Partnering Toward New Food Futures

Twenty-five years ago, Gastronomica launched as a meeting place where eaters, chefs, food producers, researchers, writers, and artists could contribute to a new area of study and engage with food through history, culture, and practice. In her opening editorial letter of the inaugural issue, Darra Goldstein drew a straight line between food, knowledge, and civics, writing, “The fact is, the more we know about food, the greater our pleasure in it. A fuller understanding of the origins of the foods we eat and their cultural context can only increase the cook’s expertise and the diner’s pleasure, as well as help us become better citizens of the world” (Goldstein 2001: iv). She saw the potential in bringing people together around the table, through the pages of a new journal, to benefit society and the common good. Gastronomica connected voices from disparate academic disciplines and a variety of sectors—hospitality, arts and design, museums and heritage, and policy amongst them—and helped constitute a reading public at the time that a new academic field, food studies, was taking shape. In view of Gastronomica’s twenty-five-year history of bringing together different forms of knowledge creation, and motivated by the Editorial Collective’s recent roundtable on commensality (see “At the Table’s Edge” in this issue), I wanted to highlight some methodological insights on co-creation from the journal’s archives. Commensality can be the sharing of food, but it is also the sharing of knowledge, and the creation of knowledge in community with others. As scholars have recently shown, commensality goes well beyond the dining table; it is a social relationship through which people connect with one another and even a form of transformative change (Abarca 2021; Wilde and Karyda 2024). Commensality creates space for new possibilities; in this way, it is a medium for creativity. The capacity to create what and how we eat is a long-running frame of inquiry in Gastronomica. In the journal’s very first issue, readers encountered experimental cuisine, notably chef Ferran Adrià’s observation that to create is to perceive new possibilities, new ways of doing things: “creativity is the connection between two key elements: the will to do something new, and the capacity to achieve it” (cited in Parasecoli 2001: 67, emphasis in original). Looking backward to look forward, I spotlight past Gastronomica pieces on partnering, co-creating, and applying knowledge to the benefit of society, drawing examples in envisioning and building new food futures—and the apparatus to get there—from around the globe, across sectors, and in my work in community-engaged research.My own research interests have focused on applied methods and the role of markets and small food enterprises in sustainable food systems, and I have greatly benefitted from committed mentorship and years of training and collaboration to get here. I did my PhD in food studies in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University under the supervision of Krishnendu Ray; that program’s unique orientation toward research, practice, and public engagement still shapes my approach (see Bentley et al. 2024 on “Action Research and Social Engagement” in Practicing Food Studies). I began the program with a background in the history of philosophy and exited it with interdisciplinary training in food systems, culture, and policy, a strong foundation in media and communication, extensive fieldwork experience with independent food businesses, and an interest in putting knowledge to work. I received further training as a postdoctoral fellow at the Culinaria Research Centre at the University of Toronto and went on to collaborate with the Feeding City Lab with the support of fellowships in new media, community-engaged research, and sustainable food and farming futures, work that has spanned different departments in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Along the way, I developed a skepticism of academic jargon (a surprise even to me, having initially started my trajectory knee-deep in theory). I also joined Gastronomica as an editor. For the past five years I have worked on the journal’s creative publications. With my colleagues in the Food Phenomena section I have cultivated and edited dozens of creative submissions, including non-fiction narratives, interviews and roundtables, artwork, and photo stories. It was here at Gastronomica that I first learned about podcasting and—despite my initial terror and thanks to a gentle nudge from journal Co-Chairs Daniel Bender and Signe Rousseau—went on to produce and cohost the Gastronomica podcast in collaboration with my Editorial Collective colleagues for many seasons. Gastronomica podcast episodes have featured conversations with authors to bring new scholarship and stories to other researchers and the broader public. I especially sought to highlight researcher-community collaborations on that podcast because there were few pieces in Gastronomica’s back issues that tell the story of cross-sectoral partnerships that actively build food infrastructures, a paucity that I believe points to the challenges of doing that kind of work.1 From my own experience, community-engaged research often requires consistent resources and grant funding, sustained university-community relationships that develop over years (not over the weeks or months of a semester), multi-person teams across disciplines and sectors, a knack for knowledge translation, agility and the willingness to move quickly, and lots of time to convene and to show up for the partners when needed—all are factors that get caught up in the gears of academic rhythms and scholarly metrics.2My work with the Feeding City Lab got its start in 2020, when researchers did a pandemic pivot away from longer-term research programs and acted quickly to track how the COVID-19 pandemic was impacting food access and supply chains in Toronto, with a focus on community actions and strategies to overcome hurdles (Dale and Sharma 2021). The Lab, led by Jayeeta Sharma, has since grown into a hub for community-engaged research on resilient foodways, with a global network of community partners, work-study students, and Lab alumni growing each year.3 Our team’s projects have varied in form, but we develop the research in collaboration with and in response to the needs of community partners. For example, in 2021, the Feeding City Lab worked with a local food security organization on digital support for a start-up incubator. In 2022, the Feeding City Lab partnered with a municipal economic development initiative to design and conduct a multilingual pilot research and outreach project that was geared toward small restaurants emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic (for more details available in a Feeding City Lab project brief, see Sharma 2023). That same year, the Feeding City Lab also had a new project underway, Voices