Arts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan)
Community, Culture and Global Studies, Department of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Harris, Lindsay Ellen
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
Kamloops, British Columbia is home to the oldest independent food policy council in Canada. Since its formation in 1995, the Kamloops Food Policy Council (KFPC) has collectively made decisions about the initiatives it values, and the broad and diverse network that has formed around these deliberations is an ideal setting to explore important questions about community decision-making and valuation of social initiatives. In this dissertation, I summarize both the history and current context of the KFPC, embedding myself in the complex webs of relations that have advanced the work of community food security for many years, and the broader historical, economic, and political context in which these relations emerged. This research is based on an ethnographic and community based participatory methodology in which I emphasize the process of learning to be a good relation as the foundation for my work. I argue that small changes build capacity for an expansive vision, using each of the imperfect terms in this phrase to explore themes of scale, change, relationality, value and expansive collective visions. I provide a thick description of how the value of specific local initiatives contribute to a collective desire for possible futures (and action towards them). My conclusions about value add to the building refrain: capitalist constraints on value and valuation have not everywhere taken over, there are many rough edges and weak places within its hegemony, and different worlds are possible. I argue that a viable economic vision (and indeed, a viable future) requires restoring relations to calculations of value, forging pathways to connect small initiatives to expansive visions, making initiatives visible in new ways to themselves and their actors, fostering new initiatives that represent collectivized desires for possible futures and enrolling more collaborators into those passionate interests.
PASSIONATE INTERESTS AND COMMUNITY DECISION MAKING: BUILDING THE LOCAL FOOD SYSTEM IN KAMLOOPS, BC by Lindsay Ellen Harris A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Interdisciplinary Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) May 2021 © Lindsay Ellen Harris, 2021 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a dissertation entitled: Passionate Interests and Community Decision Making: Building the Local Food System in Kamloops, BC submitted by Lindsay Ellen Harris in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy . Michael Evans Supervisor Susan Frohlick Supervisory Committee Member Johannus Janmaat Supervisory Committee Member Ashok Mathur Supervisory Committee Member Mike Chiasson University Examiner Philip Loring External Examiner iii Land Acknowledgement The Kamloops Food Policy Council, based in Kamloops, BC, Canada, is on the traditional, unceded territory of the Secwépemc people, who nourished themselves and this land for millennia. This ancient gathering place, where the North and South Thompson Rivers meet, is called Tk’emlúps in the Secwépemc language, Secwepemctsín. This land is called Secwepemcúl̓ecw.iv Abstract Kamloops, British Columbia is home to the oldest independent food policy council in Canada. Since its formation in 1995, the Kamloops Food Policy Council (KFPC) has collectively made decisions about the initiatives it values, and the broad and diverse network that has formed around these deliberations is an ideal setting to explore important questions about community decision-making and valuation of social initiatives. In this dissertation, I summarize both the history and current context of the KFPC, embedding myself in the complex webs of relations that have advanced the work of community food security for many years, and the broader historical, economic, and political context in which these relations emerged. This research is based on an ethnographic and community based participatory methodology in which I emphasize the process of learning to be a good relation as the foundation for my work. I argue that small changes build capacity for an expansive vision, using each of the imperfect terms in this phrase to explore themes of scale, change, relationality, value and expansive collective visions. I provide a thick description of how the value of specific local initiatives contribute to a collective desire for possible futures (and action towards them). My conclusions about value add to the building refrain: capitalist constraints on value and valuation have not everywhere taken over, there are many rough edges and weak places within its hegemony, and different worlds are possible. I argue that a viable economic vision (and indeed, a viable future) requires restoring relations to calculations of value, forging pathways to connect small initiatives to expansive visions, making initiatives visible in new ways to themselves and their actors, fostering new initiatives that represent collectivized desires for possible futures and enrolling more collaborators into those passionate interests.v Lay Summary The Kamloops Food Policy Council (KFPC) is the oldest independent food policy council in Canada. Since 1995, KFPC has formed a broad and diverse network – an ideal setting to explore important questions about community decision-making. I summarize both the history and current context of the KFPC, describing how it advanced the work of community food security for many years, and its broader historical, economic, and political context. I am an active participant in the KFPC network, and my research is based on ethnographic and community based participatory research methods. Together, members of the KFPC network have imagined an ideal local food system. I argue that small changes build capacity for an expansive vision: the many initiatives that have been and continue to be implemented are building the community capacity that is needed to bring about a collective vision for a local food system that is regenerative, sovereign and just. vi Preface Ethics Certificate (H17-02316) was obtained from the University of British Columbia Okanagan Behavioural Research Ethics Board.vii Contents Land Acknowledgement .............................................................................................................. iii Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv Lay Summary ................................................................................................................................ v Preface ........................................................................................................................................... vi List of Tables ................................................................................................................................ ix List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ x List of Supplementary Materials ................................................................................................ xi Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... xii Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Research Question .................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Community Context .................................................................................................. 4 1.3 Small Changes Build Capacity for an Expansive Vision.......................................... 8 1.4 Intentions................................................................................................................. 13 Chapter 2: Literature Review: Food Studies as Assemblage .................................................. 17 2.1 Grounding the Assumptions ................................................................................... 18 2.2 Defining Food Security ........................................................................................... 21 2.3 Income-based Solutions .......................................................................................... 23 2.4 Community Food Initiatives ................................................................................... 25 2.5 Alternative Food Networks ..................................................................................... 27 2.6 Food and Materiality ............................................................................................... 29 2.7 Literature Review Analysis..................................................................................... 31 Chapter 3: Research Framework .............................................................................................. 33 3.1 Thinking Expansively About What Counts ............................................................ 33 3.1.1 A Short Interlude to Comment on Citational Politics ............................. 36 3.2 Guiding Concepts.................................................................................................... 38 3.2.1 Systems .................................................................................................... 38 3.2.2 Relationships ........................................................................................... 40 3.2.3 Response-ability ...................................................................................... 41 3.2.4 Community-based participatory research............................................... 43 3.2.5 Summary .................................................................................................. 44 3.3 Methods................................................................................................................... 44 3.3.1 Participant Observation .......................................................................... 45 3.3.2 Interviews ................................................................................................ 47 3.3.3 Archival Research ................................................................................... 47 3.3.4 Sensory Attentiveness .............................................................................. 49 3.4 Analysis and Interpretation ..................................................................................... 51 Chapter 4: A Critical History of the Kamloops Food Policy Council .................................... 52 4.1 Programs, Partnerships and Policy Since 1995....................................................... 55 viii 4.1.1 Formation ................................................................................................ 55 4.1.2 Initiatives ................................................................................................. 58 4.1.3 Policy Advocacy ...................................................................................... 66 4.1.4 The Network ............................................................................................ 71 4.2 Regional Context: “Once it’s gone, it’s gone”........................................................ 74 Chapter 5: Thinking (very) expansively about what counts ................................................... 81 5.1 Spiraling toward an expansive vision ..................................................................... 84 5.1.1 Strategic Plan Refresh: October 2017-February 2018 ........................... 85 5.1.2 Evaluation Rubric: May 2018-April 2019 .............................................. 89 5.1.3 A Vision for the Ideal Food System ......................................................... 96 5.2 New Work ............................................................................................................... 98 5.3 Multiple possible futures....................................................................................... 100 Chapter 6: A Theory Project of Value .................................................................................... 104 6.1 Popcycle: “Who doesn’t love popsicles and bicycles?” ....................................... 106 6.2 Diverse Economies ............................................................................................... 112 6.3 Looking Back, Looking Forward, Still Looking for Success ............................... 118 6.4 We need to spend more time wanting things ........................................................ 127 6.5 Value in the Kamloops Food System.................................................................... 131 Chapter 7: Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 133 7.1 Multimodality ....................................................................................................... 133 7.2 Ethnography in these times ................................................................................... 134 7.3 Small changes build capacity for an expansive vision .......................................... 136 7.4 Testing capacity and vision ................................................................................... 138 7.5 Final Thoughts ...................................................................................................... 142 References .................................................................................................................................. 144 ix List of Tables Table 1: Kamloops Food Policy Council Vision Statements ........................................................ 11 Table 2: City of Kamloops New Construction 1945-1968 ........................................................... 78 x List of Figures Figure 1: Food Security Continuum ............................................................................................. 10 Figure 2: 2018 Annual General Meeting potluck table ................................................................ 53 Figure 3: Drafting value statements .............................................................................................. 88 Figure 4: Drafting a vision for “A resilient food system” ............................................................ 92 Figure 5: Drafting a vision for “Alleviation of poverty” .............................................................. 93 Figure 6: Drafting responses to “Is the Kamloops Food Policy Council inclusive?” ................... 95 Figure 7: Popcycle Market Survey Responses, 2018.................................................................. 109 Figure 8: Popcycle Theory of Change ........................................................................................ 111 Figure 9: Drafting a vision for “Food commons” ....................................................................... 124 Figure 10: Fourfold Food Security Response to COVID-19 ...................................................... 140 xi List of Supplementary Materials Kamloops Food Policy Council 25th Anniversary Film xii Acknowledgements I am deeply grateful for the many transformative relationships I’ve made through the Kamloops Food Policy Council network. This research would not have been possible without the expertise and enthusiasm of so many people – far more than I can name. I’ve tried as much as possible to make our collaborative research process visible in what I’ve written, and hope that members of the network will see themselves reflected here. Thank you to Laura Kalina and the other founding members of the KFPC for starting something magical and offering generous mentorship to so many young leaders over the years. Thank you to Deanna Hurstfield, for doing a close read of my version of KFPC’s history – any errors or omissions remain my own, but I am so grateful for her close attention to detail and robust organizational memory. My deepest gratitude to Carole Hebden, Bonnie Klohn and Robyn McLean, who have been invaluable thinking partners and dear friends. I am deeply grateful for the many rewarding connections I formed at UBCO. First, I would like to thank the students I’ve been honoured to teach over the last two years – this dissertation is much stronger thanks to their insights about how we are becoming people made to live in these times. Thank you to my fellow graduate students, particularly Krista Arias and Toby Lawrence, for all their generative conversations and collaborations. Much gratitude to my supervisor, Mike Evans, for offering the trust, respect, and support I needed to bring this research to life, and to my research committee members, Sue Frohlick, John Janmaat and Ashok Mathur, for so generously offering support, advice and essential interdisciplinary perspectives. Thank you to my university examiner, Mike Chiasson, and external examiner, Philip Loring, for their incisive questions and generous engagement with my work. I would also like to acknowledge the xiii financial support I received from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and the UBCO Institute for Community Engaged Research. There are so many loved ones across the country who have been cheering on the completion of this work. My deepest gratitude to my parents, siblings, in-laws and found family, whose unwavering support has made me capable of this work. I owe an overwhelming debt of gratitude to my partner Chuck, whose abiding care on this long journey has been such a gift. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my daughter Chloe, who has sacrificed much time with me over the last several years, but is nonetheless endlessly creative, resilient, and interesting. She is both my deepest joy and strongest motivation to become capable of living well in these times. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1 Research Question Small changes build capacity for an expansive vision. My backyard garden this summer made a small change, imperceptible really, towards a local food system that is regenerative, sovereign and just. Although I’ve been a keen gardener for most of my adult life, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 drove me towards gardening with renewed intensity, and I wasn’t alone. Observers noted the sharp increased interest in backyard food production as one of the silver linings of the pandemic (Mark 2020). Unfortunately, I had just given up the community garden plot I and my family had tended for the previous three seasons. Motivated to garden wherever I could, I got permission from my landlords to put in a small garden down the steep bank behind our basement suite. A cold, wet spring resulted in a less than impressive tomato harvest, but I had zucchinis galore, lovely pie pumpkins and strawberries, and best of all, abundant bucketfuls of Saskatoon berries from bushes we discovered when we clambered down the bank. I had originally signed up for a community garden plot in 2017 while developing my proposal for this research study, not knowing then whether or not it would be a helpful way to embed myself further in local food security efforts. The only plot available without joining a long waiting list was at the Peterson Creek community garden, which sits on public land owned by the provincial government, in downtown Kamloops, BC. I remained ambivalent about my plot there for the years that I used it. Beyond producing plenty of fresh veggies, I couldn’t see clearly what I was doing there, nor could I see clearly what we were doing collectively, either as community gardeners or more broadly as food system advocates. It took years of embeddedness in my local food system to see it, and it took giving up my plot and breaking ground elsewhere 2 under the spectre of the pandemic to really feel it, viscerally. In my new garden, I was alone in my backyard, yes, but the collective work we were doing was made visible to me (and I hope through this writing, made visible to others too). Beyond the obvious, what does a community garden do? They show up in the face of complex, large-scale problems in the global food system: corporate consolidation and the resultant precarities in global supply chains – made all the more visible during pandemic conditions, agricultural production that is both ecologically devastating and vulnerable to climate change impacts, and households that experience food insecurity – a key public health issue in British Columbia (Li et al. 2016). Amidst these widespread concerns, community gardens and similar community-based food initiatives continue to arise as responses favoured by advocates and scholars alike (Kamloops Food Policy Council and True Consulting Group 2010; Baker 2004; Kortright and Wakefield 2011; Guitart, Pickering, and Byrne 2012). On the face of it, this is a misplaced stratagem—small community gardens and other similar community-based food initiatives do not produce appreciable counterweights to industrialized food production, at least not in terms of dollars or calories (Roncarolo et al. 2014; Roncarolo, Bisset, and Potvin 2016; Loopstra and Tarasuk 2013; Hamelin, Mercier, and Bédard 2011; Kirkpatrick and Tarasuk 2009). But embedded within the food security dialogue are complex and urgent “matters of concern” (Latour 2004) that advocates seek to redress in community settings, particularly when definitions of food security are not limited to access to adequate food but are defined broadly to include support for sustainable food systems (BC Food Systems Network 2016). As such, the “passionate interests” of actors engage the more complex ways the “value” of such initiatives can be calculated (Latour 2013). My research poses a series of critical questions targeted to community gardens and similar programs; the research has broader significance for social 3 initiatives in general. What value(s) are produced when value is not calculated only in conventional economic terms? How and why do advocates choose to pursue the initiatives they do? Who gets to contribute to the process of deliberation about their value? And how? In this dissertation, I explore these broad questions ethnographically in a specific local context, focusing on community-based food initiatives in Kamloops, British Columbia. As a community, Kamloops has a remarkably well-developed food security approach for a Canadian city of its size. It proved to be a productive site to investigate the question of value in food security initiatives, and the historical, economic and political conditions that led to their emergence in the community. Kamloops is also home to Canada’s oldest grassroots food policy council, and this organization, the Kamloops Food Policy Council (KFPC), quickly became the home for my research. Since its formation in 1995, KFPC has collectively made decisions about the initiatives it values, including informal conversations over potlucks, strategic planning efforts with its membership, and participation in formal community consultation processes. One of my aspirations in this dissertation is to provide a rich organizational history of KFPC and food security work in the Kamloops region, as well as a vivid snapshot of what community deliberations look like in the present moment. I aim to situate these decision-making and valuation practices in the broader historical context of agricultural disinvestment in the Kamloops region. I also highlight my participation as an actor in the food system and the outcomes of the community-based participatory research endeavours that wove through my ethnographic study. Taken together, these discussions have allowed me to move towards a theory of value1 in this specific context. 1 My approach to a “theory of value” is not as a unified or static framework, but as Michael Carolan suggests, as a way of thinking about how “value is contested and made real” (2017). Alternatively, as Feichtner and Gordon 4 A basic underlying question motivates my work with KFPC: How can we expand our perspective of what things count in our common world? This question is generated by two coinciding trends in anthropological research, the first a call to renew our commitment to thinking from the ground, and the second a set of provocations (loosely known as the ontological turn) that require us to think more imaginatively and expansively about what constitutes that ground.2 Assemblage thinking in the context of the ontological turn allows for a more expansive calculation of value that includes actants’ “passionate interests”—that is, evaluations of beliefs and desires (Latour 2013). This approach to value necessitates an approach to calculation that differs from what economists have traditionally counted—rather than an economics that short-circuits the active practice of scruples, it demands a collective uncertainty over ends and means in pursuit of the optimal common life. By investigating why activists engage in initiatives that fundamentally don’t compute (in terms of dollars or calories), my aspiration for the work has been to become radically subversive, eroding reliance on dispassionate calculation and rendering alternative processes of valuation transparent. 1.2 Community Context The confluence of the North and South Thompson Rivers, called Tk’emlúps (‘where the rivers meet’ in the Secwépemc language, Secwepemctsín), has for millennia been a gathering place of cultural and economic significance for the Secwépemc peoples. The land is called suggest, a theory of value is rather a project: “As an outcome of this project, we do not envisage a list of material values, some objective theory of value, which if protected and implemented would provide a fix to our current condition. Value, as we take it up here in this first symposium, is a product of social relations, an analytic, an argument and a mode of intervention. It is a project” (2020). 2 I borrow this construction of the current disciplinary moment from Kathleen Stewart, who summarizes it as follows: “An attention to the still unfolding has returned to ethnography’s commitment to thinking from the ground, but now the ground is a set of provocations and problematics that cannot be summarized in a literalized description and therefore does not so easily slip, under the spell of a kind of analytical shorthand, into a strangely idealist paradigm that imagines the things of the world as a direct reflection of abstracted categorical distinctions” (2017). 5 Secwepemcúl̓ecw. Although Indigenous sovereignty is not a specific focus of my research, I am living and working, together with my community collaborators at KFPC, on unceded lands – a context that inflects (or ought to inflect) everything we do with a question of decolonization, of restoring Indigenous life and land, and in the case of our work, Indigenous food sovereignty. We are only at the beginning of being able to ask that question in meaningful ways and allowing the answers to reverberate through the work that we do. Settler-colonial inhabitants call this place Kamloops, a small city in the south-central interior of British Columbia. In 2016, Kamloops had a population of 90,280, with 5.4% growth over the previous census in 2011 (Statistics Canada 2017). Kamloops functions as a tertiary centre for the provincial government and is home to a regional university (Thompson Rivers University) and a hospital (Royal Inland Hospital). Kamloops can be a difficult community to characterize and based on its surface level characteristics is an unlikely candidate for extensive community food security organizing. Why did this work emerge here, specifically? is a question I explored together with my research collaborators. At the grassroots level, Kamloops has had active food security3 efforts since 1987, starting with community kitchen organizing (Kalina 2015). The KFPC was formed in 1995, making it Canada’s first independent food policy council.4 In addition to grassroots organizing, Kamloops benefitted from several years of municipal support for food security initiatives, with food security and urban agriculture addressed in several city planning documents (City of 3 I use “food security” here with a broad definition that includes both access to food and the cultivation of a just and sustainable food system. I explore in more detail in Chapter 2 the nuanced and overlapping definitions of food security, food sovereignty, community food security and household food insecurity which are all active within this community context. 