Introduction to the Food Dignity Values Statement

The Food Dignity Values Statement was drafted at a national project meeting in May 2014, three years into the community-university collaboration that was the Food Dignity action research project. The project brought together academics from four universities and community leaders from five community-based organizations working to strengthen their local food systems. The goal was an action-research collaboration to support and learn from and with these community organizations about how to build equitable, sustainable, and just local food systems: “Food dignity as a premise and Food Dignity as a research project are both steeped in recognizing that community people hold the knowledge and ability to ask the right questions and find the right answers to their own needs” (Porter, Herrera, Marshall, & Woodsum, 2014, p. 124). An ethical sensibility was part of the project from the beginning. The grant proposal narrative itself had declared that “Our project title, ‘Food Dignity,’ signals both our ethical stance that human and community agency in food systems is an end in itself and our scientific hypothesis that building civic and institutional capacity to engage in [sustainable community food systems] for [food security] action will improve the sustainability and equity of our local food systems and economies” (Food Dignity, 2010). But as we learned in the FoodDignity