from the Food Frontlines.At the Feeding City Lab we are now closing production of a thirty-episode community-engaged research podcast on social and ecological resiliency in local food systems. The episodes are divided into a two-part series: part 1, Voices from the Food Frontlines: Pandemic & Beyond (Episodes 1–12), focuses on local food supply chains during and coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, and part 2, Voices from the Food Frontlines: Sustainable Foodways (Episodes 13–30) focuses on community actions toward sustainable food and farming futures.4 We began the project during the COVID-19 pandemic to document and archive the practices, challenges, innovations, and aspirations of grassroots food practitioners and stakeholders in forging resilient field-to-table connections.5 I led the design of both series in this podcast. Episodes were created entirely in-house with only a small research team and multiple cohorts of work-study undergraduate students. To start, I developed a digital interview strategy for remote recordings, and when pandemic restrictions lifted I put together trainings and mobile podcasting toolkits for our team members to take on their field research. Episodes feature interviews from around the world, including North America and the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Ghana, and peninsular India. Many of the podcast interviews build upon longstanding collaborations between individual members of our research team and their community partners. A key goal was to share that knowledge within and beyond local contexts, to build connections amongst researchers and practitioners, engage new stakeholders, and inform policy.6Voices from the Food Frontlines episodes engage a range of topics, from public markets and community gardens to small enterprises, regenerative farming, and emergency food initiatives. A few episodes address the same local initiative from different vantage points, and others speak to similar programs in different cities around the world. One example is the grassroots development of the public markets sector in Toronto. Markets are spaces for trade, they are launchpads for new businesses, and they are places of community that bring people together: they enable connection and, importantly, the building of social trust. There has been a resurgence in public markets in cities around the world, but they should not be taken for granted. They often come into existence and thrive through the coordination and enduring efforts of many different kinds of stakeholders—from small entrepreneurs, farmers, and market managers to local consumers, neighbors, and advocates. In Toronto, the community-based network marketcityTO—a partner of the Feeding City Lab—has brought new visibility to public markets as essential spaces of food retail infrastructure and as spaces of community infrastructure. Over the last several years, marketcityTO has led Toronto’s public markets through successful advocacy toward the municipal formation of a Public Markets Action Plan, approved by Toronto’s City Council in fall 2023 and now in development. Both series in the Voices from the Food Frontlines podcast feature episodes with marketcityTO, as well as interviews with managers (past and present) of public markets and market gardens around the city of Toronto to document their history and experiences, learn about their challenges and innovations, and create space for their visions in creating a sustainable food future.7Most notably, the episodes share different perspectives, ideas, and experiences. We have far exceeded the number of episodes that we had planned when we first started out, and as the podcast has evolved so too has the Feeding City Lab’s broader global network. In this way, this podcast loosely resembles a community of practice. It does not offer a space for convening per se, but it goes beyond archiving and digital storytelling; it is both a tool for expanding networks and a forum for sharing knowledge, practice, and learnings. To put this another way, the Voices from the Food Frontlines podcast is a medium of commensality, welcoming new stakeholders to the table to collectively create knowledge and new possibilities for a sustainable and resilient food future.While podcasts are one kind of creative medium to bring researchers and multisector stakeholders together in forging new pathways forward, they are not the only means of doing so. In this special anniversary year of Gastronomica, I read through the journal’s back issues as I grappled with this question of co-creation, what it means for centering commensality within food systems, and what role researchers have to play in this process.I begin my tour of the Gastronomica archives by highlighting relationship-building as an essential ingredient to researcher-community collaborations. Here I want to draw attention to the medium, to the apparatus of bringing different stakeholders together in a project. A cluster of articles published in Gastronomica over the last decade explored ways of forging connections between researchers and people across multiple sectors (civil society, public, and/or private) and weighed in on some of the opportunities, risks, and challenges of doing so. In their piece on co-producing eating futures from Dakar, Branwyn Poleykett, Ndiaga Sall, Fatou Ndow, and Paul Young (2024) drew together academics in the humanities and social sciences, stakeholders from nonprofit sectors in community health, nutrition, and environment, and household provisioners to consider global guidelines for sustainable eating and what such guidelines might mean for a community in the global South. The authors described coming together in the early weeks of 2020, their gathering sparked by dietary advice from the EAT-Lancet Commission of scientific experts which advocated for a “Planetary Health Diet” to support human health and environmental sustainability. A university-community workshop in Dakar facilitated the sharing of local knowledge, meals, and debate. The authors noted that an important outcome was identification of the need for a supportive infrastructure through which local communities could practically work toward food system change in commensality with and for the well-being of people worldwide (Poleykett et al. 2024: 62). One of the most compelling aspects of this project was the very process that led to such insights, which Branwyn Poleykett later elaborated on during our recent conversation on the Gastronomica podcast (2024). Relationships helped connect the different kinds of knowledge shared (both academic and practical), and it was through convening and listening that the different stakeholders were able to cultivate trust, such as when the researchers found themselves pressed to share their own everyday experiences and how they fed their own families. These were human-centered insights that went beyond scientific expertise, which had the potential of