4 Only Toronto formed a food policy council earlier but via coordination with local government (MacRae and Donahue 2013). 6 Kamloops 2010; 2013; 2015). A number of interesting food security programs run in tandem in the community. For example, the KFPC itself runs the Gleaning Abundance Program (GAP), coordinating volunteers to harvest backyard fruit trees and share the fresh produce with partner agencies. The Kamloops Food Bank runs FoodSHARE, a zero-waste food recovery program, and the largest such program run by a food bank in Western Canada.5 The long running community kitchen programs are still active, but now operate out of the recently opened Mount Paul Community Food Centre, which also manages the city’s community gardens.6 Gardengate, a horticultural training program for individuals living with addictions or mental health conditions, operates a small organic urban farm.7 The broad and diverse network that has formed around food security work in Kamloops has been an ideal setting to explore important questions about community decision-making and valuation of social initiatives. Food security initiatives have a great deal of visibility in the community and complex networks of support at the grassroots and municipal levels. The KFPC and its initiatives are regarded regionally as particularly successful and well established. While some programs are relatively new, or still emerging or under deliberation, others have a long community history with strong leadership and funding structures supporting them. Very little academic food systems research to date has been based in Kamloops, though community experts have often found other ways to communicate and share their expertise. Because of the depth and diversity of initiatives, and the current lack of academic research, I anticipate the findings I share in this dissertation will have significance primarily within the Kamloops community but also 5 https://www.kamloopsfoodbank.org/foodshare/ 6 https://cfccanada.ca/en/Our-Work/Community-Food-Centres/Our-Community-Food-Centres/Centres/The-Mount-Paul-Community-Food-Centre 7 https://www.opendoorgroup.org/programs/gardengate/ 7 beyond it. The historical and contextual emergence of Kamloops food initiatives will have broader implications for other communities in the region, many of which have recently formed food policy councils or intend to do so. Another significant contribution of my study follows from the anthropological impetus to investigate taken-for-granted assumptions. In this case, I will be closely examining assumptions about value that might be limiting public deliberation as the KFPC works towards the implementation of a variety of future projects in pursuit of a reimagined food system for the community. Kamloops is a productive research site for a personal reason as well: it has been my home since 2014. I am raising a young child here and feeding my family in the Kamloops food system – sometimes growing food myself, sometimes purchasing it from local farmers, and sometimes purchasing it from the endpoints of the global supply chain that end up in Kamloops’ grocery stores. I am an engaged community member, and my research tasks have deepened that engagement even as my inclinations toward engagement have deepened my research. I have formed my own complex web of relational accountabilities within the community – accountabilities that do not end at some arbitrary cut off point to my fieldwork. One of my collaborators shared the following thoughts about being someone who works for change in our community: It's the right time for an awakening around the whole subject of safe food and safe sources of water and soil that’s protected for both. If we don't do it now – you know what, I am okay with…whatever that [label] is: apocalyptic thinker, doomsday-er, God-you're-so-depressing. I like talking about that stuff because I believe that's the pivot point we find ourselves on, and if we don't empower our community to be prepared, then I think, if I don't participate in empowering this community, my community, I will wonder what I did. What did I do with these years? These are thoughts that resonate deeply for me. As I note above, Kamloops is a viable location for this research in an “academic” sense, but many other places would be equally justified, and given the relative degree of food insecurity experienced elsewhere, many other 8 places would be much more justified. That said, it still feels like the only place I possibly could have chosen. 1.3 Small Changes Build Capacity for an Expansive Vision The aim of this dissertation is to organize the narrative of my fieldwork into an argument around a basic concept: small changes build capacity for an expansive vision. Each of the terms in this phrase functions as something of a placeholder – none of them really capture the meaning I intend in and of themselves, and in some cases I find my own word choices challenging or problematic. In this section I provide the definition and intentions that underlie each term, and my rationale for continuing to use them despite their limitations. [small] adrienne marie brown’s text Emergent Strategy became important to the participatory organizing I and my fellow collaborators were engaged in. I draw the term small from the first principle of emergent strategy she identifies: “Small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small)” (brown 2017), and use it here to reflect the ways this dissertation is in conversation with emergent strategy (a conversation I elaborate on in Chapter 5 in particular). However, I also use small intentionally as a way to force myself to reflect on my own tendency to discount the value of small initiatives. I spent a lot of time in the formation of my original proposal thinking about “inefficient” responses to problems in the food system – like community gardens – that accomplish small scale goals but don’t have an appreciable impact on food insecurity overall. This research has shown me and my collaborators ways of appreciating small initiatives, without romanticizing them, and has increased our understanding of how this work can scale into a broader vision for changing the food system. 9 [changes] This is the word that poses the most struggle for me – and that I have wanted to substitute multiple times (even as I continue to try to understand why it came to mind initially). A better fit here would arguably have been “thing” – a concept that has been an organizing mental framework for me for over a decade (since I drank the Latourian Kool-Aid during my MA).8 “Initiative” would also be an appropriate and accurate term, and one that I use frequently to refer to the collection of programs, projects, events and partnerships that make up the activities of the KFPC. But changes nods to the work of Octavia Butler in a way that feels meaningful here. As Lauren Olamina, the protagonist in Butler’s Parable of the Sower defines: “All that you touch you change/all that you change changes you” (2000). Thinking about our things and initiatives as “changes” does interesting work for us. It reminds us that we are always a part of a complex socio-ecological system – that our initiatives don’t stand alone but are intended to leverage change with that system, and are interrelated with many other things in that system.9 The word change reminds us that our things are in motion, that they are emergent, and that we might want to hold them loosely. 8 My own impetus to take other-than-human objects seriously originated from Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholar Bruno Latour, and even though my thinking has shifted considerably over the years, I find this work still holds a place in my intellectual lineage. Latour is known in part for his actor-network theory (ANT), well established as a method of inquiry that uses the technical term “actant” to unsettle assumptions about the nature of actors, who are not transcendent, necessarily human, or the source of action. Instead, an actant is “the moving target of a vast array of entities swarming toward it” (Latour 2005b, 46). It is a relational definition and not one based on inherent properties. Latour’s work draws our attention to “matters of concern”: those things that are complicated, uncertain and risky and which open, rather than close, democratic deliberation. Things do not have to be human to be active; for Latour, all objects are actants with the ability to do things or change the course of events. Latour articulates a flat ontology that is based on refusing to give explanatory priority to one actor or entity over another. The world then is the product of many kinds of agencies, human and non-human, none of which is necessarily more important than any other. 9 Evoking Gregory Bateson here: “We are not outside the ecology for which we plan – we are always and inevitably a part of it. Herein lies the charm and the terror of ecology – that the ideas of this science are irreversibly becoming a part of our own ecosocial system” ([1972] 2000, 512). 10 [build capacity] In 1993, KFPC’s founder Laura Kalina published Building Food Security in Kamloops, and in its second edition, published in 2001, she added a description of the food security continuum (Figure 1: Food Security Continuum).10 Because of how important and inspiring this continuum has been to KFPC members and leaders over the years, I want this dissertation to honour its truth while also continuing the conversation about what it means and what it looks like on the ground. Figure 1: Food Security Continuum Source: Kalina 2001 “Building capacity” is used widely in the non-profit world, as it is used here in Kalina’s continuum, often without articulating what exactly is meant by it. Kalina offers the examples of community kitchens and gardens, but the capacity the continuum refers to isn’t really those initiatives themselves but rather what goes along with them: small but semi-reliable funding streams, maybe with a little bit extra to fund some administrative support, a committed list of community volunteers with diverse interests and motivations, credibility and community good will, opportunities for on the ground learning and leadership development, and webs of relations across organizations and municipal staff. Rather than seeking to define capacity at this juncture, I instead want to show what it looks like, through the detailed organizational history and ethnography that follows. How have 10 See Kalina 1993; 2001. Kalina’s continuum was adapted from a white paper published by the Toronto Food Policy Council (MacRae 1994). Stage 1Short-term relief•Emergency/ Charitable Food ProgramsStage 2Capacity Building•Community Kitchens & GardensStage 3Redesign•Food Policy Network11 members of the KFPC network become capable of response? How have they become people made to live in these times? These questions draw the connection between “build capacity” and “changes” as defined above – together, they reinforce the importance of understanding our relationship to change and being able to respond to emergent conditions. [expansive] I use expansive here intentionally as a theoretical nod to the ontological turn, and my understanding of how that turn allows and enables a more expansive way of thinking about what counts. It also reflects the way that KFPC conceptualizes its vision as a living document – as something that is holistic and continues to roll things in as understanding increases and changes. [vision] I would like to define what I mean by vision by sharing what it means in the context of my community – the actual vision statements that are guiding the work that KFPC is doing (Table 1). These vision statements, outlining our “ideal food system,” were drafted through a collaborative process, described in Chapter 5.Table 1: Kamloops Food Policy Council Vision Statements11 A resilient food system: healthy land and water The food system in Kamloops and area is resilient and adaptive in the face of potential climate and economic upsets, and functions in a way that promotes biodiversity and soil health. Food grown through agriculture or collected through traditional harvesting methods protects land, water, animals and humans now and in future generations. Pesticide/herbicide use is reduced and eventually eliminated, and no contaminants or toxic materials are applied to the land. The scale of food production and harvesting does not overly tax the land. There is an integrated waste management system. The cost of food properly reflects the true value of inputs like human labour and water, while recognizing the environmental impacts of growing and transporting food. The KFPC and its network works regionally, provincially and beyond as required to promote conditions needed for a resilient food system, advocating for policy change, incubating programs, working with farmers and building partnerships. 11 The statements in Table 1 are reproduced as of December 2020. As a living document, the most current version of the vision is available at: https://kamloopsfoodpolicycouncil.com/our-vision/. Table 1: Kamloops Food Policy Council Vision Statements (continued) 12 Alleviation of poverty: equitable access to healthy, culturally appropriate food The food system in Kamloops and area is inclusive of all voices and meets the diversity of needs found in our community. All people living in Kamloops have access to healthy, culturally appropriate food. Many people are growing their own food, and a variety of fresh, healthy and local food is available to buy or trade. Where gaps exist in household level food security, including amongst individuals experiencing homelessness, there are enough regular meals provided throughout Kamloops to address that need. This is supported through collective urban farms and reducing food waste by gleaning from places where it is abundant. Members of the food system are advocates and facilitators of change, addressing barriers to food accessibility (i.e., living wage, costs for housing, transportation, dependence on processed food and agribusiness, dependence on other regions/countries). Local economic vitality: support for regional food providers The food system prioritizes solidarity and sovereignty over competition and profit, and ensures a good livelihood for producers with safe and equitable labour conditions for all. For example, business models like worker-owned cooperatives are favoured over profit-driven corporations. Food and agriculture sectors are key economic drivers in Kamloops and region. There is good demand for food grown in the region from residents, chefs and institutions. Food producers, processors and distributors have the capacity to scale their operations to meet increasing demand and incubator farms and shared kitchens reduce barriers for new entrants. The necessary infrastructure (dry and cold storage, commercial kitchens, abattoirs) is in place to support the food system along the value chain, and there are multiple venues where local food can be purchased year-round. Regulations support safe, healthy food but do not create unnecessary barriers for local food providers to enter the food system or innovate with their products. Our network: celebrating people as gifts and the cultivation of connections The Kamloops Food Policy Council acts as a hub and a leader, inspiring people throughout the region to work together toward a common vision. The council is inclusive, with few or no barriers to participation, and proactively reaches out to under-represented groups, listening to their needs when setting priorities. Members of the network, and the food system more generally, are aware of one another and work to collaborate with each other, reduce redundancies and address gaps. The network is a way to connect with food, fun and friendship, as well as being a venue for making effective changes in the community. Indigenous food sovereignty: decolonizing relations and the restoration of ecological food systems Food is recognized as a sacred gift that cannot be commodified. Food is produced in a sustainable, balanced way that reflects and respects the interconnectedness of food, people, and nature. Traditional practices and cultural harvesting strategies are a living reality, with widespread participation and guaranteed access to culturally-adapted foods. Access to traditional land is ensured, by returning it or creating Indigenous protected areas that do not restrict traditional land uses. Policies are put in place that ensure the integrity and health of Indigenous food systems for future generations. These policies are developed using a cross cultural approach that emphasizes Indigenous self-determination, respects Indigenous legal orders and works with natural systems/laws. Non-indigenous members work to minimize their impacts on unceded lands, educate themselves about colonization and its impacts, and seek points of complementarity with an Indigenous-led decolonization movement. Table 1: Kamloops Food Policy Council Vision Statements (continued) 13 Food literacy: intergenerational knowledge transfer and sharing best practices and research People in Kamloops and area have appreciation, knowledge and skills for growing, preserving, and cooking food. Community members feel encouraged to choose healthy foods that are culturally, regionally and seasonally appropriate. Regular sharing of knowledge and practices takes place between and within different generations and different members of society (gardeners, farmers, researchers, organizations, etc.). Area schools, including post-secondary institutions, are involved in research and education around food. Common spaces such as community gardens and tool libraries are supported so that community members have places to spend time, share and learn from each other. Food Commons: the revitalization of local food assets and the sharing economy People in Kamloops are regularly growing, cooking and eating together and sharing the food they have grown or prepared. Kamloops has many venues and processes in place to support the sharing economy (common gardens, shared kitchens, a platform for bartering, etc.). This encourages more local food, more variety and more equal distribution of resources while reducing food waste. These activities promote a feeling of abundance and remind us to care for our community and for each other. An interconnected and caring community helps meet people’s needs and complements programming to address household food insecurity. People recognize the importance of sharing as an alternative to the current economic system and are empowered to advocate for a more inclusive and respectful system. I think of “vision” as the plain language version of compelling concepts that have been articulated recently by anthropologists: “imagine otherwise” or “speculative futures.”12 Although the plain language of vision is more pragmatic and recognizable in my community context, this scholarship has helped me to understand the vital role of this vision setting work. 1.4 Intentions I don’t want to pretend that this dissertation is something more than it is. To say that my main point is that small changes build capacity for an expansive vision is not in and of itself a truly groundbreaking argument. It certainly isn’t news to any of my community collaborators. Where I think this work is best positioned to add a meaningful contribution is in its thick description of how exactly, by which I mean ethnographically, the value of specific local 12 See for example the work of Elizabeth Povinelli (2011b; 2011a), the Speculative Anthropology series published by the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Fieldsites Editors’ Forum (Anderson et al. 2018) and the public scholarship of Zoe Todd (2018). 14 initiatives contributes to collective desire for possible futures (and action towards them). My conclusions about value do not constitute a new theory but instead add my voice (and that of my collaborators) to the refrain: capitalist constraints on value have not everywhere taken over, there are many rough edges and weak places within its hegemonic control, and different worlds are possible. Let me clearly dispense any confusion about my ideological position: capitalism and colonialism are destructive and a poor way of organizing how we relate to one another and should be dismantled as quickly as possible. My hope is that this work provides a pathway to connect small initiatives to expansive visions and makes these alternative experiments visible in new ways to themselves and their actors. My intention with this dissertation is to let the community-based work, the outcomes, the relationality, the solidarity, rise to the forefront. The write up is just the write up. The work, the contribution to the body of academic knowledge, is in the community, and in the way that community has grown or changed over the duration of my observations and engagement. There will be instances where the write up is inadequate to represent what occurred. This is a position I feel confident defending, because the work and knowledge created wouldn’t have been possible without the reciprocal and solidarity-based process in which I was only one participant among the collective.13 I have organized this work into the following sections: 13 My inspiration to push back against disciplinary constraints comes from several sources, but one in particular that comes to mind is Aimee Meredith Cox’s recent essay questioning the future of anthropology: “What if, like Zora Neale Hurston, we loved the communities we live with and respected the knowledge formed there enough to reject the mandate to translate people’s lives for mainstream consumption or adhere to a theoretical register that would be legible and legitimized within anthropology departments?” (2018). 15 In Chapter Two I offer a review of the food studies literature, which identifies themes within the complex assemblage of research that has risen exponentially in this field over the last two decades. Chapter Three articulates the methodological and theoretical framework that I have used to guide my research, as well as my aspirations for personal development as someone learning to be in good relation-with as a member of the community. I also include an overview of the specific methods and tasks I carried out during my research. My research findings are organized into three chapters. In Chapter Four, I summarize the rich history of the KFPC, unpacking as much as I can the complex webs of relations that have advanced the work of community food security for many years. I situate this organizational history in the broader historical, economic and political context of the interior of British Columbia. Chapter Five describes the process for developing one of the outcomes of the community-based participatory work I engaged in: an evaluation rubric for the Kamloops food system. This chapter includes both pragmatic suggestions for the use of rubrics as effective tools in community organizing work, as well as reflective work that considers how a vision becomes a thing that creates action. In Chapter Six, I theorize more explicitly about how value is operative in the Kamloops food system, drawing on the examples of several alternative economic experiments during the KFPC’s history to illustrate my thoughts. I end by pointing to the importance of collectivizing desire, and of finding ways to build the radical power and potential of small initiatives by connecting them with a shared vision. 16 Chapter Seven outlines the conclusions I draw from this body of work, but also offers my reflection on what it means to be a community-based researcher writing a dissertation “in these times” – specifically, these times shaped by the global COVID-19 pandemic. The circumstances shaped by COVID-19 impacted my own capacity as a researcher and writer in ways that altered the final form of this dissertation. At the same time, COVID-19 created significant impacts in Kamloops (as it did globally) to acute household food insecurity, with anticipated impacts to mid and long-term local food security. The ways that KFPC mobilized to respond to these impacts offer important insights and nuances to the findings that I had either outlined or drafted prior to the start of the public health response. Taken together, these chapters make up my best attempt to interpret a rich and complex set of data about collaborators and things and places that I care about deeply. There are many stories that could be told about this work, and this one comes from my limited perspective and my admitted fallibility as someone who would much rather be doing the work than writing about it in a format constrained by academic conventions. Small changes build capacity for an expansive vision. 17 Chapter 2: Literature Review: Food Studies as Assemblage The broad intention behind this chapter is to review the relevant food studies literature that has informed my ethnographic study of food-related initiatives in Kamloops, BC. The last 20 years have seen a proliferation of interdisciplinary research in the food studies arena. Given the multiple possible entry points to the literature, and the impossibility of treating the entire volume of research comprehensively, I begin by outlining a series of assumptions that guide the structure and selectivity of this literature review. I intend for my analysis to avoid a superficial survey of the field, hoping instead for an approach that brings diverse, interdisciplinary research into conversation. In this way, I treat food studies research as an assemblage, and as such, consider the ways in which it both hangs together and falls apart as significant. In other words, where are scholars making linkages across topics or disciplines, and where are they not? Both would seem to reveal important considerations about the future of food studies research. Treating food studies research as an assemblage is not an attempt at a unifying theory or systematic approach to the literature. Even if such unification were possible, to attempt it would fundamentally misconstrue how an assemblage gathers ways of being across diverse scales, temporalities and materialities.14 Rather, I intend to avoid an approach to the literature that might limit my ability to follow the diverse collection of actors in the Kamloops food system, and as such, I work towards an analysis that is cross-cutting amongst diverse streams of research. This kind of analysis is particularly important given the historical context of Kamloops’ food systems 14 See Chapter 3 for a more in-depth discussion about my approach to assemblage thinking. 