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

Introduction: 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....