urban core. These results highlight the need to further adapt antihunger efforts for often sprawling suburban communities, where poverty rates are increasing but spatial mismatch combined with poor transit access might hinder access to food assistance.     

Urban migrant women’s everyday food insecurity coping strategies foster alternative urban imaginaries of a more democratic food system

Urban migrant women worldwide utilize a creative combination of food insecurity coping strategies to procure food for themselves and their families. Using in-depth interviews with 72 migrant women in Medellín, Colombia, and Washington, DC, this paper argues that in low-income urban communities these everyday strategies can further their demands for autonomy in determining what foods they produce and consume. Relying on feminist geography and food sovereignty literature, this research explores how migrant women living in poverty rely on informal networks for growing and sharing food, seek out organic, fresh foods, and utilize independent survival strategies to counter exclusionary rhetoric and a food system they view as unhealthy. In doing so, they devise alternative urban imaginaries of a more democratic food system. This research contributes a more nuanced understanding of the food insecurity experiences of urban migrant women.     

Managing sustainable farmed landscape through 'alternative' food networks: a case study from Italy

This paper focuses on a case study of an 'alternative' food network based in the Abruzzo National Park, Italy, to explore how ideas of sustainable farmland management can be expressed through broader understandings of developing networks of care concerned with local economies and societies, high-quality specialist food products, particular 'traditional' farming practices and livestock breeds, as well as the ecology of a farmed landscape. The scheme allows customers, internationally as well as in Italy, to 'adopt' a milking sheep on a large mountain farm. In return, adopters are sent food products from the farm. The adoption scheme is inter-twined with an agri-tourism project which provides accommodation, runs a restaurant and engages in educational activities. The scheme is the result of the individual initiative of its founder, and is associated with a strongly expressed ethical position concerning the value of sustaining valued local rural landscapes and lifestyles, and the importance of 'reconnecting' urban dwellers with rural areas, farming and 'quality' food production. Yet the localness of the scheme is sustained through wider national and international networks: volunteer and paid workers are drawn from several European countries, funding has been acquired from the EU LEADER programme, and internet and transport technologies are essential in connecting with and supplying an international customer base. The broader economy of care instanced in this case study draws attention to a need to develop strategies for sustainable farmland management constructed around wider programmes of social, economic and cultural, as well as environmental, concern.     

Food Safety and Contract Edamame: The Geopolitics of the Vegetable Trade in East Asia

This paper examines how the proliferation of the new Japanese food‐safety regime has influenced the edamame industries of China and Taiwan—the two largest producers of edamame beans in the world. Edamame is not only a popular cuisine in the Asia‐Pacific region, it is also responsible for the largest‐scale frozen vegetable flow in East Asia. This study addresses how the interaction between geopolitical realities and the subcontracting of edamame crops has created an access regime governing the vegetable trade in East Asia. By addressing the complexity of the geopolitics related to contract farming, this study considers the extent to which the Japanese edamame trade has subordinated edamame producers in multiple places in Asia, while Taiwan's edamame industry has positioned itself to obtain preferential access to the edamame flow between Japan, Taiwan, and China.     

Toward a Spatial Understanding of Staple Food and Nonstaple Food Production in Brazil

Brazilian agricultural census data at the municipal level are used to develop and map a simple index of staple food versus nonstaple food agriculture for Brazil over time (1996–2006). The results show spatial variation in the direction and degree of the shift toward or away from staple food cropping across Brazil. The index is presented as an important methodological step toward a systematic geographic understanding of crop share changes surrounding food versus fuel and other nonfood crop production.     

基于粮食安全的中国能源可持续发展:机遇和挑战(英文)

中国能源安全形势日益严峻,机遇与挑战并存。生物质能发展具备资源丰富、产品多元化、循环利用和增加农民收入的显著优势,加快生物质能开发对保障中国能源供给安全极为重要。本文通过运用灰色关联分析方法,对中国生物质能开发与粮食安全之间的关系进行定量评价。结果显示我国生物质能开发对粮食安全的影响并不明显,中国的粮食安全主要受其农业生产条件限制。但这并不意味着中国生物质能可以不受限制的发展,中国发展生物质能需综合平衡多种因素,如短期内大量投资、生物质供应的激烈竞争。清洁、可持续是中国生物能源发展的重要方向。     

我国食物安全研究进展及展望

保障我国食物安全是我国一切建设发展的前提和基础。在我国农业基础资源日益紧缺以及加入WTO 的 国情下, 食物安全面临着新的机遇与挑战。本文回顾了食物安全概念的演变过程, 综述了我国在自然基础资源与食 物安全、食物安全现状及其评价、国际贸易和经济全球化对食物安全的影响以及食物安全预警和管理等方面的研 究进展, 并对未来我国食物安全研究进行了展望。研究表明: 今后我国食物安全研究应在以下方面需要加强: 在研 究内容上, 不仅重视食物数量保障, 更应注重食物质量安全、食物资源可持续利用和综合食物安全风险评价与预警 等方面; 在研究视角上, 不仅重视宏观食物安全研究, 更应重视微观食物安全; 在研究方法和手段上, 应当充分运用 现代科学技术, 如网络技术、空间模拟技术以及3S 技术等, 进一步加强综合食物安全的定量和动态研究。     

Queer Farmland: Land Access Strategies for Small-Scale Agriculture

Farmers struggle to afford farmland because competing land uses raise prices higher than what farmers earn, especially in small-scale and sustainable agriculture. Farmers often depend on an intimate partner’s income or labor to access land, yet few studies investigate sexual relationships in farmland access. I interrogate how sexuality shapes land access for small-scale agriculture through participant observation and interviews with 25 queer farmers in New England. I find that queer farmers’ sexual identities and relationships influence where they farm, who they live and work with, how they afford the land, and how they learn to farm. I argue that finding land, labor, credit, and knowledge are intertwined, heteronormative processes of capital accumulation shaped by racism and sexism. Queer farmers’ experiences navigating heteronormativity suggest the relevance of sexuality to land conservation and food justice, limits of organizing land access through sexual relationships, and alternatives to the “family farm.”     