18 advocacy, which has origins in a public health approach that often lacks linkages to other critical food systems research. Levi-Strauss suggested to anthropologists that food is good to think with, a means through which to better understand other societal conditions (1963). More recently, the materialist turn gives anthropologists a push toward taking up food as a matter of concern in its own right (Abbots 2016). To outline my final assumption, I take both of these positions as important. My work is situated to a certain extent within anthropology’s ontological turn. As such the other-than-human actors of the Kamloops food system join their human advocates as profoundly important in their own right. Yet, I also look for that historical and comparative perspective in which such an analysis may shed light on its social, political and economic context. 2.1 Grounding the Assumptions I draw on insights from three texts to ground the assumptions outlined above. First, I follow the work of geographer Charles Levkoe who positions the Canadian “food movement” as a complex assemblage (Levkoe 2014; Levkoe and Wakefield 2014). Levkoe’s empirical project studied food-related organizations and regional food networks in four provinces (British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Nova Scotia). The results indicate that “an overwhelming majority (97%) of respondents identified as part of a ‘food movement’ despite the decentralisation of the networks and diversity of aims” (Levkoe and Wakefield 2014, 313). Understanding the food movement as a complex social assemblage enables thinking through the “ways that diverse interests come together through everyday practice, without ideological coherence as a necessary precondition” (Levkoe and Wakefield 2014, 315), and points productively toward meaningful opportunities for political transformation. As Levkoe argues, 19 Collaborations across sectors, scales and places offer the potential to work towards longer-term, structural changes necessary for transforming the food system. However, with these opportunities come new challenges since networks bring together diverse people and ideas, sometimes with contradictory perspectives, creating tensions that must be negotiated. Studies that fail to understand the strategic use of networks by [Alternative Food Initiatives] risk producing an incomplete picture of the struggles surrounding the food system and overlooking important political struggles. (2014, 400) The limitation of the analysis lies in the lack of attention to the other-than-human and material realities that also constitute the food systems assemblage. Given the complex social-ecological composition of alternative food initiatives, there are more things that need to be taken into account in the assemblages that constitute them. From a more ontological perspective, David Goodman, who was an early advocate of the applicability of an Actor-Network Theory approach to studying food systems (1999), joins with colleagues E. Melanie DuPuis and Michael Goodman to author Alternative Food Networks: Knowledge, Practice and Politics (2012). Goodman et al. define alternative food networks as the “new economic and cultural spaces for the trading, production, and consumption of food” which have both ethical and aesthetic components that distinguish them from the profound challenges posed by the “unsustainable industrial food system and the exploitative trading relations embedded in the global supply chains that support its growth and (expanded) reproduction” (2012, 4). Though I return to their project in a later section, I would like to note here that the work demonstrates a cross-cutting analysis of the sort I wish to attempt. Goodman et al. draw on three themes to unite the analytical approach of the work: reflexivity, knowledge practices and alterity. As a result, this text presents a theoretical “taking stock” approach to the alternative food studies research that precedes it, walking a fine line between arguments critical of how alternative food projects are drawn into the mainstream corporate economy, and those arguments that are celebratory of the political potentials of the food movement. They note “this stance recognizes that food activists’ struggles have failed to meet their own visions but also pays 20 attention to the ways in which, in some cases and in some places, alternative economies have carved out relatively independent positions in the food system” (Goodman, DuPuis, and Goodman 2012, 4). I am interested in the possibilities for expanding their discussion in two ways: moving beyond market-facing alternative food projects to include public health and community food security initiatives, and exploring a means of grounding their theorization in rigorous ethnographic study. Finally, I highlight the historical importance of Jack Goody’s Cooking, Cuisine and Class (1982) which stood at a pivotal moment in the anthropological study of food. In the text, Goody traces the state of play in the anthropology of food, outlining its historical progression from the functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, to the binary framework of Levi-Strauss, to the cultural approaches of Douglas and Sahlins. For Goody, these prior approaches share a concern with meaning, but play down the significance of time and space, something he sought to address by reintroducing a historical and comparative dimension into study of the processes of production, distribution, and consumption of food. What is most significant in my reading is not just that he aims to take this broadly holistic analytical approach, but that the means by which he achieves it is empirically grounded in rich, ethnographic detail of two communities in northern Ghana. He observes in his conclusion, In stressing the link between the nature and distribution of resources and patterns of consumption, I have not tried to seek out a single factor to explain every feature of the culture of the kitchen, but rather to explore the extent this can account for differences in time and space. The method will not recommend itself to those who find it uncomfortable to work with more than one propositional frame. But such an approach should require no defence. (Goody 1982, 213) Importantly, what he achieved with this work cut through the noise of a contested anthropological field (Dirks and Hunter 2013). Given the explosion of food studies research in the last two decades, there is substantially more noise in the field than at the time Cooking, 21 Cuisine and Class emerged into the state of play. Despite my broad reading across multiple streams of food studies research, I was unable to find any sense of saturation or comprehensive understanding, and further, little sense that any work in particular can be thought of as “field defining.” Though I consider the possibility that this is a fault in my reading, I think it more likely that this is a condition of the literature itself: an overwhelming myriad of local micro-studies, attempts at typologies, inter-inter-interdisciplinarity, and well intentioned efforts to simplify the complexities of a global food system. I am primarily interested in the kind of ethnographic research that might start to scaffold this body of literature toward a less contested point. Although the purpose of my study is to understand how communities come to value social initiatives, the exploration of this goal via the specific example of the Kamloops food network requires contextualization within the relevant body of existing food studies research. The last 20 years have seen a proliferation of interdisciplinary research in this arena. Given the broad scope of my proposed research, I begin with reviewing work that defines the related concepts of food security and food sovereignty, and then comment briefly on four avenues within the food studies literature. 2.2 Defining Food Security I open this section with an effort to define food security and food sovereignty, concepts that are often deployed with multiple different meanings by food studies scholars. A widely accepted definition of food security is provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, which defines food security as the condition in which “all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (Tarasuk, Mitchell, and 22 Dachner 2016, 7). Food sovereignty on the other hand, has its origins in the grassroots agrarian movement La Via Campesina, and turns its focus to the “right of nations and peoples to control their own food systems, including their own markets, production modes, food cultures and environments” (Wiebe and Wipf 2011, 4). Food studies scholars have pointed out the tensions between these definitions; Marc Edelman et al. note that where food security is technocratically defined to prioritize adequacy of supplies, it may stand in opposition to food sovereignty given that any means of food production, including exploitive industrial systems, can ensure such adequacy (2014).15 On the other hand, some scholars instead have emphasized the overlap or interchangeability between less technocratic definitions of food security and food sovereignty (Edelman et al. 2014). Food activists in the Canadian context also differ on their approach to food security/sovereignty. For example, Food Secure Canada has shifted to work under a food sovereignty paradigm, differentiating food security as a goal and food sovereignty as a means of achieving it (Food Secure Canada 2013). In contrast, the BC Food Systems Network does not address food sovereignty but clearly incorporate its principles within their broad definition of food security, as follows: Food security requires a sustainable food system in which: • everyone is able to acquire, in a dignified manner, adequate quantity and quality of personally acceptable food; • people are able to earn a living wage by growing, producing, processing, handling, retailing and serving food; • the quality of land, air and water, the well-being of animals, and the integrity of plants and seeds are maintained and enhanced for future generations; and 15 This tension can also exist even in paradigms that promote “sustainable” food security, in cases where sustainability is framed as a techno-scientific ecological modernization of existing industrial systems (Goodman, DuPuis, and Goodman 2012, 111). 23 • food is recognized as the basis of health and celebrated as central to family, community and cultural integrity. (BC Food Systems Network 2016) Others, like BC’s Interior Health Authority or the Dietitians of Canada prefer the concept of “community food security” which aims to ensure that “all citizens obtain a safe, personally acceptable, nutritious diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes healthy choices, community self-reliance and equal access for everyone” (Interior Health Authority 2017; Dietitians of Canada 2017; Hamm and Bellows 2003). In light of this discussion, I choose to define food security in the broadest sense, inclusive of both access to food and the cultivation of a just and sustainable food system. Because this definition overlaps with the principles of food sovereignty, I often use food security as inclusive of both concepts. However, I use food sovereignty in the occasions where my intention is to emphasize where value is placed on people’s self-determination of food systems, or where it better reflects the continually evolving terminology used by my collaborators at the KFPC. More than simply establishing a definition of terms, this conversation also draws attention to the diverse questions and motivations that assemble actors together under the auspices of a “food movement” (See Levkoe 2014; Levkoe and Wakefield 2014). I would suggest that such a flexibility with respect to terminology is necessary to “follow the actors” within the Canadian food activist context. 2.3 Income-based Solutions Economists have established the connection between food prices, poverty, and food security (Tweeten 1999; Headey and Martin 2016). Beyond economics, there is also a large body of research exploring food insecurity, narrowly defined as “inadequate or insecure access to food because of financial constraints” (Tarasuk, Mitchell, and Dachner 2016, 2), as a significant 24 public health concern for Canadians.16 Much of this recent work highlights the importance of financial access to food and advances income-based policy solutions to household food insecurity (Buck-McFadyen 2015; Hamelin, Mercier, and Bédard 2011; Loopstra, Dachner, and Tarasuk 2015; Loopstra and Tarasuk 2015). This represents something of a sea change in public health approaches to food security, though as Lynn McIntyre et al. observe, this is still a contested research domain (2016).17 While the research narrative around financial concerns is compelling and generating policy leverage within the Canadian context, this emphasis on increasing government-level attention to income-based solutions to food insecurity often comes at a cost: a demonstration of the ineffectiveness of community food initiatives (such as food banks, community gardens or community kitchens) to achieve appreciable outcomes reducing food insecurity amongst Canadians. McIntyre argues that food insecurity is often rendered invisible by food security policy, as social programs originally targeted to those experiencing poverty (children’s nutrition programs, community gardens/kitchens) continue to operate despite program evaluations that questioned their reach and effectiveness, their goals evolving to include other mandates such as community engagement or food localism (2011). Researchers have recently sought to answer the question of effectiveness empirically. For example, Sharon Kirkpatrick and Valerie Tarasuk surveyed low income households in Toronto (2009). Their findings demonstrated very low participation rates in community food initiatives amongst those 16 On a national level, Tarasuk et al. describe the incidence of food insecurity as follows: “When the results for all of the provinces and territories that measured food insecurity in 2014 are considered together, 12.0% of households in the country experienced some level of food insecurity during the previous 12 months. This represents 1.3 million households, or 3.2 million individuals, including nearly 1 million children under the age of 18. More than 1 in 6 children under the age of 18 lived in households that experienced food insecurity. (It should be noted that British Columbia, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador and Yukon are not included in these estimates because they opted out of food insecurity measurement in 2014.)” (2016, 9). 17 Public health approaches previously focused on increasing community capacity for food security through a community food systems approach (Kalina 2015; MacRae 1994; McCullum et al. 2005). 25 households, and among participating households, programs had no bearing on the household food security status. In a follow up study, Rachel Loopstra and Tarasuk attribute the reasons for non-participation to lack of accessibility and relevance of these initiatives to low-income households (2013). Wayne Roberts, who has worked as a Toronto-based food activist for the last two decades, has criticized this research trend for emphasizing the “impotent community response” to rising food insecurity (2016). Though he agrees with the fundamental role of income-based solutions, he notes the necessity of going beyond “nutritionism”, what he describes as “the doctrine that food’s human impact is entirely physiological. All people, and especially people who have been marginalized and impoverished, need personal and social support and empowerment — needs that are also addressed through food via such projects as community gardens and community kitchens” (Roberts 2016). My project is positioned to address a significant limitation of current food insecurity research in Canada – though this current research trend makes undeniably important claims about the income-based nature of food insecurity narrowly defined, it trades on its policy leverage at the expense of a more cross-cutting analysis that attends to what new forms of social life might be generated out of activists’ work within food security broadly defined. 2.4 Community Food Initiatives A second body of literature considers the benefits, challenges, and motivations of community food initiatives. Much of this research is celebratory or limited to descriptive analysis. Community gardens in particular have received significant analysis. Community garden projects are often seen to be unambiguously positive, and as such an important research focus has been to develop an understanding of their benefits and the challenges faced in implementing 26 and sustaining such projects. Laura Lawson, in her history of community gardening in the United States, points to this concern when she suggests: “The assumption that gardens can garner support through their inherent goodness permits a lack of accountability about the good that gardens actually do” (2005, 292). Even authors who do attend critically to community gardens focus largely on differences among them and the ways in which some particular gardens fall short of the assumed ideal. For example, Hilda Kurtz investigates how the individual context of community gardens “contributes to markedly different experiences of fostering community in urban neighbourhoods” (2001, 656). She explores ethnographically the different meanings of community that gardeners negotiate in gardens with perceived or actual enclosures compared to fully accessible gardens. Her work underscores the ways in which the context of a garden can affect the degree to which its participants experience a sense of community and points out that some community gardens fall short of idealized expectations of sociability and community building. She does not, however, question those idealized expectations. Daniela Guitart et al. recently conducted a systematic review of the academic literature on community gardens, highlighting the range of motivations, challenges and benefits taken up by community garden researchers (2012). According to their analysis, across a diverse disciplinary field, three quarters of the studies presented positive outcomes from community gardens. However, there were frequent discrepancies between the benefits discussed and the benefits demonstrated (Guitart, Pickering, and Byrne 2012). The most commonly demonstrated benefits were social, perhaps a reflection of the complex methodologies required to demonstrate other benefits such as improved nutrition or environmental sustainability, both of which were frequently mentioned but rarely demonstrated. Research on collective kitchens is far more rare, but a review of the literature indicates parallel findings; though various benefits are discussed 27 and social benefits are demonstrated, the research is limited in scope and unable to demonstrate whether collective kitchens impact food security outcomes (Engler-Stringer and Berenbaum 2005). Given their analysis, Guitart et al. propose several directions for future community garden research: improving geographical scope beyond large industrial cities in the US where most research is currently focused, introducing comparative analysis of diverse social and political contexts, and turning attention to the “political ecology” of community gardening, or as they pose the question: “how do the social and political conditions surrounding community garden formation and continuity over time impact agro-biodiversity specifically and biodiversity generally?” (2012, 369). These suggested directions align with conclusions drawn by John Taylor and Sarah Lovell following their assessment of urban home garden research (2014). They underscore the need to extend the research agenda beyond descriptive analysis and identify the importance of a research agenda that considers the socio-ecological entanglements of urban gardens. 2.5 Alternative Food Networks Unlike the first two literature streams that are primarily concerned with (in)effectiveness, a third body of research is instead concerned with alterity. This research frames community food initiatives and initiatives that align with an ethos or aesthetic of “alternative” (organic, local, or slow) food as a type of radical resistance to industrial, capitalist food systems. Within the scholarship on alternative food networks, a divide exists between competing perspectives: those that celebrate the radical, transformative potentials of alternative food projects, and those that are critical of how such projects achieve few of their radical aims and instead become co-opted by the capitalist logic that dominates existing food systems (McClintock 2014). The question of 28 how a “transformative food politics” might emerge from between these polarized perspectives has been raised in recent work (Levkoe 2011). For David Goodman et al., the answer lies in a more reflexive understanding of the world as “relational and process-based rather than perfectionist” (2012, 6). Noting the division in current scholarship, they aim to understand “consumers (and producers) as ‘imperfect’ social actors situated somewhere between these polarized positions and focuses on the politics of consumer-producer relationships that are the bedrock of alternative food and fair trade networks” (Goodman, DuPuis, and Goodman 2012, 5). They advance the concept of “reflexive localism,” which frames local food systems “not as local ‘resistance’ against a capitalist ‘logic’ but as the outcome of mutually constitutive, imperfect, political processes in which the local and the global make each other on an everyday basis” (Goodman, DuPuis, and Goodman 2012, 24). Nathan McClintock concurs with the need to navigate between the poles of celebration and critique – what he calls a “false dualism” that conflates or essentializes the multiple rationalities driving alternative food networks (2014, 158). Instead, he emphasizes how alternative initiatives “may exemplify both a form of actually existing neoliberalism and a simultaneous radical counter-movement arising in dialectical tension” and that in fact, these initiatives must be both, since the “contradictory processes of capitalism both create opportunities for urban agriculture and impose obstacles to its expansion” (McClintock 2014, 149). It is in “coming to terms with urban agriculture’s inherent contradictions” that we can find a reflexive, relational, process-based path forward (McClintock 2014, 150). As McClintock suggests, “Focusing on process - on how and where urban agriculture arises - ultimately offers a better understanding of urban agriculture's various functions and forms and the contradictory tendencies internal to its growth” (2014, 158). 29 J.K. Gibson-Graham’s feminist critique of capitalism and subsequent development of their diverse economies framework has been used to helpful effect in analyzing alternative food initiatives. For example, Michael Carolan and James Hale use it in their analysis of urban agriculture as a community development strategy in Denver, Colorado (2016), and Patricia Ballamingie et al. use it to ground their analysis of the Hidden Harvest gleaning project in Ottawa, Ontario. Alison Alkon and Julie Guthman critique Gibson-Graham’s approach in their introduction to New Food Activism, suggesting that these diverse and alternative economies “while potentially generative, exist at the margins of the neoliberal political economy” and pay inadequate attention to food justice and those most at risk of harm from neoliberalism (2017, 12). Too much focus on the merits of alternative food initiatives may work to limit activists’ understanding of the confrontations of state or capital that are possible. There is a fundamental disagreement here, between those that carry some ambivalence about alternative food projects but are willing to study or implement them for their potential benefits, and those who are concerned that giving them attention limits the potentials for achieving significant changes at scale in the food system. I don’t think there is a point of resolution yet in the literature, and such a resolution may not be desirable or necessary. However, based on my own experience engaging deeply with a community of collaborators struggling through these questions, I am inclined toward holding space for tension (in both the literature and in the community), and allowing for ambivalence and inherent contradictions to inhabit our initiatives. 2.6 Food and Materiality A body of recent anthropological research considers the ontological, material nature of food, exploring “how matter and meaning are dynamically entwined” (Abbots 2016, 1). In one 30 approach, scholars turn attention to the embodied practices of consuming particular foods. Examples of such studies have discussed meat (Evans and Miele 2012), raw (Paxson 2008), alternative proteins (Sexton 2016), milk (DuPuis 2000) and butter/margarine (Hocknell 2016). In doing so, they open a means of investigating the social relations and broader historical, political and economic conditions that shape their production. Examples of projects that address the contingent materialities of food systems broadly construed are Anna Tsing’s (2015) ethnographic study of the historical, political and economic contingencies of the commodity chain of the Matsutake mushroom or Zoe Todd’s (2014) work on fish-human relations that inform Indigenous-State political discourses in Canada. Other scholars draw on recent work on affect theory to articulate the agency of the nonhuman participants in food systems. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of l’affect as “an ability to affect and be affected” provides the basis for thinking about other-than-human agency (1987). Jane Bennett follows Deleuze and Guattari to theorize a “vital materiality,” enhancing our understanding of the agentic contributions, or “thing-power” of nonhumans (2010). Affect, which Bennett equates with materiality, conceptualizes how other-than-human objects are both active and responsive. Bennett reads recent studies of omega-3 and hydrogenated fats through her concept of vital materiality, suggesting they demonstrate a “productive power intrinsic to foodstuff” where eating is experienced as “the formation of an assemblage of human and nonhuman elements, all of which bear some agentic capacity” (2010, 49). She notes, “Eating appears as a series of mutual transformations in which the border between inside and outside becomes blurry: my meal both is and is not mine; you both are and are not what you eat” (Bennett 2010, 49). In another example that turns an affective lens onto alternative food initiatives, feminist geographer Jessica Hayes-Conroy uses the concept of the 31 “visceral” to articulate how complex webs of material relations are both “embodied socio-spatial productions” and “a mechanism of daily political struggle” (Hayes-Conroy 2014, 32). This provides a compelling critique to the school gardening and cooking programs she studies, as their advocates make unfounded claims about the universally empowering exposure to “natural” foods. 