For the first time ever in Canadian history, Canada has committed itself to developing a national food policy. This aspiration is long overdue but raises important questions relating to what the policy ought to cover and why. This course seeks to examine how law, policies, and governance mechanisms fundamentally shape consumer food choices. Food is at once an intimate personal consumer good and a public good that helps to promote health and wellbeing for all Canadians. The rights to food and to be free from hunger are human rights. Yet, hunger persists amidst obesity epidemics. Food safety and security are fundamental concerns for all peoples. Food is culturally significant. There are gendered and racialized dynamics to food production and marketing. This course will examine legal, societal, and cultural aspects to food and food regulation. We will consider the relationship between food production and the regulatory mechanisms that determine food choices. In addition to forming an appreciation and understanding of the complexity of food governance in regulatory mechanisms, additional topics for potential exploration may include novel food regulations; intellectual property rights affecting food innovations, production and consumption; the treatment of animals; emerging technologies (the IoTs as applied to food, synthetic food); food programs, and the normativity (and harms) of institutionalized food in state facilities (such as residential schools and prisons). We will consider the push and pull of corporate food, the proliferated reliance on food banks, the deskilling of populations, and impacts for access to culturally significant foods and sustainable practices. We are concerned with the implication of such issues for the acquisition of good nourishment and wellbeing, for maintaining an environment conducive to food growth, and for determining the direction of the current food economy, as well as its distributional consequences.
For the first time ever in Canadian history, Canada has committed itself to developing a national food policy. This aspiration is long overdue but raises important questions relating to what the policy ought to cover and why. This course seeks to examine how law, policies, and governance mechanisms fundamentally shape consumer food choices. Food is at once an intimate personal consumer good and a public good that helps to promote health and wellbeing for all Canadians. The rights to food and to be free from hunger are human rights. Yet, hunger persists amidst obesity epidemics. Food safety and security are fundamental concerns for all peoples. Food is culturally significant. There are gendered and racialized dynamics to food production and marketing. This course will examine legal, societal, and cultural aspects to food and food regulation. We will consider the relationship between food production and the regulatory mechanisms that determine food choices. In addition to forming an appreciation and understanding of the complexity of food governance in regulatory mechanisms, additional topics for potential exploration may include novel food regulations; intellectual property rights affecting food innovations, production and consumption; the treatment of animals; emerging technologies (the IoTs as applied to food, synthetic food); food programs, and the normativity (and harms) of institutionalized food in state facilities (such as residential schools and prisons). We will consider the push and pull of corporate food, the proliferated reliance on food banks, the deskilling of populations, and impacts for access to culturally significant foods and sustainable practices. We are concerned with the implication of such issues for the acquisition of good nourishment and wellbeing, for maintaining an environment conducive to food growth, and for determining the direction of the current food economy, as well as its distributional consequences.