highlighting disparities between the different workshop participants and the possibility of bridging them. Echoing others, Poleykett and her coauthors argued for the creation of spaces that enable these kinds of interactions, “entangling awkwardly the local and the global and thus changing the terms of the conversation” (Poleykett et al. 2024: 66) to engage global guidance on production and consumption. Time will tell if and how such an approach might be scaled. In October 2025, the EAT-Lancet Commission is to release its updated review of food system transformation, promising an expanded framework that connects health and sustainability with food justice (EAT 2025).One of the issues here was how to productively engage local communities and create the space to weigh in on a global problem—lack of sustainability—when the solutions are generated from afar. A Gastronomica piece on water insecurity came at this question from another perspective. In their research in Arizona, Christy Spackman and her team started with a problem: there were water shortages in Arizona and local officials were tasked with ensuring that the taps continue to flow with clean, potable water that people would want to drink (Spackman, Manheim, and Barua 2022). Arizona was weighing its options for water provisioning, and the legislative landscape was shifting. As the researchers caught sight of a new, potential opening for direct reuse of wastewater in Arizona, they wanted to know more about the possibility of its acceptability, how local consumers perceive their water, and what they value about it (Spackman et al. 2022: 55–56). They noted that “Arizona is not the first in the United States to consider moving to DPR as a technological fix to address water shortages” (Spackman et al. 2022: 55) and that DPR—shorthand for direct potable reuse of wastewater—had encountered plenty of consumer resistance elsewhere. With expertise in food studies, sensory science, media arts, and collaborative design they created Tasting Water, an interactive exhibit that invited local consumers to taste and assess different kinds of potable water from across the region, including one that had sensory qualities in common with DPR (but was not actually DPR). They described the exhibit as that engage water consumers from the local and from around the and from and water (Spackman et al. 2022: and the many collaborative design that helped bring it to not only the role of sensory experience in water acceptability, it also cultivated between As the authors noted in their the of the led to a new a mobile exhibit that to enable local water to engage their this tool would share knowledge and also create it by bringing consumers and together around solutions toward water a on the of within a Gastronomica special section on doing research with the retail published a decade the of with on research and the of a public exhibit from the UK, the of one story of a food the as part of the Food project at the the unique of project stakeholders in and sectors and the connections between see also from a of strong shared understanding of partner and public more insights, and better toward the of doing history interviews the food supply to this the toward a shared longer-term view of food that was in an through a public and on a project this away from of collaboration in food research. We see this in in another this one recently in Gastronomica by and her colleagues in a roundtable conversation and photo of a tour of in et al. 2023). The team their knowledge workshop and field to with their goal to relationships with research partners and convene an with on the social justice and of this The researchers noted that this was by their own and for what this means for food systems, but that the process of convening was because it facilitated space for and amongst people across disciplines and sectors, each bringing an interest in at (see also et al. on “The to the for and a few articles from the Gastronomica archives what it to move collaborations from and on creating new possibilities to that knowledge to piece on the a on the of a by a as a it with social that across knowledge and a For spaces of food production that brought people together to cultivate network of up new creative possibilities and the potential to them. She community and gardens as potential for transformative but such a could be expanded to other in the food such as community and for example, piece on building a food and on the initiative and the role that community can play in the are spaces that bring people together to share food and, to share knowledge, and both research and could their beyond their is how might knowledge support the and/or of the for new food futures, people might might commensality show up in the and building of food infrastructures, and what role could researchers Food system practitioners, and often need research and to their their their communication, and their this need and in my own work on sustainable and resilient food with a range of partners. this has a approach that applied methods that research programs to the needs of in the pages of this journal years ago, and research team readers through their of creating new possibilities for supply chains of to programs in they up of and food to through a that brought small farmers, local food and together around a common goal et al. and described how their team a supportive role in the different drawing in new stakeholders, creating space for and et interests around and social building trust, and to often methods for et with a view toward their shared collectively solutions to supply In my this kind of approach was in part because it the perspectives, and points as of as In more recent and colleagues researcher-community collaborations in other to support in the local environment, and community health, including development of a to program and and a digital through which market managers could and and 2021; et al. 2021). of academic research, knowledge, and new possibilities and capacity to and that knowledge within the context of a local anniversary is coming at a time of public that the and networks of food are not for if there is on and what the solutions to For this I through Gastronomica’s archives of the past years to spotlight examples of collectively creating knowledge to enable and help build new food futures, with attention to and medium in bringing different stakeholders together and welcoming new to the I that readers will in back to read pieces Food is about relationships between between and consumers, between farmers, and and eaters, and between environment, and There is an need for across sectors, research, insights, and stories to support co-creation of new food and technological researchers have an important role to play in creating space for this work. Along the some new and partnerships I they will be brought to the pages of Gastronomica.

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