2.7 Literature Review Analysis My project is motivated less so by limitations within each of these avenues in the literature, but by the lack of cross-cutting analysis that bridges substantially divergent research streams. A host of diverse and sometimes contradictory motivations bring food activists together, and despite these diverse concerns, they have created a “food movement” best understood as a complex assemblage. As the research conversation seeks to understand the complexities of this movement, I am interested to note the significant distance established between the initial summary of a public health approach to food insecurity, and the lack of any meaningful connection in that research to the material, embodied, affective take on food considered here. Given the way we could think of hunger or food insecurity or eating in general as a significantly affective experience, it seems worth asking why ontological considerations are not more widely taken up. For those studies where turning the dial on the aggregation of food insecurity statistics represents the most important measure of effectiveness, what is the relationship between this understanding of “security” and the embodied desires of bodies that eat or the collectivized desires of collaborators who gather together over potluck meals to organize? What is the relationship between effectiveness and alterity across diverse food initiatives? In my empirical approach to the Kamloops food system, I am interested to ask: does it make sense to bring ontological or affective considerations to bear on the pragmatics of community-based food 32 initiatives? Perhaps these initiatives are not meaningful responses in light of a thus far “impotent community response” to the significant public health concern that is food insecurity. Or perhaps they are fundamentally important to a more inclusive evaluation of the pragmatic ways communities are getting on with things.18 In light of this assessment, I have taken up an ethnographic project that enables holistic and cross-cutting analysis of these questions. To build on the strengths of the current literature, this project 1) has a robust empirical grounding with sufficient historical, economic and political context; 2) bridges problematic divisions within and between research approaches and 3) treats food systems as complex affective, socio-ecological assemblages. 18 My orientation toward pragmatism and “getting on with things” is inspired by both Haraway’s “staying with the trouble” (2016) and Tsing’s stories of collaborative survival amidst economic and ecological ruins (2015). 33 Chapter 3: Research Framework All that you touch you change All that you change changes you The only lasting truth is change God is change ~Octavia Butler 3.1 Thinking Expansively About What Counts My first foray into the Kamloops food system network was an interview with the founding chair of KFPC, Laura Kalina. At one point in our meeting, she opened the doors to the cupboard beside me to show that it was packed full of binders and spiral-bound reports. LH: Well, I was wondering, you know, what you had in terms of archives– LK: Oh geez, you know– LH: And that sort of thing– LK: I have saved every frickin’ thing, and actually, I'm planning on retiring in a few months, so everyone was so happy you were coming because I have every meeting, every newspaper article, every video, every– LH: OK, this is a treasure trove. I'm going to excavate your cupboard here– … LK: We'll be getting an office now at the Mount Paul [food centre], so that will be great once we have an office with a filing system, because right now you can see I've got everything like everywhere, and here's just some other examples, in terms of all the resources, here was my first book, that was my first one…I've got so many resources and manuals, like community kitchens, this was my research, this was my evaluation research report, I can leave some of these, if you want to read any of these things– LH: I definitely would love to– LK: This feasibility study, I did, this was for a food co-op…so there's the community kitchen manual, and all of these resources have gone everywhere, and then since then people have sort of done their own…I can grab more things for you. Tucked in amongst the binders and reports I spotted a jar of homemade pickles. I don’t recall mentioning the pickles at the time, and reviewing the interview transcript it is clear that I 34 did not. I don’t have a photograph, but the memory is resonant enough I can see the pickles in my mind even now. Two and a half years later, I stood at an open mic at the monthly network meeting celebrating Laura’s retirement and told the story of finding the pickles. It was near the end of an evening of roasts, celebrations, laughter and the odd tear, and the story seemed as resonant with the crowd as it was for me. Laura came up to the front, laughing, to give me a hug. “Those were your pickles, weren’t they?” she asked someone in the crowd. “I ate them. I did eat them.” I’ve invested a lot of thought over the last few years about why the pickles are resonant. I don’t know why the pickles were so resonant for me in that moment. Sure, it’s always a little disorienting to find pickles in your archives, but I’ve been doing work in the food system for years and it’s not that uncommon to find preserves stashed in unexpected places. I suspect my theoretical brain clicked on and thought, well, you’re supposed to be attentive to the other-than-human, and there it is, your first thing. But I hadn’t a hot clue what it really meant. Still don’t if I’m really being honest. Yet I still chose to share the anecdote at the retirement celebration, and there you go: the pickles were gifted to Laura, years ago, and then I gifted them to the community, and then she returned the gift to the chef with a compliment, and now the pickles are kin, like it or not. In this project, the devil is in the details (as many would say, but here I’m referencing Haraway in particular). As I note in my introduction, a basic underlying question motivates my work with KFPC: How can we expand our perspective of what things count in our common world? In this chapter, I outline how a more expansive definition of “what things count” structures the theoretical and 35 methodological framework that will guide my research.19 To reiterate my specific research questions: What value(s) are produced when the value of social initiatives is not calculated only in conventional economic terms? How and why do advocates choose to pursue the initiatives they do? Who gets to contribute to the process of deliberation about their value? And how? The Kamloops food system, and the many initiatives underway within it, form complex socio-ecosystems in the urban landscape. As such, my effort to understand them must think expansively about what counts; my research must be able to address all the human and other-than-human things that are assembled. Additionally, I frame these questions with the assumption that my collaborators in the community also have an expansive definition of what counts. Whether implicit or explicit, their definition of what counts is related to the way they create value and make decisions about initiatives. I think a conceptually-rich ethnographic praxis and a relational ontology can productively investigate how they do so. Most importantly, I want to consider these questions in light of Haraway’s simple but “game-changing” claim: “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe 19 The conditions of possibility for thinking more expansively about what constitutes the empirical ground for ethnography can be traced through a number of closely related turns of thought: the ontological turn, science and technology studies (STS), new materialism, affect theory, and increased attention to assemblages and world-making projects. Though there is significant diversity across these ontological approaches, I concur with feminist scholar Patti Lather’s claim that collectively, “What becomes thinkable is a science that grows out of practical engagement with the world within a different ontology of knowing: This might be the beginnings of not only (post) qualitative research but a science worthy of the world” (2016, 129). Eduardo Kohn suggests that a basic similarity within these projects is founded in the recognition of numerous ethical and political issues that cannot be treated as exclusively human problems. An ontological approach is reactionary (sometimes explicitly) to global ecological concerns and recognizes that anthropology as a purely humanistic endeavour lacks the conceptual tools needed to address these complex problems (Kohn 2015). For Kohn, ontology is “the study of ‘reality’—one that encompasses but is not limited to humanly constructed worlds” (2015, 312). The project for an “ontological anthropology” then becomes: the nonreductive ethnographic exploration of realities that are not necessarily socially constructed in ways that allow us to do conceptual work with them. I see this as a response to a conceptual, existential, ethical, and political problem—how to think about human life in a world in which a kind of life and future that is both beyond the human and constitutive of the human is now in jeopardy. (Kohn 2015, 315) 36 descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories” (Haraway 2016, 12).20 3.1.1 A Short Interlude to Comment on Citational Politics Citations have always been political, but with inspiration from Sara Ahmed, I want to be intentional and explicit about mine (2014). This project is in conversation with multiple bodies of work: food studies (exponentially proliferating and impossible to track comprehensively); community-based research methodology; the ontological turn (a diverse, moving target); Indigenous critiques of the ontological turn; science fiction; social movements; public policy. As research in food studies proliferates, and the impossibility of giving attention to this research in a systematic or comprehensive way becomes obvious, the importance of selectivity in what we choose to give our attention to becomes increasingly clear. What you pay attention to grows (brown 2017, 42). Even as I find myself animated by the potentials of ontological thinking, I am also deeply engaged with serious critiques of the ontological turn. Such critiques have originated from a number of Indigenous scholars who have engaged with the ontological turn, providing a uniquely important emphasis on tangible relational responsibilities and the continued impacts of settler-colonialism (Hunt 2014; Todd 2016; Watts 2013). Metis anthropologist and Indigenous studies scholar Zoe Todd observes that much of the scholarship around ontological anthropology ignores the voices of contemporary Indigenous scholars who have taken up ontological questions (2016). Todd advocates for treating Indigenous scholars “as thinkers in their own right, not just disembodied representatives of an amorphous Indigeneity that serves European intellectual or 20 Haraway attributes the origin of this concept to Strathern (1992). 37 political purposes, and not just as research subjects or vaguely defined ‘collaborators’. As dynamic Philosophers and Intellectuals, full stop” (2016, 7). Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee scholar Vanessa Watts articulates the Indigenous ontology “Place-Thought” to challenge the epistemological-ontological frame that dominates Euro-Western thinking. As she describes it, “Place-Thought is the non-distinctive space where place and thought were never separated because they never could or can be separated. Place-Thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts” (Watts 2013, 21). She emphasizes the difficulty of translating Place-Thought to Euro-Western concepts, noting that even among scholars who are beginning to acknowledge the importance of the non-human world, non-human agency is still incomplete and subjugated: even though the non-human “has been granted entrance into the human web of action, it is still relegated to a mere unwitting player in the game of human understandings” (Watts 2013, 30). The challenge of translation is further clarified: “Our cosmologies (and the theories within them) are righteously different and cannot be separated from the stuff of nature. When an Indigenous cosmology is translated through a Euro-Western process, it necessitates a distinction between place and thought. The result of this distinction is a colonized interpretation of both place and thought, where land is simply dirt and thought is only possessed by humans” (Watts 2013, 32). As a settler researcher, I seek to treat Indigenous contributions to ontological debates with gratitude, and reciprocate with tangible, structural actions that resist the “systematic indifference” and “epistemic ignorance” (Kuokkanen 2007, 5) that colonial universities have perpetuated. This requires, as geographer Juanita Sundberg suggests, engaging “scholarship 38 rooted in non-dualistic epistemic traditions” that can “address methodological challenges stemming from Eurocentric meta-narratives and dualist ontologies” (2014, 35). In keeping with this intention, there are some pieces of work I have intentionally excluded due to their authorship. It isn’t just a removal of the citations, but a chance to rethink my arguments without those ideas. And that practice is just as important, if not more so, when intentionally including underrepresented voices, as I am not just adding in citations but allowing their perspectives to actually shift my worldview. For me, that process of rethinking is still underway, and so this dissertation represents the best of what I am thinking (and who I am thinking with) right now, while leaving space to acknowledge that I have many more ideas yet to rethink, and many more layers of colonialism and patriarchy yet to peel back. 3.2 Guiding Concepts 3.2.1 Systems Although I included systems theory in the development of my initial research proposal, it didn’t become clear to me until I began to write up my findings just how essential it was to my approach. You need a depth of knowledge and depth of familiarity with a system to begin to sense where the shifts are occurring or where shifts may be emerging. This is the first research study in which I’ve engaged relationally to this depth and needed a way of navigating through contexts inside of contexts. Perhaps just as the interdependencies of a system don’t come into view without deep relational engagement, the importance of systems thinking doesn’t truly become evident until you’re right in the thick of it. My approach to systems thinking is informed by Gregory Bateson ([1972] 2000), who was a consummate systems thinker, suggesting that humans are part of “ecologies of mind,” eschewing the duality of mind/body and form/substance and attributing ecological crises to our 39 inability to understand these complex systems. There is an invitation here to think about doing science differently. Bateson is clear to identify the reflexive position of the scientist: “We are not outside the ecology for which we plan – we are always and inevitably a part of it. Herein lies the charm and the terror of ecology – that the ideas of this science are irreversibly becoming a part of our own ecosocial system” ([1972] 2000, 512). Bateson identifies the fundamental (and if technologically enabled, lethal) error in any effort to “separate mind from the structure in which it is immanent, such as human relationship, the human society, or the ecosystem” ([1972] 2000, 493). Later, in Mind and Nature, Bateson would write: At present there is no existing science whose special interest is the combining of pieces of information. But I shall argue that the evolutionary process must depend upon such double increments of information. Every evolutionary step is an addition of information to an already existing system. Because this is so, the combinations, harmonies, and discords between successive pieces and layers of information will present many problems of survival and determine many directions of change. (G. Bateson 2002). Nora Bateson, Gregory’s daughter, and an important systems thinker in her own right, has made significant contributions to continuing her father’s project. Nora suggests that “Theory doesn’t count until you have it in your elbows. It is easy to talk about interrelational processes and interconnectedness in nice clean impartial language…Try dancing it. Try kissing it. Try learning to taste it. Bring it to your fingertips.”21 These thoughts really resonate for me as someone who came into systems thinking through community-based practice. Building on her father’s important question, “What is the pattern which connects?” Nora introduces the concept of “warm data,” which she defines as transcontextual information about the interrelationships that integrate a complex system (N. Bateson 2017). Warm data brings not just context but multiple contexts, or transcontextual information, into view. Additionally, her 21 Nora Bateson, Facebook post, October 31, 2020. 40 works helps to clarify the relationship between sense-making and change-making that is enacted by researcher-activists like me and my co-conspirators: “Systems change is not about fixing the system. It is about sense-making. The fixing will happen by happenchance, not direct correctives… but only when the interdependencies come into view” (N. Bateson 2019). 3.2.2 Relationships As my systems orientation would suggest, my own relational entanglements and reciprocal commitments to KFPC and its members and our other-than-human kin in Secwepemcúl̓ecw are integral to the research process. Much of Kim TallBear’s recent work has emphasized the importance of being in good relation-with human and other-than-human kin. She writes: But indigenous folks might have something quite different in mind. I hear them talking about your need to take on the obligations of kinship. This isn’t about indigenous peoples being incorporated into your world. It’s about you learning how to live here in relation with this place and with peoples who were long co-constituted in relation to these lands and waters and skies. You clearly did not learn how to do that very well. I want to also emphasize one idea that the TRC calls for action don’t sufficiently address: Kinship obligations to nonhuman kin were also violated by the settler state. The decimation of humans and nonhumans in these continents has gone hand in hand. When one speaks of genocide in the Americas it cannot be understood in relation to the European holocaust, for example, that is seen as having a beginning and an end, and which is focused on humans alone. Our genocide in the Americas included and continues to include our other-than-human relatives. (TallBear 2016) In thinking about my approach to becoming a good relation specifically with my research collaborators, I have drawn on Aimee Meredith Cox’s concept of unconditional relationality, where the relationships formed during research have a life outside of the research and are not solely beholden to the condition that these interactions service the anthropological project. These are ways of being with one another that center the process of learning people (not learning about them, but learning who they are) in context and in real-time. These are ways of being with one another that lead us to new realizations and help us co-craft innovative solutions to the project of living in this world that may or may not directly respond to our initial research preoccupations. (2018) 41 Cox further suggests that unconditional relationality “necessarily changes us, so that we are equipped with tools such as courageous empathy that allow us to take generative action” (2018). Working from a praxis of unconditional relationality has transformed me in ways that have made me more capable of response to our collective matters of care. However, leaving this understanding of being in good relation-with solely in the realm of my individual relationships within my research context misses much of the radical nature of TallBear’s point, which is the ways that we are implicated in broader structures of relations: ecologically destructive capitalist logics and ongoing colonial violence. Learning to be a good relation while living in Secwepemcúl̓ecw feels a lot like being radicalized. As I note in my introduction, I view capitalism and colonialism as destructive systems that are poor ways of organizing how we relate to one another and that should be dismantled as quickly as possible. Imagining the future of what comes after is an open question that we are only at the beginning of being able to answer. 3.2.3 Response-ability I follow Beverley Skeggs’ (2002) distinction between telling the self (being reflexive) and praxis (doing reflexivity), which as she describes “is the tendency to think that the problems of power, privilege and perspective can be dissolved by inserting one’s self into the account and proclaiming that reflexivity has occurred in practice. Telling and doing are two very different forms of activity” (Skeggs 2002, 361). Instead, a reflexive praxis is one that “understands the relations of production, that is aware of the possibilities for appropriation, that knows about the constraints of disciplinary techniques and the power relations of location and position, and that does not reify and reproduce the categorization that enable exploitation and symbolic violence” 42 (Skeggs 2002, 364). 22 This position offers a blunt condemnation of an ethnography in which reflexivity is limited to self-confession. It is similar to the position taken by Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang, as they seek to redefine narrower parameters for decolonization, in which reflexivity is framed as a move to innocence that relieves the settler scholar “of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all. In fact, settler scholars may gain professional kudos or a boost in their reputations for being so sensitive or self-aware” (2012, 10). In order to better conceptualize what a reflexive praxis looks like, Donna Haraway’s (2016) cultivation of “response-ability” is helpful. She frames the term as a means of becoming capable, as a “praxis of care and response” (Haraway 2016, 105). Response-ability in stories of complex accountabilities is necessarily incomplete and partial, but the details matter. As Haraway observes: “It is no longer news that corporations, farms, clinics, labs, homes, sciences, technologies, and multipecies lives are entangled in multiscalar, multitemporal, multimaterial worlding; but the details matter. The details link actual beings to actual response-abilities” (Haraway 2016, 115). That many actors are irrevocably assembled within the Kamloops food system is already evident: it is the details that lead to response-abilities. Importantly, the details of my own accountabilities form the foundations of this project. Methodologically, this becoming capable requires something different than what critique has given us (or perhaps more appropriately, what critique has failed to give us). Karen Barad proposes instead a principle of “diffractively reading insights through one another, building new insights, and attentively and carefully reading for differences that matter in their fine details, 22 I define praxis as Paulo Freire advocates: “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (2000, 51). 43 together with the recognition that there intrinsic to this analysis is an ethics that is not predicated on externality but rather entanglement” (2012, 50). Matters of care are added to the matters of concern Latour defines: “Being is threaded through with mattering. Epistemology, ontology, and ethics are inseparable. Matters of fact, matters of concern, and matters of care are shot through with one another. Or to put it in yet another way: matter and meaning cannot be severed” (Barad 2012, 69). 3.2.4 Community-based participatory research “What good is any anthropology that doesn’t imagine better lives and futures, and then work to make them real?” (Oman-Reagan 2018). I am deeply invested in imagining better lives and futures for the people and the land that I’m learning to be in good relation-with, and as such, I aim for concrete, pragmatic outcomes – taking the theoretical concepts I outline above into practice. This is the concept of praxis that Paulo Freire advocates: “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (2000, 51). I have chosen to actualize the guiding concepts I frame above in ways informed by community-based participatory research (CBPR) principles. I frame CBPR as a relational and transformative praxis, rather than a specific set of research methods or techniques: CBPR “is not simply a community outreach strategy but represents a systematic effort to incorporate community participation and decision making, local theories of etiology and change, and community practices into the research effort” (Wallerstein and Duran 2006). CBPR has given me a vocabulary for engaging with community collaborators that has allowed me to communicate the ethos of the methodology I want to embody, without falling into academic jargon. 44 3.2.5 Summary Taken together, read diffractively and folded in, these guiding concepts form the basis of a relational ontology that, together with a commitment to thinking from the ground, frame my research. What kind of ethnography emerges? What provocations result from a more expansive definition of what counts? • Ethnography must be response-able. Being self-reflexive is insufficient; rather ethnography must ensure reflexivity occurs in practice and in the context of community collaboration. Response-able ethnography does not blunt its political or public voice; • Ethnographic practice leads to a valuable conceptual repertoire that would not be possible without attention to the event-richness, historical conjunctures, conceptual disjunctures or affective force of being in a field situation; • Ethnography is ontological. It destabilizes nature/culture or fact/value binaries and embraces ontological plurality, following all kinds of human and other-than-human things and their relations; • Finally, ethnography is poetic in the sense that it is attuned to the unexpected and affective; as well as the ways the anthropologist can be remade through such a mode of engagement with the world. All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. 3.3 Methods An ethnographic approach to study the Kamloops food security network, informed by the kind of relational ontology defined above, can productively investigate complex socio-ecological networks. My approach combined a rich, collaborative engagement with people with an awareness of how destabilizing the nature/culture binary enables us to think critically about all 45 the actants/things that assemble around community issues. In order to analyze how community collaborators negotiated processes of valuation and make decisions about social initiatives, I used participant observation, interviewing, and archival research to investigate the things at work in the Kamloops food security assemblage. 