Reframing food as a commons in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper interrogates the role of the dominant narrative of “food-as-commodity” in framing food systems policy in Canada. Human values shape policies, usually privileging those policies that are aligned with dominant values and neglecting others that confront dominant values. In that sense, valuing food as a commodity privileges specific market-based policy goals, regulations, and public subsidies that aim to enlarge market coverage. This prioritizes both corporate profit over societies´ common good and private enclosures of commons resources over universal access to food for all. Conversely, the normative shift this paper proposes—valuing and governing food as a commons—could enable socio-ecologically based policy goals and regulations, and redirect public subsidies to support customary and contemporary practices that produce and distribute food differently. Such a normative shift, scholars have argued, is a prerequisite for developing legal frameworks that lead to more and better 1) self-production; 2) stewardship of natural commons; and 3) civic participation in the governance of a resource that is essential for everybody´s survival. Valuing food as a commons can provide a complementary narrative to alternative civic claims such as food sovereignty, agro-ecology, or food justice. In this paper, we begin by outlining the theoretical basis for our investigation into the role of food valuation in the critical food guidance shaping public policy. Next, we provide an overview of the concept of food as commons through the multidimensional food values framework and offer a tri-centric governance model to frame the analysis. Following a brief policy context for Indigenous food initiatives in Canada, we then provide three case studies involving Anishnaabek food systems to explore valuation of food beyond commodity in customary and contemporary food systems. Finally, we discuss how valuing food as a commons offers critical food guidance for addressing multiple socio-ecological issues connected with food systems policy in the Canadian settler colonial context.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".