Going Public with Notes on Close Cousins, Food Sovereignty, and Dignity

In fall 2009, I taught a graduate course at Cornell University in the sociology of food and ecology. My students and I were fortunate to have food systems sociologist Harriet Friedmann participating in our seminar meetings while she was on sabbatical at Cornell. Twenty years earlier, Harriet and I had published a paper that sketched a framework characterizing political-economic epochs in global agriculture since 1870. We named these epochs “food regimes” (Friedmann & McMichael, 1989). Christine Porter was a student in that course. She claims it helped her put enough academic and activist pieces of the food system puzzle together to propose what later became Food Dignity—a five-year action and research project about food security, sustainability, and sovereignty involving four higher education institutions and five community-based organizations doing food justice work in the U.S. During that course, Christine and I remember Harriet mentioning that she searches for daisies breaking through the concrete of an industrialized, globalized food system, and also that I expressed a touch of envy about the hopefulness such sights might offer. From the standpoint of the international food sovereignty movement with which I a Philip McMichael, Professor, Department of Development Sociology, Cornell University; pdm1@cornell.edu