3.3.1 Participant Observation The core method of this study was participant observation. I began attending public KFPC events as a community member in October 2016, to introduce myself to members of the community and begin to scope a research proposal that would be relevant to their concerns and interests. I presented a brief summary of my proposed research to the group in February 2017 for discussion and feedback and finalized this proposal over the next few months. Behavioural Research Ethics Board approval for the study was granted in October 2017. Between October 2017 and May 2019, my fieldnotes document that I attended at least 71 meetings or events (the actual number is higher as instances of multiple meetings per day are counted as a single entry in my notes). Even though I discontinued detailed field notes after May 2019, I continued participation in KFPC meetings up to the time of writing (and intend to continue for the foreseeable future). I continued to keep documentation in the form of minutes or meeting notes and use this information as the basis for any observations post-May 2019 that I have included in my findings. The types of meetings, events and spaces I participated in are organized loosely into the following types: • KFPC Network Meetings. KFPC holds monthly potluck meetings on the first Wednesday evening of each month. These meetings typically include time for sharing organizational updates, informal networking, the “best potluck in Kamloops”, and a 46 topical focus such as a guest speaker, spotlight on a specific organization or program, or facilitated activity. • KFPC Board Meetings. Board meetings are held monthly on the third Wednesday evening of each month, and include elected Board Directors, the part-time contractors who make up the distributed leadership team, and occasionally guests or network members. I attended KFPC Board meetings as a guest participant beginning in October 2017, and in August 2018, I was elected as a volunteer Board Director and transitioned to attending in that capacity. • Community events and meetings. There were several events organized by KFPC or other community organizations, focused on or related to community food security. For example, I attended Picnics Not Pipelines, a family-oriented event organized by the Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty to protest the Trans-Mountain pipeline, Nourish, a full-day workshop on the root causes of household food insecurity, and the annual Pumpkins of Light Festival at Gardengate. I also attended relevant municipal council meetings and engagement sessions at the municipal and provincial levels. • Purpose focused meetings. As I became involved with specific projects, many of the meetings I attended (and sometimes organized and chaired) were focused on the needs of those projects. • One on one or small group meetings. I met regularly for coffee with key collaborators. • Urban agriculture spaces. I held a community garden plot in the Peterson Creek garden for three years (2017-2019), and volunteered occasionally with the Gleaning Abundance Program and the Seed Library. 47 3.3.2 Interviews I conducted several interviews early in the research process with leaders and decision makers in the Kamloops food security network. One interview, with KFPC founder Laura Kalina, was completed prior to the start of the project as I was scoping the research needs in the community, and published as part of Locale Journal’s food activist interview series (Kalina 2016). Once the project proposal was approved, I conducted seven interviews over the first several months of research. I conducted an additional three interviews toward the end of my data collection, with individuals involved with the economic development projects that are outlined in detail in Chapter 6. While these interviews were open-ended, some general questions along essential themes guided the discussion: • The participant’s background, experience and expertise with food systems • The participant’s understanding of the evolution of food security efforts in Kamloops over the last 30 years • The participant’s perception of goals, motivations, successes and challenges of food security initiatives currently in place in Kamloops 3.3.3 Archival Research I drew on archival research to provide historical context for the development of the current Kamloops food security initiatives. My intention has been to understand the current work in terms of earlier and related initiatives in the past, developing an ongoing history that reflects how KFPC’s approach has unfolded and continues to unfold in the community. I had access to all of KFPC’s available records, dating back to the formation of the community kitchen programs in 1991. These records included a variety of documents: agendas, minutes, budgets, 48 grant applications, feasibility studies, project reports, local news clippings, best practice guides, strategic planning notes and other ephemeral materials. Paper copies of these documents were kept in roughly chronological form until the mid-2000s. At that point, as members transitioned to digital file storage, there are several years of patchy records where paper records were incomplete and digital records were not retained in a centralized way. Beginning in 2012, digital records were maintained in a shared google drive, and I also had full access to these records. Since my primary research specialization is not archival, my approach was not systematic and should not be considered equivalent to what a professional archivist could have achieved with the material. Instead, I prioritized analysis that would support the current work and aspirations of my fellow collaborators. For example, given KFPC’s attempts to start a social enterprise and assess the feasibility of a food hub (projects I describe in detail in Chapter 6), I investigated more thoroughly the records related to past economic development projects, and contributed these findings in real time to support the food hub development process. I also prioritized records that would help me to clarify or validate information I learned via participant observation or interviews, and vice versa – targeting specific interview questions or conversations with KFPC members who could help to fill in gaps in the records or clarify confusing information. I coded my findings multiple ways: chronologically and by programs/projects to support an accurate organizational history, but also by themes that emerged through analysis of my other data, including network meeting structure and relationship formation, funding, economic vitality, strategic planning, policy development, Indigenous food sovereignty and regional partnerships. In the discussion of my findings in the following chapters, I am interested to situate KFPC’s organizational history in the broader historical, political and economic climate of the 49 Kamloops region. I had originally intended to conduct primary archival research at the Kamloops Museum and Archives (KMA), focused on historical developments in the regional agricultural sector. I did make one visit to KMA – in keeping with my guiding relational approach, I went to assist a fellow KFPC network member who was compiling photos and other information for the 40th anniversary celebration of the Kamloops Regional Farmers’ Market. Together we reviewed KMA’s pre-compiled files on the Farmers’ Market and agriculture sector and spent most of an afternoon sorting through a set of slides from the early years of the market that had recently been donated by a local photography society. As insightful as this experience was, I quickly realized that further archival research on regional trends was going to be beyond my capacity given the full scope of the project and my intent to prioritize immediate community concerns generated by my CBPR approach. Though I do still include some discussion in my findings of broader regional conditions, I draw on secondary research and insights from the interviews I conducted to form this analysis. 3.3.4 Sensory Attentiveness Because participant observation, interviewing, and archival research are traditionally oriented to human actors, I aimed to employ what Bennett (2010) calls a “sensory attentiveness” that I hoped would animate my orientation to human and other-than-human matters of concern. I expected that the emergent properties of the field and myself in the field would largely determine the practice, and that I would experiment with ways of capturing the affective dimensions of interactions between actors as they resonate in the public garden space on a busy downtown street or in the hum of a business meeting conducted with potluck leftovers behind it. I also expected my attentiveness to go beyond the local setting of Kamloops food spaces. Tsing suggests that an appreciation for current conditions of earthwide precarity enables us to notice 50 the patchiness that is “open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life” (2015, 4). Broader public affects, particularly those related to precarity or uncertainty, may “shiver” through the system, leading to an economy more affectively activating than effectively rationalizing (Massumi 2015, 13). I hoped that my sensory attentiveness would accomplish both a broad and narrow awareness of the affective. I often found that my attempts at sensory awareness were indistinguishable from what I had traditionally understood participant observation or ethnography to be. Maybe I was “doing it wrong” or maybe ethnography is already able to accommodate such sensing in robust ways. For the most part, I kept it simple and attuned my senses when the situation naturally inclined that way: Times to eat and share food, conversations over coffee, friends to hug, soil to plant in, zucchinis to harvest. I engaged with somatic memories as I reviewed and analyzed my data. For example, I conducted one interview while sick with a flu, and the gravel in my voice and occasional coughing are audible in the recording. My analysis of the material is inflected with my memories of feeling internal pressure to carry on with the interview as scheduled, my consciousness not to shake hands with the interviewee, and my attempts to suppress coughing while I knew the recorder was running. In contrast, far more of my memories are inflected with the joyous upswell of being in the right place at the right time doing work that I loved. For example, KFPC’s 2018 Annual General Meeting was held outside under the small fruit orchard at the Gardengate urban farm. It rained briefly as I was driving to the meeting, but the sun broke through as I arrived, and I still can connect to the sense memory of the beauty of the setting and the people in it bubbling up. 51 3.4 Analysis and Interpretation Recursive analysis is a textbook approach for most ethnographers.23 Although I draw on the robust framework for analysis this longstanding approach offers, I note that the ontological turn in anthropology adds a relational depth to recursivity that I find useful. Amiria Salmond comments that for the ontological anthropologist, the task is not to find a definitive statement on the nature of reality, but instead is to “generate relations with others and to account for alterity in ways that leave the question of ‘what is?’ productively open” (2014, 169). In her view, the recursive nature of this project is essential: “Instead of resolving difference with recourse to universal categories, or dissolving it in pragmatic appeals to naturalized knowledge, the recursive strategy is to approach alterity relationally—that is, to see difference as a relation and to address it through relations with others” (Salmond 2014, 178). This is ethnography as a study of relations with relations (Wagner 1975; Strathern 1988), and it guides my understanding of what a recursive analysis can accomplish. In pragmatic terms, this means I follow the actors, human and other-than-human alike, by studying my data as it emerged, personally transcribing and re-living interviews, writing and re-writing fieldnotes, reading and re-reading documents, and intentionally forming a close, affective connection with the data. I also engaged my community in the interpretive process in a number of ways: communicating with KFPC staff and board about their research needs, hashing out my emerging theories over coffee, providing regular research updates to the network, and creating both informal and formal opportunities for the community to offer feedback. 23 See for example LeCompte and Schensul who define recursive analysis as the cyclical or continuous interaction between inductive/deductive analysis, data and hunches, until a stable pattern appears (2010, 15). 52 Chapter 4: A Critical History of the Kamloops Food Policy Council Community is necessarily emergent. It can’t be made by outside forces. It can’t be manipulated with ingenuity. It must rise up. ~Nicole Lavelle | Codes and Questions for Anyone Who Goes Anywhere I had potluck angst the first time I attended a KFPC network meeting. Potluck angst is not an uncommon phenomenon, as I would later discover that even some of KFPC’s most experienced and knowledgeable food systems organizers shared this feeling. When you have been invited to “the best potluck in town,” it’s understandable that you might feel a bit intimidated.24 Based on what I had in my kitchen at the time, I decided on a roasted beet hummus and homemade crackers. The beets were from the farmer’s market, but the chickpeas were from a tin, purchased at Superstore (origin unknown). It was simple (you don’t want to look like you’re trying too hard), easy to transport and didn’t require reheating (who knows how much oven space there will be), vegetarian (maybe they don’t eat meat?), featured a local veggie (are members even allowed to shop at regular grocery stores?), and hopefully tasty (honestly it was fine but maybe a little bland). It was fine. I picked up my jar at the end of the night, with most of its contents gone, slipped it discretely into my bag and left for home, relieved to have passed the minimum threshold test for potluck success. Two years later I once again had fresh beets from the farmer’s market in my kitchen, and an internet search for a recipe led me to a roasted beet dip.25 It was much tastier than my previous attempt, and when I picked up my jar, scraped clean, to head home, one of my fellow 24 I should note that it is perfectly acceptable to attend and eat at a KFPC potluck without bringing anything at all, and several community members do this every month with the full support of the group. My angst was almost entirely self-imposed. 25 Because no food-related dissertation is complete without a recipe, you can find this one by Rebecca Dwyer on Always Nourished blog, available at https://www.nourishedtheblog.com/vegan-roasted-beet-dip/. 53 collaborators waylaid me to ask for the recipe. “It was so delicious, I can’t wait to make it,” she said. The meeting was our AGM for 2018, and it was held in the small orchard at the entrance to Gardengate’s urban farm. We stood under the fruit trees and chatted for a few minutes in the waning summer evening, while I held my jar, and then I went home. Figure 2: 2018 Annual General Meeting potluck table Source: Kamloops Food Policy Council, Reprinted with permission. Taking her inspiration from Octavia Butler’s protagonists, adrienne marie brown writes the following in Emergent Strategy: 54 Octavia was concerned with scale – understanding that what happens at the interpersonal level is a way to understand the whole of society. In many of her books, she shows us how radical ideas spread through conversation, questions, one to one interactions. Social movements right now are also fractal, practicing at a small scale what we most want to see at the universal level. No more growth or scaling up before actually learning through experience. (2017, 22) On the one hand, an anecdote about a recipe is fairly inconsequential – there isn’t at the surface anything particularly meaningful or vulnerable about a passing compliment about a potluck dish or a recipe exchange. For me though, because of the parallel contrast with my first potluck experience, it’s an example of the way my own capacity and confidence have been built over years of work and relationship development. It’s an example of the small ways community belonging and connection are forged. These relational entanglements form the core of my understanding of what the KFPC is and does. Or as brown would put it: “what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system” (2017, 53). I think these small scale patterns apply not just to our relational connections but to the programs and initiatives that have bubbled up over KFPC’s history as well. One network member shared with me in an email, “Other projects like public produce (the garden at Tranquille and Elm), I think they are an evolving concept – e.g. stepping stone to other projects.” That is a perspective that I have come to share over my time with KFPC, and one I believe to be reflected in the data I’ve collected and compiled here. It’s no small effort to write a history of an emergent grassroots effort like the KFPC. Early in my research, another network member shared with me a memory of their experience attending a meeting with a funder about a funding application KFPC had submitted: [The funder] said, “Well, who are you guys?” and we said, well we used to be an incubator but now we’re keeping gleaning and we do this and we do this and they didn’t get it – after an hour we could not explain, we don’t have that elevator pitch because we’ve done so much but it’s kind of been scattered and we want to generally improve food security but it’s kind of weird in that we’ve done different things and it’s hard to explain to somebody who it is exactly that we are. 55 Although I think being able to describe KFPC with more clarity has emerged with time and practice, it’s still a challenge. I would like to acknowledge all the KFPC members who contributed insights and memories to the history that I outline in this chapter. I start with a retelling of KFPC’s history, identifying the context for its emergence and following its timeline since 1995. I then provide a summary of the broader historical, political and economic trends in the region that have shaped KFPC’s work. 4.1 Programs, Partnerships and Policy Since 1995 4.1.1 Formation … I thought, “Well, I’m just going to work in Kamloops.” And then from the low-income women, we started community gardens. It really became apparent that we needed to develop a food policy council because it’s one thing to do action but if we don’t have policy then we’re not really getting long term success ~Laura Kalina The Kamloops Food Policy Council met for the first time on November 30, 1995, making it the longest running grassroots food policy council in Canada, and building on a confluence of existing community factors that allowed it to emerge at that point in time. Laura Kalina, its instigating force, started work in Kamloops as a public health dietitian in 1987 with the Thompson Region Health Board.26 She quickly became engaged with household food insecurity, starting community kitchen programming for the low-income women she was supporting (Kalina 2015; 2016). Ready to broaden the conversation beyond the social service partners involved in the community kitchen project, Kalina organized a forum for World Food Day. Held on October 16, 1995 at the South Central Health Unit, the event brought in as guest speakers food activists Cathleen and Brewster Kneen and Herb Barbolet from Farm Folk City Folk (Soneff 2017). The 26 The Thompson Region Health Board would be restructured in 2001 into the Interior Health Authority, one of five regional health authorities that govern, plan and deliver health-care services within the province of BC. 56 event was attended by 40 people from across a variety of sectors and interests (Barbolet and Kalina 1995). A key partner in the forum was Al Oliver, the local representative from the BC Ministry of Agriculture, who was able to draw in connections from the farming community and expand the reach of the event (Soneff 2017). In the final report that followed, the organizers summarized forum’s objective: It is the purpose of this forum to identify committed individuals from the community who will develop and institute an ongoing and flexible food security strategy for the Kamloops area. These individuals will be politicians, business and community leaders and individual citizens. The strategy will be designed to be self-sufficient. A model operated almost entirely by the individuals who will derived the most benefit (i.e. low income earners) is visualized. (Barbolet and Kalina 1995) The invitation to attend the first meeting of the KFPC was sent to a steering committee of key individuals identified through the forum. The group would meet six times over the following year, merge with a separate Community Gardens Committee in the fall of 1996, and incorporate as a society early in 1997. While most meetings in the early years were held during the workday, the first potluck meeting (of what would become a well-established tradition of gathering over food) was held on November 12, 1998 at the Ministry of Agriculture Office Board Room. From the Chairperson report at the first AGM of the society, held in 1998: In closing, the Kamloops Food Policy Council as a registered society, is entering into a new era of recognition and legitimacy. We are now being invited to the table to discuss food issues with groups not only in British Columbia but across Canada. Our big challenge will be to keep food security on the political agenda and work towards our vision of: ‘all people, at all times, will have enough food for well-being.’ The ability to bring together this group in a way that cohered relied in part on the foundation of community organizing around food that had already taken place. One of these foundations is the Kamloops Farmers’ Market, started in 1978 in an attempt to support local, often organic, producers, by group of concerned citizens with an explicitly social justice focus (Grube-Cavers 2011; Soneff 2017). In the fall of 1977 an ecumenical group called the Kamloops 57 Committee for World Development Education, made up of mostly women from the United Church of Canada, the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, the Presbyterian Church, and the Kamloops Chapter of the YMCA-YWCA, hosted a guest speaker from the Dominican Republic at their “10 Days for World Development” event, focused on food and hunger. Based on her research compiling an oral history of the Kamloops Farmers’ Market, Annalise Grube-Cavers, the daughter of one of the market’s founding vendors, described how this committee would go on to organize a seminar on Food Self-Reliance and a series of meetings, advertised openly to the community, where residents could collectively discuss the challenging questions around thinking globally and acting locally, and participate in planning a market that would support local producers. The market would open later that summer with four vendors (Grube-Cavers 2011). These radical underpinnings would stay with the market throughout the years, and spill over to support the new work of the KFPC. For example, early supporters of the market and long-time vendors Paula and Mendel Rubinson participated in the formation of the KFPC and Paula would co-chair for many years. In a recent book highlighting Kamloops’ social justice efforts over the years, local authors Rose Soneff and Tracy Hoot wrote: “Mendel Rubinson was a strong believer that the Farmers’ Market should stay ‘real’. Other farmers in the market and the original organizers agreed. Mendel chaired the Farmers’ Market Society board for 20 years because he believed the market should be managed and controlled by farmers” (Soneff 2017, 76). Charitable food services were also being created in the community at the same time. What is now the Kamloops Food Bank was started in 1981, by Hank Woodland as “Hank’s Cupboard” at the Kamloops United Church with support from the ecumenical community 58 (Soneff 2017). This was part of the growing encroachment of US-style charitable food banking that would move into Canada alongside the deep recession of the 1980s (Riches 2018). These wider community foundations are acknowledged by KFPC members even now, as a long-time Kamloops resident and KFPC network member shared: We had one of the first farmers’ markets and I know some of those people at the United Church, a lot of them work for government, same as the Anglican Church, they started old people's homes and other care facilities which are now being run by other organizations but I guess the point is we've had some very fine organizations within this community that have done some really good community work and we've had this large section of the population with a lot of capacity and strong commitments to this community who have built lots of organizations, so the food policy council, it was kind of the first but really there was a lot of that kind of stuff where the community came together for lots of good things. Building on that insight, my research findings suggest that ultimately where the KFPC was particularly successful was in its ability to come together for lots of good things in a lasting way, in which small changes would build capacity for an expansive vision. 4.1.2 Initiatives I think that the food policy council here is very unique, like the more research I do into food policy councils the more I notice how, I don’t want to say powerful, yeah I guess, how powerful we are and how our long-standing community representation, we have a lot of people who really support us and we haven’t really pissed anybody off, we’ve been doing a lot of change, we’ve been really working hard, it’s shifting into a more long-term sustainable model but I think that there’s a lot of people who really care about the council and its future and I think that we’re really lucky….We have these laurels to stand up on, I think it’s really special and I think we have to figure out how to keep that. Like, our history is rich. ~KFPC Network Member 4.1.2.1 Community Kitchens and Community Gardens Community food security programing in Kamloops started with the launch of community kitchens in 1991, together with funding to support a two-year research study and program evaluation. Continued operation of the community kitchen program after this incubation period was handed off to Kamloops Home Support Service, now called Interior Community Services (ICS). 