The Total Diet Study: Changes in Food Safety Since the First TDS

This article discusses what we know about some of the main food safety risks in China. The focus is on role of the China Total Diet Study (TDS) as a tool for food safety risk assessment and the selection of priorities for monitoring. We compare the strengths and weaknesses of the TDS with those of two other major sources of information about food safety and nutrition: the National Food Safety Contamination Monitoring Network (FSCN) and the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), showing how the different methods they use produce different but complementary information. We then use an analysis of lead, cadmium and pesticide residues to demonstrate that, despite its shortcomings, the TDS provides the most reliable source of information about the actual dietary intake of harmful substances.     

TENDING CULTURAL LANDSCAPES AND FOOD CITIZENSHIP IN TORONTO'S COMMUNITY GARDENS*

ABSTRACT. Scattered throughout the city of Toronto are more than no community gardens, sites of place‐based politics connected to the community food‐security movement. The gardens, spaces where passions for plants and food are shared, reflect the city's shifting cultural landscape and represent an everyday activity that is imbued with multiple meanings. Toronto's community food‐security movement uses gardens as one strategy to regenerate the local food system and provide access to healthy, affordable food. Three garden case studies expand on the complexities of “food citizenship,” illustrating the importance of that concept to notions of food security. The gardens reveal the role gardeners play in transforming urban spaces, the complex network of organizations working cooperatively and in partnership to implement these projects, and the way in which social and cultural pluralism are shaping the urban landscape.     

Analysis of food retail patterns in urban,peri-urban and rural settings: A case study from Lebanon

Existing evidence on food retail expansion in developing countries is largely based on cross-country studies. This may be excellent to provide general pictures but less relevant for development planners to tailor context-specific interventions. We apply a meso-level analysis to address three questions: (i) Are modern food retail formats impeding the expansion of the traditional ones? (ii) What is the pattern of food retail expansion into urban, peri-urban, and rural areas? (iii) What factors influence observed food retail patterns? The study was carried out within the geographic landscape of Lebanon, a commercial link between the Middle East and Europe. Historical analysis shows increased growth both in the modern and traditional food retail sales, with the former modestly outpacing the latter. However, data from the last five years indicate the gap being reduced to 2 percentage points, displaying a clear leveling-off as compared to the preceding decade. Thus, we find insufficient evidence to conclude that modern food retail formats are definitively replacing traditional ones. An extremely high spatial disparity in food retail concentration is observed across governorates and districts, suggesting a need for flexible policies for viable food system development in various contexts. Expansion of modern food retail formats is limited by geography or socioeconomic groups, while traditional formats are equally present in urban, peri-urban and rural settings, including high poverty areas. This suggests a need for recognizing the latter as alternative institutions to address specific needs of consumers, particularly in poorer neighborhoods or rural areas. The findings are relevant for international, regional, and domestic food retailers to understand food retail patterns in Lebanon, for development planners to tailor specific interventions in areas where food establishments are least developed, and for researchers to investigate the impact of such patterns on nutritional transformations among the Lebanese urban, peri-urban and rural populations.     

中国食物供给能力分析

从中国各类型生态系统(农田、草地、水域) 的实际的食物生产能力出发,结合进出口产品中的食物部分,得出全国实际的食物供给能力,根据食物营养成分表中的转化率,将各类食物折算成人类生存所需的3 大营养成分(热量、蛋白质、脂肪) 的产量来表示,并利用ArcGIS 进行草地和农田食物供给的空间分析。以2004 年为例,中国实际食物供给能力为：热量1.601×10¹⁵ kcal,蛋白质6.163×10⁷ t,脂肪2.717×10⁷ t。其中,中国内陆生态系统实际可供给热量1.454×10¹⁵ kcal,蛋白质4.996×10⁷ t,脂肪2.074×10⁷ t,分别达到了陆地生态系统生产潜力的32.46%、38.33 %和41.12%,内陆生态系统食物供给还有较大的增长余地。在小康水平下,中国的食物热量、蛋白质、脂肪分别可以供养人口19.12 亿,20.84 亿和11.03 亿人,按照2010 年营养目标和2020 年全面小康目标,热量和蛋白质的供给已经较为充足,而脂肪的供给有所不足,今后需要注重油脂作物的种植和生产。结果还表明：中国的食物供给能力中,农田占据了绝大部分,不过比例有下降的趋势,从1998 年的84.66%,下降到2004 年的74.72%;草地和水域生态系统所提供的食物所占比例分别为4.83%~5.80%、6.02%~7.51%,波动较小;净进口食物所占比例逐年增长,1998 年仅为4.04%,2004 年增加到13.82%。通过平衡模型计算,在温饱、小康、富裕水平下,2004 年中国可以供养的人口分别为：15.34 亿,15.00 亿和14.11 亿,这表明,如果能够优化种植结构,合理配置植物性食物向动物性食物转化比例,均衡营养消费结构,中国实际食物供给较为充足。