59 If single-parent women are at risk for nutritional problems, why are so few nutrition programs directed towards this target group? This question caused me great concern; so, I set out to learn more. I visited the Kamloops Food Bank and Outreach Society, read pertinent journal articles, and spoke to community groups and individuals familiar with the concerns of poor people. I experienced shock my first day at the Food Bank. I could not believe the number of families using the Food Bank, nor the despair many of them faced. These families were hungry! Other than the Food Bank, I discovered there were no programs available to assist these families in securing nutritious food. As a health professional specializing in nutrition, I felt compelled to redirect my programs from the traditional, middle class family to the poor and disadvantaged. I decided to change my focus from general nutritional programming, which involved group lecturing and media, to collective action surrounding food security issues. I decided to try a new approach to teaching and to program design which would empower people to make changes in their lives. (Kalina and Crawford 1993, 3–4) Together with Susan Crawford, her research partner, Kalina described the success of the program: “A community development approach to health promotion, using participatory research methodology successfully minimized the barriers that inhibited the participants from trying new foods, increased their personal skill in shopping and cooking low-cost nutritious food, and increased social support among the participants” (Kalina and Crawford 1993, i). Community gardens were also a significant early focus for the group. Only one existing community garden (Crestline Community Garden) was present in 1995, when the KFPC was established, so the group turned to championing more community gardens. The Peterson Creek garden was added in 1996, followed by the Sahali garden in 1997. The local news highlighted their success: The food policy council has been instrumental in attempting to plant the community garden seed for several years…The council is hoping to expand the community gardens concept in 1997, eyeing more city land as well as land from developers, churches, community groups or individuals. The new garden had been a piece of out-of-the-way lawn that required constant mowing until it was planted in early June. (McRae, n.d.) In 2006, community garden coordination was handed over to ICS with ongoing funding from the City of Kamloops. Today, the current iterations of the community kitchens and 60 community garden programs are still operated by ICS, now out of a dedicated facility, the Mt. Paul Community Food Centre. They describe how their programs aim to “provide people with access to high-quality food in a dignified setting that doesn’t compromise their self-worth. People learn cooking and gardening skills there, and kids get their hands dirty in the garden and kitchen in ways that expand their tastebuds and help them to make healthier food choices” (Interior Community Services n.d.). The initiation of the Community Food Centre (CFC) came from a KFPC network member, who was working at the time as the local animator for the provincially run Farm to School program. Several members of the KFPC Board at the time were interested in being the lead organization or incubator for the CFC, but were concerned KFPC didn’t have the capacity to take it on. Based on the criteria of the program27, which included the need for a dedicated building, ICS was determined to be the appropriate organization to pursue the opportunity. One of the staff members from the program shared how the process unfolded once that decision was made: In 2014, ICS was recognized as a Good Food Organization under Community Food Centres Canada (CFCC). That designation meant that our programming would focus on healthy, whole food delivered in three main areas of focus: food skills, food access and education and engagement. We promote and use local, healthy sources of food through our programming focused on the whole food system with the belief that everyone is entitled to access dignified food…. In 2016, CFCC was interested in expanding the CFC sites across the remainder of Canada. We were thrilled to take our partnership to the next level and start the journey to become the first CFC in BC…. In September of 2016 we began negotiations to purchase the current building we are in. We worked closely with the owners to develop a plan that met both their and our needs. The building was a former United Church which was in need of many repairs and updates and was costly for the small congregation to maintain. After both parties were comfortable with the terms, ICS purchased the building and began our capital campaign to change the space to a CFC. 27 Founded in 2012, Community Food Centres Canada was an attempt to nationally scale up a model originated by The Stop Community Food Centre, based in Toronto (Community Food Centres Canada n.d.). 61 4.1.2.2 Gardengate In 1999, KFPC started working toward another flagship program: Gardengate, what is today a small organic urban farm and horticultural training centre for individuals living with addictions or mental health conditions. The project started with a presentation to a KFPC network meeting, by a champion from the Arbutus Vocational Society, who was keen to start a vocational agricultural project to “provide rehabilitation programming opportunities for mental health consumers” but had stalled at the point of acquiring land, realizing they needed “to establish a more profound community connection that would allow the organization to develop opportunities for mental health consumers in Kamloops” (KFPC Minutes June 21, 1999). KFPC was eager to contribute their community development perspective, and by the following year, funding had been obtained, a lease from the Thompson Health Region Board had been secured, and in late fall 2000 the site was plowed. The first program participants were welcomed the following spring. Now managed by Open Door Group, Gardengate has continued over time to expand its programming, without losing sight of its people-driven mandate. From the perspective of the current program manager: Our mantra is that it has to be people over product. If we're just focusing on the plants or the produce or the produce sales or the need to generate revenue or whatever else, we're missing the point of why we're here. So while those pieces are necessary and important to what we do, they mean absolutely nothing without the people that are facilitating that. So we've done the best that we can with guidance from people that are accessing the program but also with our own knowledge set to grow and develop the program over time. In 2020, Gardengate expects to expand again, with the development of a new facility. “Our proposed new facility, equipped with a fully functioning commercial kitchen, will allow us to serve more participants and expand the range of skills we help nurture, such as cooking, carpentry, sales, marketing and machine maintenance” (Open Door Group n.d.). This new 62 expansion circles back around to potential partnerships with the KFPC, opening opportunities for the new commercial kitchen space to be used by KFPC’s Food Hub pilot program (see Chapter 6). 4.1.2.3 FoodSHARE FoodSHARE, a zero-waste food recovery program operated by the Kamloops Food Bank, has been another flagship program incubated by the KFPC, and it continues to put Kamloops on the map for food waste reduction. The program is currently the largest of its kind operated by a food bank in Western Canada, and at the time it started, there were no comparable programs Canada-wide. In 2003, the Food Bank, which had recently moved to a new location, was working toward a more expanded mandate to include more programs and outreach, and was interested in “getting involved with the community and food security” (KFPC Minutes Sept 9, 2003). These conversations would lead to the formation of a Food Recovery Working Group in March 2004, drawing together the KFPC, City of Kamloops, and the three largest emergency food agencies: Salvation Army, Kamloops Food Bank & Outreach Society, and New Life Mission. In November 2004, KFPC secured a contract with Interior Health to initiate a community-based food recovery project. The intended outcome was the development and short-term implementation of “a Food Recovery Project consisting of organizing food donations, donation systems and distribution systems related to food recovery from food service establishments and food retailers in the Kamloops area” (IH Contract Nov 1, 2004). The Food Recovery Working Group would use the mission statement: “More Food. Less Waste” and KFPC provided the project management during the initial implementation. 63 Once the partnerships were established and the project up and running, operations were handed over to the Kamloops Food Bank. The KFPC would also publish a best practice guide to share their knowledge about creating a food recovery program called “Creating a food recovery program: a step by step guide” (Kalina 2007). At the start of the program, FoodSHARE would rescue 3500-4000 pounds of food each month from 14 donors and distribute to 12 community agencies (Kalina 2015). Now, according to the Kamloops Food Bank, more than 11 million pounds of food have been diverted from the landfill since the program started, which has been distributed to 7,000 clients, 60 community agencies that make meals and 6 farmers who use expired product for animal feed (Kamloops Food Bank n.d.). 4.1.2.4 Public Produce Public produce, or edible landscaping on publicly accessible lands, was initiated in Kamloops in 2011, when KFPC brought Darrin Nordahl, author of Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture to speak to the community. Following his visit, KFPC would initiate a public produce garden on a donated lot in the 100 block of Victoria St. KFPC received a grant from Interior Health to hire a project coordinator and the work was done by volunteers. In its first year, the site functioned as a demonstration garden for public education by the Thompson Shuswap Master Gardeners. In 2012 the City planted a permanent public produce garden at McDonald Park on the North Shore, and in 2013, added a public orchard in Riverside Park. In the spring of 2013, the Victoria St. garden was decommissioned. The raised beds were undercut due to neighbouring development, making their continued use unsafe. The boxes were relocated to another donated location, at Tranquille and Elm Street, on the North Shore. A best practices start up guide to public produce was published in 2013, by one of the Master Gardeners who contributed significantly to the project as a volunteer (Sedgman 2013). 64 Robin Reid, a faculty member at TRU, and Kendra Besanger, who coordinated the Victoria St. garden, published a qualitative study of the Public Produce program, noting that it brought food security issues to the fore in the community, establishing formal and informal networks between individuals and community groups (2014). Ultimately however, public produce has not been one of KFPC’s most successful efforts. Once the gardens were established, it was challenging to coordinate volunteer investment in maintaining them, without a dedicated coordinator. Although public produce garden spaces still exist at McDonald Park and on Elm St., their use has been quite variable. 4.1.2.5 Community Food Action Program The Community Food Action Program (CFAP) started in 2013 and is the main program that continues to be delivered by KFPC. The Gleaning Abundance Program (GAP) was the first program to be started under the umbrella of the CFAP, and continues to be the primary focus of CFAP to the time of writing.28 Gleaning is “the harvesting and distribution of annual overabundances of food that would have been ignored or gone to waste, primarily from residential fruit-trees whose owners would not otherwise pick them, but also gathering usable food from farming-operation crop-culls, backyard- or community-garden overproduction” (IH CFAI grant proposal 2013). Although gleaning had been introduced as a possible second phase for food waste recovery when the FoodSHARE program was initiated, it was not able to be implemented sustainably at the time.29 28 As of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, CFAP also includes management of the Butler Urban Farm. 29 The early efforts by the Food Bank to introduce a gleaning program depended on students hired during the summer with assistance from federal summer employment grants. Because these grants were unpredictable from year to year, and the availability of summer student employees did not align well with the peak of Kamloops’ fruit harvest (June-October), this first attempt at a sustainable gleaning program was not successfully integrated into the FoodSHARE program. 65 Community interest in reviving the idea to start up a gleaning program emerged at a network meeting in the fall of 2012, with a network member raising the idea that Kamloops invest further in food waste reduction. A working group of several members was struck to explore the idea and compile information on best practices for gleaning programs. In early 2013, KFPC hosted an event called “Let’s Talk About Food”, an invitation to the community and KFPC network to engage in brainstorming about KFPC’s next food security priorities. The desire to formalize a gleaning program was really crystalized at this event. One network member shared their experience of being at this meeting as a newcomer to KFPC, and hearing the excitement around the ideas and at the end of the meeting, when the need for fundraising was identified, no one else stepped up, so he volunteered. He would go on to write an application to Interior Health’s Community Food Action Initiative program and secure $45,000 over three years to establish the program. The grant proposal would point out that “Although Gleaning shows much potential as one such action and is presently happening locally/sporadically/informally within the IHA, community knowledge of these groups is limited, not-for-profit agencies are normally not part of the sharing, and most importantly, focused citizen-actions to advocate for clear municipal food security and food action policies and by-laws are not being coordinated” (IH CFAI grant proposal 2013). The pilot project’s aim was to scale up within three year and create a model that could be replicated by other communities across the Interior Health region. Today GAP operates on a model of distributing 1/3 of a harvest to the volunteers, 1/3 to the tree owner, and 1/3 to 66 partner agencies.30 Over 117,000 pounds of fruit and vegetables have been harvested since the program started in 2013. A number of partnership or collaborative projects emerged to join GAP under the CFAP umbrella, though GAP remains the consistent mainstay. One such initiative was the collaboration with Farm to School, a provincial organization with a mandate to support school-based food literacy initiatives. In 2014, Farm to School selected Kamloops, together with Vancouver and the Capitol Region, as pilot sites for a Regional Hub program. These Hubs were “coordinated by local Animators and regional Steering Committees to facilitate regional networking, administer funding and support to schools and build regional leadership capacity for the development of food literacy and food security programming in schools” (Wittman and Powell 2016). Although the Regional animator would be employed by Farm to School rather than KFPC, Kamloops was a strong candidate as a pilot side because Farm to School could be embedded within the existing CFAP umbrella and draw on its established network. A research team evaluating the Regional Hub pilot identified the following observation about the effectiveness of the partnership, which has also proved true for other similar partnership that would appear under the CFAP umbrella over time: “The Hub has thus not only leveraged the resources of the KFPC, but also provided a new pathway for that network to realize its broader food systems transformation goals” (Wittman and Powell 2016, 12). 4.1.3 Policy Advocacy Always bring snacks. ~Laura Kalina 30 In practice, tree owners and volunteers rarely keep a full 2/3 share of the harvest. For example, in 2017, 54% of the harvested produce was donated to partner agencies (see de Candole 2018). 67 Early on in my fieldwork, I attended a Kamloops City Council meeting, where three KFPC representatives were scheduled to present an update on their work, Laura Kalina, Carole Hebden, the new Board Chair, and Bonnie Klohn, a member of the staff leadership team. Laura had a reusable grocery bag with her, filled with small jars of dried fruit from the gleaning program. She came over to where Bonnie was seated, to rehearse the contents of the jars: apricots, cherries and something else I can’t recall. She walked around the inside of the horseshoe council table, placing a jar with at each place and visiting with each of the city councilors that were already seated. After the presentation, we would stand in the parking lot to debrief. “That went well, I thought,” Laura would say. “Always bring snacks.” Public policy advocacy is another area where the KFPC has been very successful: the network advocated for, and participated in the creation of, the Kamloops Food and Urban Agriculture Plan, which was finalized in 2015 and built on earlier policy inclusions in the Kamloops Social Plan in 2009, the Sustainable Kamloops Plan in 2010 and the Agriculture Area Plan in 2013. An urban hen by-law was also adopted by City of Kamloops in 2016. One of the network members commented, “the food policy council here has developed a really good working partnership with the city and that's fantastic, that's huge, and I think that’s one of the most major accomplishments in the last few years.” Getting to that point however would take many years of dedicated effort. Cultivating strong political and media relations has been an aim of the KFPC right from its early days. Take for example an excerpt from a letter to Mel Rothenburger in 1996, then editor of the Kamloops Daily News, from Kalina as the KFPC Chair: “As a city, we need to strive to be more self sufficient in our food supply – look at how the lock-out of supermarkets has affected us. Also what about the notion of why should we be paying tax dollars to cut grass 68 when we could be growing food?...I would like to get as much coverage as possible to assist our lobbying with the city. Thanks so much” (June 20, 1996). This push towards strong advocacy came from a very clear position that adopted policy was closely linked with long term success for improved food security: This Food Security Continuum is based on the principles of community development and the readiness of the community. For example, in Kamloops, it took about 10 years to move through the continuum. The Kamloops Food Policy Council was formed about five years after community kitchens and gardens were established. Now, with the success of the community kitchens and gardens, the group, with increased membership and support, is ready to move onto food policy development (Kalina 2001, 43). There were several stops and starts along the way to reaching an adopted food policy for Kamloops. As early as 1996, the group would begin work on a Food Policy Discussion Paper (KFPC Minutes, May 22, 1996), but it wasn’t until 1999 that a contractor would be hired to develop a final draft of a food policy for presentation to the City of Kamloops (KFPC Minutes July 7, 1999). A version of this document would be published as “A Food and Nutrition Policy for the Thompson Region (KFPC June 2000)” as an appendix in the second edition of Kalina’s book Building Food Security in Canada, and would be adopted by the Thompson Health Region Board. After various attempts to engage the municipality, the following year, the KFPC would document that the Food Policy Committee had been successful in coming up with a draft policy that is “acceptable to [the City of Kamloops Social Planning Committee] and does not lose too much of what KFPC originally proposed” for incorporation into the new Social Plan. KFPC was turned down for a social planning grant to “take this process to the next step; that is, to hire someone to work with us in approaching all the other relevant bodies and agencies in the region (school boards etc.) to develop a comprehensive food policy for the region” (KFPC Minutes, April 18, 2001). It wouldn’t be until the spring of 2002 that KFPC would have their food policy 69 integrated into the social plan and accepted at Council, though a longer Food Charter they had also drafted would not be included (KFPC Minutes May 29, 2002). In September 2003, the group would reengage with their policy goals, hoping “to pick-up from where we left off and push the food policy initiative forward…It is important that we get the city to Act on the food policy that it adopted – not just file it away” (KFPC Minutes Sept 9, 2003). The Chair’s Report at the AGM that year would state: “Laura met with [city councilor] Sharon Frissell on follow-up to the implementation of the food policy, but due to limited time has not been able to pursue further development. More energy and enthusiasm is needed in this area.” This push for reengagement would lead to a strong relationship with one of City of Kamloops’ biggest food security champions, Ron McColl. With support from the Interior Health Authority, McColl and Kalina would jointly organize a Community Food Action Forum in March 2006. The local news would report: A few main objectives became clear when about 50 people, individuals directly or indirectly involved in the city’s food security issues, gathered at Interior Savings Centre for four hours, said organizer Laura Kalina…It’s the first time in 10 years that this group has held a brainstorming session, and Kalina was impressed with the outcome. During the next three years, the council hopes to initiate several projects the work towards: supporting local farmers and growing more locally; promoting healthier eating in public buildings and workplaces; enhancing education about poverty, and increasing awareness about existing resources available in Kamloops. (Kamloops Daily News 2006) Notes scrawled on the back of an agenda indicate what stood out to one of the attendees: “support local food economy,” “eat more local” and “root cause of poverty.” The report that would follow from the Forum would make several recommendations specific to further policy development, including to “incorporate new policies from the Food Action Plan in an updated Social Plan for Kamloops” and “prepare a Kamloops Agricultural Plan to support and enhance agriculture in Kamloops” (Interior Health Authority, Kamloops Food Policy Council, and City of Kamloops 2006). The 2009 update to the City of Kamloops Social Plan would follow up on that 70 recommendation, and include a full section on food security (Social Planning and Research Council of British Columbia 2009). The City would also move forward with developing an Agriculture Area Plan (AAP), a process that would begin in 2012 and be adopted by City Council in 2013. The AAP would recommend yet another plan, suggesting the City “Develop an Urban Agriculture Plan/Community-wide Food Strategy” (City of Kamloops 2013). This recommendation would be taken on as well, culminating in the development of the Kamloops Food and Urban Agriculture Plan, and finally realizing the full extent of the imagination KFPC had brought to its policy advocacy efforts (City of Kamloops 2015). Since its adoption in 2015, the Kamloops FUAP has been a very active “thing” for many of the KFPC network members. For example, during one planning meeting that I attended, one of the KFPC staff members turned to her bulletin board to grab a scrap of paper with several of the FUAP actions that tagged KFPC as the lead agency. Being new in my role as a participant at the time, from my perspective it seemed as if the introduction of the list was proliferating tasks that possibly didn’t have community energy behind them, so I asked “just because it is in the FUAP, do you have to do it?” In response, my colleague suggested “but this is a community plan that we contributed to” reflecting the continued importance of the relational ties that were embedded in the work of creating it. One interviewee from the City of Kamloops shared that from their perspective, the FUAP is still “alive”: We always want with plan implementation a level of ownership from the community and this plan – I think the development of this plan was very organic, and as much as it was a very top down “we're going to do a Food and Urban Agriculture Plan”, I think the inspiration for that and impetus for that was driven organically. I don't feel like this plan [FUAP] has been forgotten about or the implementation has sort of just ground to a halt, I think this plan is still alive. I think the Agriculture Area Plan is also still alive – there are some initiatives in the Agriculture Area Plan that have stalled out because you know an organization that was going to be putting forward something isn't able to anymore or in terms of personnel changes or priority changes or whatever. I feel like with this plan it is still very much alive and in the process of being implemented. 71 Despite this obvious community investment in the FUAP, energy and interest in it has waned to a degree over the duration of my study. On the one hand, KFPC took the initiative to secure a small grant focused on a “policy implementation” project, which I address in the following chapter. But that project would in some ways take on a life of its own, building energy around emergent projects – some of which were present in the FUAP and some of which were not. Additionally, it seems clear that the successful implementation of the FUAP would require more dedicated championing on the part of the City of Kamloops itself, and that the success of having had a policy adopted by the municipality will always be somewhat tenuous as political will ebbs and flows. For example, despite being named as the lead organization for a majority of the recommended action items in the plan, the City has never provided KFPC any ongoing operational funding for the programs and services they provide. The KFPC has been successful at cultivating relationships with City of Kamloops staff members who hold portfolios that overlap with food security or urban agriculture, but that support isn’t necessarily shared broadly across other departments like development or operations, which arguably have more impact on the conditions that shape agriculture and urban agriculture within the city. And KFPC has also noticed the loss of a real “champion” for food from within the city, whether among city staff or the current composition of elected representatives – where having had a keen champion in place had been instrumental at various points over the years of advocacy that lead to the development of the FUAP in the first place. What that plan is able to do, as an actant in the network, is a question I revisit again in the chapter that follows. 4.1.4 The Network Grace [Lee-Bogs] articulated it in what might be the most-used quote of my life: ‘Transform yourself to transform the world.’ This doesn’t mean to get lost in the self, but rather to see our 72 own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet. ~adrienne marie brown | Emergent Strategy Grounding all of the projects, partnerships and policies developed over the years is one of KFPC’s primary roles in the community as a network for the food movement. KFPC holds monthly potluck meetings open to anyone in the community with typical attendance of 30-40 people, and holds space for the informal ways of making kin that take place when people break bread together. The network has built relationships with and between key community members (including city councilors and staff, and leaders in health, education and social service agencies), and provides a venue for social service agencies without an explicit food security mandate to grow their awareness of food-related issues. Some partners come to network meetings only in formal contexts (i.e. when invited to present an update). There is a noticeable difference in the kind of partnership that is possible to develop with these partners, though that approach is distinctly in the minority. The “people first” mentality articulated by Gardengate’s program manager has permeated more broadly into the network as a whole: Because everybody's coming for their own purpose, their own reason. And they speak to their own truth… And you know, while food security is really important to what we do, if we don't have people here, we don't have anything. And I think that a lot of the programs that you're interacting with, I hope that you're getting that same kind of vibe…It's not about the greenhouse, it's not about the garden, it's about the people that are identifying this as a place that they want to be. Because if we don’t have people, we have no need for food security in the first place. Mentorship and opportunities for leadership skills development have been a key part of what’s been made possible by the KFPC network. For Kalina, mentorship was always an explicit focus: I probably have spent the last ten years more in mentorship than in leadership. There’s probably about four young gals that are in their thirties now, that I’ve just mentored along the way. One now is doing her Masters, she’s coming back. Another now has a job with the city in food policy. I knew I’d need to provide their mentorship and then we’ll see it grow, so it’s just been really exciting. (2016, 100) 73 One of the network members shared their experience of receiving mentorship from Kalina, “She was a great mentor from the beginning. Anything I needed I could go to Laura” and then reflected on how they would apply that approach to inclusion in their own food security work, “I like to set everyone up for success, and make everyone feel valued and contributing.” Another member shared how these opportunities for mentorship and practice are created through the structure of the KFPC: If we want projects to succeed it is beneficial to us to draw in more people to share the community workload. But they need to see a benefit for themselves – I think this is one of the reasons GAP works so well to engage people. The other is we need to nurture their democracy and leadership skills. It is one of the reasons I love the consensus model used by KFPC and the fact that chairs are rotated for network meetings. It gives people are chance to grow and try – what is practiced is learned… What we're trying to encourage is this emergent leadership and we're looking at our network and we're saying, if you guys have ideas, if you guys have interests, come tell us about it and we can support you to do it and maybe get some resources or staff time or whatever to help. We do really encourage people to push for what they want and then we found out that it was called something so we can use this emergent leadership, put a name on it, which is pretty cool. In a conversation with another network member, we surfaced how a change in the physical set up of tables during potluck meetings, due to steadily increasing attendance, changed the interactions that could take place, ensuring that even as the network grew in size, holding space for conversation could still remain a focus: Network member (NM): You attended Food Policy Council member meetings for quite a long time before I ever found my way to having a conversation with you. And that is part of a personal awakening, right, where I can be in a group of people all gathered for common interest and not dial in, and I learned that, in this role and in life, I need to really be far more observant of who's in the room. I didn't talk to you, I didn't even really take it in. There is too much going on. LH: Yeah, and part of that was me sort of feeling out what it was going to be to belong to the network myself and slowly starting to have conversations myself with all of the people around the room. And part of that is like the structure of the meeting when we used to have the tables all in a circle, you know. So you’d talk to your neighbor on this side and you’d talk to your neighbor on this side, and you didn't— 74 NM: Yeah, we've evolved to where our conversations are the point. And how do you structure space so that that comes about? Later in that conversation, we would go on to identify some differences between the continued informal approach to networking established by the monthly potlucks, and a more formal collective impact process that was bringing invited partners into a series of meetings (see discussion in 5.2 for details of this work). What we came to was an understanding that despite some differences, the connection with the credible grassroots approach remained strong: LH: When you think about the sort of intentionality that we're bringing to the collective process, that we're formally bringing people together. How do you think that that compares to the way that KFPC has been informally bringing people together? NM: How does it compare? Well, I think you named it with intentionality. The randomness is diminished somewhat, but it isn't losing touch with the grassroots evolution or any aspect of what's going on in the community. I think the formality piece is because of the partnerships that are playing into that and the level within a hierarchical bureaucracy that we're engaging. I think it's the right thing. We're a flat level organization. We don't have the hierarchy, but we have strong leadership, incredible credible leadership. LH: Which is really important. NM: Yeah, so putting that into a position where we can engage those hierarchies at a high level, right? I don't think that that is wrong. I don't think that that's going to do a disservice to our historical approach at all. I think it's really needed. 4.2 Regional Context: “Once it’s gone, it’s gone” At this point I want to step back and situate the KFPC’s decision-making and valuation practices in the broader historical context of agricultural disinvestment in the Kamloops region, to think about how, as long-term economic and regulatory trends have eroded production and diversity in the sector, the priorities and interests of KFPC have grown more expansive despite the constraints that limit the possibilities of their work.31 As I note in the introduction, Kamloops 31 Note that in this section I primarily focus on the challenges and failures of settler colonial agriculture and ranching practices, not the thriving food system of the Secwépemc prior to colonization – see Ignace and Ignace 2017 for an in depth analysis of this. 75 can be a difficult community to characterize based on what is perceptible at the surface level, and in many ways is an unlikely candidate for becoming a national leader known for extensive community food security organizing. Why did this work emerge here, specifically? is a question my research collaborators speculated about with me. One network member with a long history in Kamloops suggested KFPC’s emergence can be attributed in part to the diverse employment base in the city and the type of people who were attracted to the community as a result: When you look at Kamloops and how this community evolved in the last 50 years relative to other communities…we have been a regional center of the provincial government for at least fifty years…I worked in that culture and a lot of the people in this community who provide various kinds of leadership and various kinds of organization were drawn from the families that lived in this community because of that employment. You had a high number of professional people who came to this community and made it home…It wasn't just government employees, it was also hospital employees and it was also educational people…those kinds of employers provided a number of community organizations with a lot of capacity that they could draw on and made this a desirable place to live. There was a good sense of community and people stayed here. 32 Another interview, with a member of the City of Kamloops staff, reiterated a similar concept – pointing out that surface-level understandings of Kamloops as a “redneck mill town” elided important nuances in the sectors that have shaped the community’s character: Historically within Kamloops we’ve had a strong agricultural industry in the region, a very entrenched history of farming, the entire North Shore was BC Fruitlands property. When my mom moved to Kamloops in the 50s, past the North Shore, it was just orchards, all orchards…When Laura [Kalina] arrived here, she must have seen some potential and I can’t help but think some of that history has to have played into it, that character of our community. Historically there’s been this perception that Kamloops is this redneck mill town, I guess some people would argue in some ways we still are, it’s changing, but the working class character of Kamloops, which again has changed a lot in the last 15 years, the working class character of Kamloops wasn’t just around resource extraction or resource based jobs, saw mills, the Weyerhaeuser mill, Domtar, mining jobs, there was that aspect of the blue collar working class aspect of Kamloops but there was also the 32 This observation is supported by employment data from the time – in 1961, government and other service sector employment made up an estimated 25% of the city's payroll and was the leading contributor to the city's economic base (MacKinnon and Nelson 2005, 26). 76 farmers and the agricultural aspect of the region…people came here for work, and I do think Kamloops had that blue collar working class feel, and I do think that is conducive to caring about your neighbours and caring about your neighbourhoods and wanting to do things like be handy and be competent with what you can do which includes being able to provide for yourself and your family, so I do think that what Laura probably identified and harnessed was all this latent potential in the area and in the character of the people of Kamloops. While these comments offer insight into why the KFPC might have emerged as a successful organizing force within the community, I want to go deeper to offer reflection on the history of the agriculture sector itself, its rapid decline in importance in the Kamloops economy, and the challenges this has posed for the KFPC in its aims to build the local food economy and a more food secure community. In 2019, I attended a public meeting organized by the users of the Noble Creek Irrigation System (NCIS). The NCIS irrigates more than 30 agricultural properties in Kamloops’ Westsyde neighbourhood. The system, originally built by BC Fruitlands in the 1960s, had been managed by the City of Kamloops since the neighbourhood was amalgamated in 1967 (Wallace 2018). The NCIS users had been notified the City was intending to discontinue management of the system, a decision that would leave producers scrambling on short notice and significant additional costs to secure an alternative. Advocacy on the part of the user group (including meetings such as the one I was attending) would work to delay the City’s decision and allow time to collaborate on different possibilities (Wallace 2019). As I stood talking with a circle of attendees outside the community centre after the meeting, the conversation turned to the ways that agriculture had been and was continuing to be forced out of the community. The group discussed just how recently the site we were standing on, on the North Shore, was orchard land. One person commented, “once it’s gone it’s gone.” Kamloops’ agricultural history, primarily focused on ranching, market gardens and orchards, emerged primarily in response to the development of a staples economy (J. Stewart 77 1992; MacKinnon and Nelson 2005; City of Kamloops, n.d.). The Hudson’s Bay Company established early farms and ranches in the 1860s in response to the demand for meat and vegetables created by the gold rush, and private settlement would increase with the imposition of the colonial regime. With the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885, and the incorporation of Kamloops in 1893, the community would evolve into an “agricultural service, saw milling, and small-scale distribution centre” and its population would grow slowly to about 4,000 by 1914 (MacKinnon and Nelson 2005). Stewart would note that the period “saw major investment in agriculture in the region”, which was quite diversified, as it included expansions to cattle ranching, the establishment of orchards promoted by the BC Fruitlands Corporation, and the cultivation of tomatoes and other vegetables between rows of fruit trees (J. Stewart 1992, 32–33). A prominent canning industry was established, with the first cannery incorporated at Walhachin in 1913, followed by one in Kamloops in 1915 (J. Stewart 1992). Despite the well-established agriculture sector, its decline would be swift. By the 50s-60s all the local canneries had closed their doors. In Kamloops, the overall acreage for commercial vegetables dropped from 876 acres in 1951 to 238 acres in 1961 (City of Kamloops, n.d.). There’s a complex set of factors that contribute to the erosion of the agriculture sector, including on the one hand those that combined to reduce the economic viability of agriculture, and on the other, those that increased other land use pressures. Cheaper food from elsewhere introduced competition that Kamloops’ agriculture sector could not keep pace with. MacKinnon and Nelson note that “Kamloops' small-scale fruit and vegetable industry could not compete with the large agri-businesses that were starting to appear at this time in the Okanagan and the United States, while general improvements in canning, refrigeration, transportation and marketing meant stiff, year-round competition even in local 78 markets” (2005, 26). Stewart suggested that labour shortages and dependency on low wage structures also played a role, particularly in the canning industry (1992). Environmental factors contributed their own challenges: early frost dangers and the difficulties of growing certain varieties this far north also posed risks for the canning industry and the viability of orchards (J. Stewart 1992). While agriculture was becoming less economically profitable, demands to develop the lands along the South and North Thompson Rivers were increasing. After World War II, Kamloops’ population grew quickly, and “the latter half of the 1950s was characterized by rapid and accelerating growth, which averaged 7% over few decades” (City of Kamloops 1974). MacKinnon and Nelson note that this pressure “was heightened by the scarcity of flat land suitable for residential and commercial development. Kamloops is situated in a narrow, steep-sided valley. Unstable silt bluffs and a 500-metre change in elevation to the plateau above limit upslope development, while flooding limits choices in the valley bottom” (MacKinnon and Nelson 2005, 26). Table 2 shows the rapid pace of development into areas that were (then) outside Kamloops’ municipal boundaries, and which were largely farm or orchard lands. Table 2: City of Kamloops New Construction 1945-1968 Area33 Before 1945 1945-49 1950-54 1955-59 1960-68 Brocklehurst 61 44 112 203 882 Valleyview 19 78 95 214 324 Westsyde 27 14 72 126 239 Dallas 0 2 4 49 75 Source: City of Kamloops 1974 33 Though not included in this table, the 1974 OCP explained “During the period covered by the table above, North Kamloops infilled almost entirely while the population of the original City remained comparatively static” (City of Kamloops 1974). Units are also not provided, so it is unclear if the table refers to new residential construction or new construction generally, however, later context in the report implies that at least in Brocklehurst, the increase was primarily residential. 79 The risks of losing agricultural lands were known well in advance of this rapid influx of development. In 1952, J. Lewis Robison, Professor of geography at UBC argued that “as residential areas expanded into the region's limited agricultural lands, the city was ‘in danger of biting off the hand that feeds it’” (Robinson in MacKinnon and Nelson 2005, 26). In 1972, the Province of BC implemented the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) to restrict subdivision and non-farm development. The City of Kamloops’ first Official Community Plan was developed in 1974, after the amalgamation of the original south shore settlement with North Kamloops in 1967 and the additional amalgamation of Valleyview, Brocklehurst, Rayleigh, Barnhartvale, Dufferin and other unincorporated areas in 1973. Unfortunately, both the ALR and the OCP were in place too late to give guidance to the rapid development taking place. The OCP noted that “Without the restraint of an established plan or pattern of services…development occurred literally at the volition of the individual land owner as the price for urban lots was bid up by the influx of new residents, accustomed to and able to pay higher prices” (City of Kamloops 1974). And although the City now has an AAP that affirms its support for agriculture, development pressures continue to drive decision making, and in practice, as the example of the NCIS demonstrates, agriculture, within the city boundaries at least, is not well supported. Outside the boundaries of the City of Kamloops itself, the Thompson Nicola Regional District is one of the few remaining regions in the province with quality land available for increased agricultural production, even as the overall number of farms in the region has continued to see slow decline (Kamloops Food Policy Council and Tapestry Evaluation and Strategy 2020). In that sense, there are very real possibilities for an expanded agriculture sector in the region more broadly, but the challenge now with reinvigorating the sector is the loss of much of the supportive infrastructure needed for economically viable agriculture. Sector 80 development needs to proceed with support for both new farming enterprises and the infrastructure that will make them economically viable. Given the way that small changes have built capacity for an expansive vision within the KFPC, there are open possibilities for their engagement in this work. 81 Chapter 5: Thinking (very) expansively about what counts For years, food security has been focused on short term relief and capacity building, with huge strides made in the Kamloops region. The KFPC has established food security as a foundational component for a sustainable Kamloops and now there is a full roster of groups and agencies that have stepped up to take on work in this aspect. Yes, poverty and hunger are on the rise but there are more local organizations rallying to understand and address the root causes…It’s been an amazing ride. So where does KFPC go from here? We know that our current food system remains too reliant on food arriving from elsewhere. AND the “elsewhere” is becoming increasingly unstable. Your council is well positioned now. We can play a role in the implementation of existing agriculture plans to grow more food in this area of BC…It’s the right time ~Carole Hebden | 2018 Annual General Meeting When I formally initiated my research with KFPC in 2017, my early conversations with my fellow collaborators reflected an interest in working to build the regional food system and a concern that KFPC had been too narrowly constrained to work only on urban agriculture or smaller community food projects. One network member shared that they felt KFPC was “sidelined” during the process of developing the Agriculture Area Plan, and expressed concern that KFPC had been “typecast as urban agriculture” and was being defined by outside perceptions of what its work was or should be. Another member reflected: The food policy council isn't super involved, isn't directly involved with a lot of agriculture initiatives, you know, larger – we’re involved in urban agriculture but I don't see us as having a major role in the large-scale commercial agriculture, even though we have [had] farmers…on our board so it was great to have the commercial farmer perspective but it's just a lot of admin time to be on a board as a farmer….I think we've been going through this period of transition and kind of shifting the food policy council from a grassroots working board…to a totally new structure of having three paid staff, a board that can rely on staff to carry things out. There was a palpable sense that KFPC was at a point of transition and ready for a change in focus toward the regional food system. Although the turn KFPC has taken toward the vitality of agriculture in the region is framed by its current network members as a new focus, there have been past conversations in the community about revitalizing the Kamloops regional agriculture sector. These past conversations 82 go all the way to the early roots of the KFPC: at the 1995 Food Day Forum that sparked KFPC’s formation, one of the three goals of the event was “To support the local and regional agricultural base, and to ensure a food system that supports the renewal of our natural environment while providing quality foods to consumers” (Barbolet and Kalina 1995). In the introduction to the forum’s final report, the organizers nod to the scale of the issue: “It is overwhelming to think that Kelloggs spends from 40 to 70 million dollars a year to advertise Fruit Loops. It is even more overwhelming to overcome this economic force with sustained agricultural power” (Barbolet and Kalina 1995). Enhancing the local food economy surfaces again as a goal at various points in the KFPC history. For example, it was a priority identified in the Food Action Plan, prepared jointly by the KFPC, Interior Health and the City of Kamloops (Interior Health Authority, Kamloops Food Policy Council, and City of Kamloops 2006). In fact, this report adapts Kalina’s food security continuum, adding a fourth stage focused on the economic vitality of the agriculture sector. In regional conversations beyond the KFPC itself, Community Futures Thompson Country (CFTC), a business development non-profit organization, has made efforts over the last two decades to investigate opportunities for small producer diversification and market expansion. 34 While this brief summary demonstrates that the conversation about regional vitality is not new, continued declines in the number of farm operations in the region reflect little success thus far for this work. 34 This includes a study called “Back to the Land: Agricultural Opportunities” looking at opportunities for small producer diversification (Crane Management Consultants Ltd. and Calissi Consulting Inc. 2000); the Interior Livestock Marketing Seminar responding to increased abattoir regulations (2005); the Thompson Shuswap Food Connections project looking at opportunities for diversification and market expansion (True Consulting Group 2012); and a feasibility study for a year round farmer’s market (Stott et al. 2016). The records indicate that KFPC network members participated in the engagement processes for at least the latter two studies. 83 In March 2019, I drove a fellow KFPC colleague and I out to the Skeetchestn community, for a partnership development meeting with the Skeetchestn Natural Resources office (which would later evolve into their participation as one of the businesses in the food hub pilot discussed in the following chapter). Because we had arrived early for the meeting, and because the natural resources office is located in a portable building with no waiting area, we sat outside on a concrete parking barrier in the spring sunshine to wait. As we waited, I was describing my surprise at working through older KFPC records and discovering that a desire to build the regional food system and the economic vitality of the agriculture sector had been prevalent in various ways starting from the earliest days of the KFPC. My colleague listened to my questions, and offered a poignant reflection in response, drawing a parallel to her experience with therapeutic models – in particular the concept of the therapeutic spiral in which conversations cycle back around when people are ready to have them. I have only one scribbled note from the conversation, as we dropped our discussion to go into our meeting: “think it’s the same but something has shifted.” This idea, that conversations might be cycling back around, that things might having been resonating in the background because people didn’t have the capacity to unpack them until they were ready to emerge again to visibility is what I turn to explore in this chapter. I start by describing the process that took place from October 2017 to December 2019, that moved KFPC from its former strategic plan to the vision it holds today. I follow this with an analysis of the new work that emerged concurrently with the development of the vision, focused on building the regional food system. I conclude by describing the multiple possible futures that KFPC is holding space to realize, through both its visioning and its action. 84 5.1 Spiraling toward an expansive vision Belief Initiates and guides action – Or it does nothing. ~Octavia Butler The question of what tips a plan from just a plan and into action (from belief to doing) is a particularly interesting one. But the more specific question of what would tip us specifically from belief into action has been much more motivating for me, and for my colleagues. No one wants a plan that just “sits on the shelf” and that phrase repeats over and over in my notes and observations. Lauren Olamina’s Earthseed verse “Belief / Initiates and guides action / Or it does nothing” has a multilayered perspective to offer us as we work towards the answer, as it generates yet more questions: What are the conditions in which it becomes possible for beliefs to initiate and guide actions? What capacity is needed to create those conditions? How might thinking, knowing and planning be understood as a praxis of setting visions or conjuring imagined futures? How might expansive visions enable distributed leaders to do things and act on beliefs? From the earlier discussion about policy advocacy and development, it seems evident that for the KFPC, plans are indeed “things” that are alive, although their ownership by the City of Kamloops, and the absence of key champions for them within the current composition of local government (elected officials and staff) are part of the relational web that detract from their agency to animate work. Put another way, as Barad might suggest, objects are not already there, they emerge through specific practices. I hope to generate insights by describing in detail the specific practices that led to the emergence of a new thing: KFPC’s shared vision for the food system (see Table 1: Kamloops Food Policy Council Vision Statements). 85 5.1.1 Strategic Plan Refresh: October 2017-February 2018 A strategic plan had been adopted by the KFPC in 2015. Although it was intended at the time to be a five-year plan, by 2017 a number of significant shifts had taken place within the organization that prompted revisiting it sooner than expected. One of the KFPC network members who participated in the development of that plan shared: Everybody has a pet rock, and everybody had to have their pet rock in the plan, so we ended up with a strategic plan that is big and bulky and full of motherhood statements about all kinds of pet rocks. The most important value of that plan wasn't necessarily its content, but the process of putting it together. It also formed the foundation for us to move forward on some specific projects like getting charitable status, and that in turn led to some very capable people getting successful grant applications, which resulted in hiring very capable people to do admin day-to-day work. So now it's my understanding that the board is looking at the strategic plan and saying, woah this is way too much and this isn't giving us the focus we need, and that's not a criticism at all, that's great because it worked – it got us to that point. As that comment illustrates, the existing strategic plan played a functional role in some important governance shifts that were taking place in the organization. There was a keen interest in securing charitable status for KFPC with hopes it would lead to improved funding, reinvigorating a conversation that stalled after a failed attempt at securing it in 1999. The minutes at the time also note an interest in finding a governance structure that would “enable the Kamloops Food Policy Council to enter strategic planning for expanded activities and succession in its leadership” (KFPC minutes, April 2, 2014). With support from a facilitator from the Fraser Basin Council, the group revised KFPC’s bylaws and elected a new board that met for the first time in May 2014. This group would go on to adopt the strategic plan in 2015 and secure charitable status the following year. With charitable status secured, in 2016 and 2017, KFPC received a small amount of grant funding towards operational expenses: $8,000 (2016) and $10,000 (2017) from the United Way and $37,000 (2017) from the Province of BC Ministry of Community, Sport and Culture (KFPC 86 2016-17 Financial Statement). This resulted in the addition of two part-time contract staff members who were able to focus on KFPC’s operations (such as network communications, financial management, organizational planning and fundraising) at a level that had not been previously possible. Together with the contractor who had been coordinating the Gleaning Abundance Program since 2014, the two new contractors proposed a collaborative leadership structure to be shared across three part-time roles in the spring of 2017, in lieu of a more traditional executive director position. A new Board President was elected that summer, and by the fall of 2017, the discussion between the contract staff and board had turned toward the need for a new strategic plan – marked in part by these shifts in organizational governance, and in part by the sense that KFPC was at a point of transition and ready for a new focus to its work. A clear desired outcome for a new strategic plan was to create something that would give operational guidance to the staff team – they felt that the existing plan included “everything we could do” and a refreshed version should be more practical, specific and directive. The need for this clear guidance appeared to be an outgrowth from the new relationship between the staff leadership team, who wanted the direction they would need exercise autonomy in their work, and the Board, which was positioned in a strange middle ground between an oversight board and its long history as a hands-on working board. One area in particular where the staff felt the most uncertainty was around the existing programs, like GAP. “Should we keep gleaning? Or pass it off?” was a frequent question. Keeping the program would have implications: a change in KFPC’s narrative as an incubator of new initiatives that were handed off to other agencies once they were off the ground. On the other hand, keeping the program would also allow for more organizational stability and potential funding opportunities. As such, the development of a new strategic plan was connected to very pressing questions that the group wanted to answer. 87 I started attending board meetings as an invited guest in my research role, just at the start of this process. At the first board meeting I attended, in October 2017, another network member was there as a volunteer facilitator to lead a discussion about the vision and mission. One interesting outcome from the discussion was the understanding that the aspirations KFPC had for the food system extended beyond their actual reach or mandate as an organization – that the things they wanted to articulate about the food system were holistic and wouldn’t fit into the parameters of “SMART” goals that KFPC itself could achieve. The advice provided by the facilitator in the meeting summary she provided was that KFPC “could also consider outlining some core values rather than goals for the strategic plan and leave specific goals to the implementation/action plan that staff then respond to. This seems more reasonable given the Board discussion.” When that volunteer wasn’t available to facilitate any further conversations, the Board chair asked if I would be willing to facilitate the next meeting. I met with the Board chair and staff team to process the results from the October conversation, and draft a set of values that could be brought forward to the full Board the next month. I would then go on to facilitate a discussion at the November board meeting, attend two more meetings with the Board chair and staff, and participate in the Board discussion in January, before the refreshed strategic plan was approved by the Board in February. 88 Figure 3: Drafting value statements Source: Photo by author, November 22, 2017 One key area that evolved substantively over the course of these discussion was the mission statement itself. The original statement read: “The mission of the Kamloops Food Policy Council (KFPC) is to be an open, welcoming network that fosters and strengthens the Kamloops region community food system by working collaboratively to influence policy, share knowledge, 89 educate residents, stimulate dialogue, catalyze action, and initiate projects and partnerships” and over the series of discussions shifted to reflect the core statement “building grassroots community capacity around food.” At the time, Interior Community Services (ICS) was in the midst of obtaining their accreditation with Community Food Centres Canada, and watching that process unfold prompted some of the KFPC team to reflect on the differences between ICS and KFPC, and express concerns about duplicating efforts and the importance of KFPC’s role being differentiated. Identifying the component of grassroots capacity became a strong point of convergence about what actually did differentiate KFPC’s work from other agencies in the sector. A comment of my own, taken from one of the interviews I did during that same timeframe, reflects what it felt like to be watching the Board and staff cohere around their planning process: It’s interesting sitting in on the strategic planning sessions, the couple ones that I have so far, because it doesn't sound to me like you're changing who you are. It’s sort of like you’re trying to find the words to describe who you are, to clarify that, but it doesn’t sound like change. Maybe a lot of the transition has come before at this point though. You’ve had to go through a lot of transition over the last year or two years and now you’re at the point where you can clarify. 5.1.2 Evaluation Rubric: May 2018-April 2019 One of the KFPC staff team shared at the Board meeting that they had talked with an executive director of another agency in town, in a mentorship context, and was excited about a suggestion that KFPC adopt key performance indicators (KPIs) that could be used to hold the organization accountable to its strategic plan. An interesting conversation about KPIs emerged at this juncture – in part because the Board had decided not to develop any evaluation metrics when it approved the revised strategic plan in February (a meeting I missed due to illness), and they thought there had been some aversion to KPIs at the time, though no one could remember why. 90 But the trust engendered by that mentorship role was sufficient to bring the conversation back to the table, and the board agreed to move forward with the suggestion. A new network member, a consultant with experience in program evaluation for systems-level change work was looking for a way to get involved with KFPC. The Board Chair, a member of the staff team, and I met with her on a sunny spring day at the picnic table in the community garden behind the Mt. Paul Food Centre. In that conversation, after we shared some context about what KFPC planning had looked like to that point, she jumped to concept of an evaluation rubric as a flexible, qualitative tool that might work for us, sharing information about how she had used rubrics in the past and how they function as an interpretive framework for evaluation.35 As a group, we were very keen on the idea, and agreed that her and I could co-facilitate a process. The KFPC Board shoulder-tapped a Strategic Planning committee to work with us as co-facilitators and take the lead on designing a process for engaging the board and the broader network in developing the rubric. Because the strategic planning process initially followed by the board hadn’t been widely inclusive of the network, one driving motivation behind the rubric process was to ensure that the broader network membership was engaged in a 35 Rubrics are used commonly in educational settings, and many are familiar with their use in that context. Recently, they have been taken up within the evaluation community, starting with the work of evaluator Jane Davidson (2005), connected with the importance of surfacing values in a transparent way in order to make credible evaluative judgements (King et al. 2013). Though there is no defined approach to what a rubric looks like or standard process for developing one, King et al suggest there are two core aspects to evaluative rubrics: 1. Criteria that surface the important values, that “define the things that matter and what good looks like” and 2. Descriptors articulating what “different levels of 'goodness' or performance look like” (2013, 13). Their practice-based assessment of the use of rubrics in evaluation contexts generated a summary of their benefits, suggesting rubrics: • “transparently set out the basis for making evaluative judgments, • provide a means for reaching a shared understanding of what matters, and what 'good' looks like, • help us to integrate expectations, policy, strategy and evidence about what good looks like, • provide a basis for integrating multiple data sources to reach holistic evaluative judgments, and • keep evaluation focused on the things that matter” (King et al. 2013, 19). 91 meaningful way. Not only was this important for developing a rubric but it would also help to validate the earlier strategic planning work. 5.1.2.1 What does your ideal food system look like? We started by dedicating the monthly network potluck in November 2018 to the question “what does your ideal food system look like?” The invitation to the network read: We will spend some time at the meeting getting feedback from members about what an ideal food system would look like for Kamloops. This will be an important step to build on the strategic plan recently created by the KFPC board. The information will be used to help us create an evaluation framework to help us understand what success looks like and help us understand the best way to create the food system we want to see. You don’t need to bring anything for this activity, but could spend time thinking about what it means to have an ideal food system. It is okay if you think of things that do not currently seem possible to achieve, or things that you do not think the Kamloops Food Policy Council is working on. We are developing a tool that can be used to help the council make decisions and understand how it fits into the food system more broadly. We also understand that KFPC works in collaboration with partners from different parts of the food system, and we love the idea of getting a shared vision or goal for what we want the food system to look like. At the meeting, members were directed to share their thoughts on each of the seven values, posted around the room, focusing on these questions: What would it look like if we had a food system that achieved these 7 values from the strategic plan? How would it feel? How would our everyday lives be different? And a related question: What does it look like when we aren’t meeting or achieving these values? Are there any aspects of an excellent food system that are not captured by these values? 92 Figure 4: Drafting a vision for “A resilient food system” Source: Photo by author, November 7, 2018 93 Figure 5: Drafting a vision for “Alleviation of poverty” Source: Photo by author, November 7, 2018 94 5.1.2.2 Deeper questions We dedicated the following month’s potluck meeting to deeper questions the Strategic Planning committee identified after reviewing the results from the November meeting. Members were invited to rotate to different tables, each focused on one these outstanding questions36: • What role do we want to play in having a resilient food system/ healthy land and water? Is this about: o How food is grown in Kamloops? o Acting as a model in the province/country/world? o Encouraging and advocating for changes? o Something else? • What do we mean by culturally appropriate food? What phrase might we use instead? • Is the Kamloops food policy council inclusive? What are steps toward us becoming more inclusive? • What role should we and can we play in addressing systemic barriers to food security (i.e., living wage, costs for housing and transportation)? 36 A major outstanding question not included in this list centered around Indigenous Food Sovereignty, and whether or not this was framed appropriately. Rather than trying to cover this deep question in the short time frame available in the meeting, the Strategic Planning committee decided to address it differently: 1. Through a full-day event called Nourish that KFPC was hosting, which would be engaging broader community and Indigenous representation and focusing on Indigenous Food Sovereignty as one of two topics and 2. Through the conversations the Board was beginning to have engaging with the Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty about addressing white supremacy in the food system. 95 • To have an ideal food system in Kamloops, how should we address all the steps in between growing and buying food (e.g. the supply chain, processing, storage and value-added services in Kamloops)? • What are the benefits of the food commons, local food assets and a sharing economy? What outcomes might we see by helping the food commons grow? Figure 6: Drafting responses to “Is the Kamloops Food Policy Council inclusive?” Source: Photo by author, December 5, 2018 5.1.2.3 How would you describe Kamloops’ food system today? The Strategic Planning committee created draft “ideal food system” statements using the input collected at these two meetings, as well as at the Nourish conference KFPC hosted in March 2019. These draft statements were shared at the April potluck meeting. Members were 96 invited to help us map evidence on Kamloops’ current state in the food system as a whole and for each of the seven statements: If you were asked to rate Kamloops’ food system, what evidence would you use to do that? In other words, what activities, policies, feelings, characteristics would you use to describe the food system in and around Kamloops? Rather than a rating scale of 1-5, members were invited to use a scale from seed-fruit (seed, sprout, plant, flower, fruit) to visualize the evidence they were sharing. My co-facilitator and I reflected on what the process had felt like as we went through it: LH: what I think happened with our group is that the entire process took on a life of its own and vision became a thing that was embedded with all these relationships and that has made it so that the vision itself has a kind of agency in the way that it's affecting how the work is continuing Co-facilitator: So to add a thought to that, yes I feel like part of why it was so successful is that – the word galvanized is coming to mind, and I don't know if it's the right word, but it just captured what was already on people's minds. I don't think all of it was on any one person's mind but it captured what was on all the different minds in the room and in such a mature organization that was so aware of the work it was doing and why it was doing it – it just brought it to the next level but it wasn't a huge amount of work to get it there because of the maturity in the organization already. 5.1.3 A Vision for the Ideal Food System The sections above describe the formation of the current KFPC vision to a level of detail that I’m not completely confident is interesting or useful for anyone but me, and perhaps a handful of my collaborators who are equally invested in our process. Yet I have decided to share it, despite that uncertainty, because I think there is a kind of necessary transparency that is generated by this retelling – a way of making visible a process in the hope that it allows this vision to remain a thing that is alive, that enrolls people into the work of striving for it, but also remixing it whenever remixing is needed.37 One member shared with my co-facilitator that she 37 At the time of writing, several “remixes” have emerged. For example, after the completion of the rubric statements, the committee went on to create a theory of change as a graphic depiction of how KFPC understands change toward an ideal food system to happen, and a student researcher from TRU also supported the committee 97 had been carrying a printed copy of the vision statements around with her, because it was like poetry. Besides, the devil is in the details anyways (invoking Haraway again or possibly Taylor Swift this time). There is an unending flow of writing on how to vision and why to vision for organizations, though very little offers support with how to imagine futures outside our existing institutions. Here is one possible exception that seems to reflect what we were aspiring towards (taken from Michael Albert’s instructional for developing economic visions, drawing in part on his Participatory Economics model): We seek a picture of a desired future rich and detailed enough to provide hope and direction but to also respect careful analysis based on real knowledge. We understand our efforts to be cumulative, adaptable, and always the basis for more clarification, refinement, and improvement as we learn more through practice. We are not creating blueprints to confine ourselves, but outlines that anyone can utilize, adapt, refine, and replace as we proceed. More, we see that widespread participation in designing a better future requires that people become adept at thinking about institutions, structures, social roles, and how these relate to desirable values. Therefore to have a blueprint which guides and constrains a movement and which is determined by a few and overseen by them is certainly authoritarian. But to openly propose a vision, and to try to disseminate the skills and knowledge needed for effectively conceptualizing and adapting vision is the opposite. It respects that people need and will use vision both for direction and for sustenance, but simultaneously enlists and assists people in joining a collective, flexible, continually improving, visionary project of their own making. … To us, the real solution to the conundrum—that people seeking a better society need vision but that having vision can also do us harm—is not to reject vision in public while it is developed privately, but to debate visionary aims and goals publicly, and, more, to disseminate and clarify the methods by which vision is developed and refined so that all people who wish to do so may partake of the project, confidently bringing to bear their own insights, interests, and experiences. (Albert n.d.) with a Kamloops-wide assessment of progress toward each of the seven vision statements (Pletsch and McLean 2020). I also produced a short film about KFPC that remixes the statements in a visual narrative (see Chapter 7). 98 5.2 New Work38 This growing interest in KFPC’s role in the broader regional food system resulted in some new work that unfolded concurrently with the visioning process. KFPC’s major undertaking in 2018/19 was an initiative funded jointly by the Real Estate Foundation of BC (REFBC) and Vancouver Foundation (VF), to run a collective impact process focused on implementing, on a regional level, many of the food policies and plans adopted by local governments, Indigenous communities and other organizations in the region. 39 KFPC had been talking about applying to the Real Estate Foundation of BC for funding for several years, though without a clear idea of which project would be a good fit for the funding stream available. As the grant application was being conceptualized, some of my collaborators viewed it as an opportunity to really animate the concept of “the region” in KFPC’s work. There was some concern when developing the scope of the project, that in order to maximize the chances of being accepted by REFBC it should be limited to a focus on implementing City of Kamloops policies: the Food and Urban Agriculture plan in particular. An initial compromise among the leadership team and board was reached by including both the Agriculture Area Plan and the Official Community Plan in the proposal. The REFBC replied with interest in the proposal, but a request that KFPC take a broader regional approach. This request was incorporated into the second stage 38 Note: this section was drafted prior to COVID-19 and does not reflect how the work of KFPC would evolve under these unanticipated circumstances. See the Conclusion for my thoughts on these more recent adjustments to KFPC’s work. 39 To clarify the participatory role I held with the project: I contributed to the REFBC grant application as a collaborating author, though I wasn’t involved in initial conversations where the policy implementation project was selected as the topic for that grant application. I was the lead author of the VF grant application, which secured the matching funds stipulated by REFBC, focused on a parallel Participatory Action Research project. Once the project was underway, I participated in a few different capacities: in my role as an ethnographer for my dissertation research, in my role as the Primary Investigator for the PAR evaluation of the project, in my role as a KFPC Board Director, and for a short period (January-April 2019) in my role as a policy analyst with the Province of BC Regional Economic Operations branch. 99 proposal, and one KFPC member shared with me their happiness and relief that the region would be getting the focus they felt it needed. The description of the project, taken from the final report prepared at the end of 2019, reads: Beginning in September 2018 with funding support from the Real Estate Foundation of BC, the Kamloops Food Policy Council (KFPC) launched a collective action process for food policy implementation (the Community-Based Food Plan Implementation project; also referred to throughout this report as the collective action project). The primary aim of the project was to aid the transition between community plans and their on-the-ground implementation. Researchers have identified an “implementation gap” that often occurs between the adoption of policies by governments and institutions and their manifestation on the ground (Clarke 2012). While much progress had been made in the Kamloops region towards implementing food policy, there were policies and plans in place representing shared goals across sectors that were not being moved towards implementation. The KFPC anticipated that these shared aspirations would benefit from a grassroots approach to implementation, using community partnerships as a lever to spark action. The goal of this project was to bring together Indigenous communities, local governments, organizations, and community partners such as food and agriculture related non-profits, researchers, and educational agencies to identify where mutual objectives exist in relation to food and discover how these objectives could be collaboratively accomplished. KFPC’s vision for the project was to: • Build capacity for community involvement in food policy implementation; • Explore potential for partnerships between governments, organizations or institutions; • Create a foundation for successful partnership funding proposals; • Help to bridge identified policy implementation gaps and initiate projects. Bringing together such an important group of local partners presented an exciting opportunity for KFPC to learn more about the effectiveness of collective action in small cities and rural regions. With support from the Vancouver Foundation, KFPC launched a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project that would run in parallel with the Community-Based Food Plan Implementation project. Using PAR methodologies, the intention of the research was to evaluate the on-the-ground outcomes of the collective action process, while simultaneously building capacity – informing and strengthening the project as it unfolded. KFPC also expected the research to provide a higher-level analysis of the role of community engagement in plan implementation that would be significant in other small communities interested in using collective action to reduce the 100 implementation gap. The PAR research focused on two main research questions: 1. What is the role of community-based collective action in food plan implementation in small cities and rural regions? and 2. What are the benefits of incorporating participatory research into collective action processes? (Pletsch, McLean, and Harris 2019) A number of tangible and intangible outcomes resulted from the time invested in facilitating the loose collective of partners KFPC was able to engage. The Food Hub Pilot, a project I describe in detail in the chapter that follows, is one such example. In the context of the question “where does KFPC go from here?” that I have used to animate this chapter, the policy implementation project sits at an interesting intersection. On the one hand, it was in intimate conversation with the previous planning processes which produced “things”, like the Food and Urban Agriculture Plan, that were very alive for KFPC members. On the other hand, the simultaneous development of the shared vision for the food system was creating a new thing for members to cohere around and use to imagine possible futures. One of the recommendations identified in the final policy implementation project report was to “Broaden the scope of the collective to a shared vision for the food system rather than the narrow focus on existing food plans” (Pletsch, McLean, and Harris 2019), reflecting in part a likely recency bias and preference on the part of our team for the vision that we were building together in that same timeframe. Without downplaying the importance of the FUAP, or the advantages that KFPC has in having an adopted food policy at the municipal level, the shared vision created something else altogether. 5.3 Multiple possible futures adrienne marie brown invokes Octavia Butler’s fictional protagonists to illustrate a point about emergence that I think is relevant to the ways I’ve articulated how KFPC has built its expansive vision, and the proliferation of work that goes along with it: 101 Octavia’s leaders were also decentralized, and they were generative – resilience and solutions came from that decentralization; the collective response was possible because no one person held the power…Rather than narrowing into one path forward, Octavia’s leaders were creating more and more possibilities. Not one perfect path forward, but an abundance of futures, of ways to manage resources together, to be brilliant together. (2017, 22–23) With the scope of the vision we’ve collectively created, KFPC is holding space for that generative work, for multiple possible futures. There are two senses of the possible I want to engage with here. First: the possible as pragmatic, as realistic, as what can we achieve, together, with the resources we have now? Second: the possible as what our collective imagination can call into being, as what is the full scope of possibility for our future? There are very few points in the in depth history and contemporary discussion I’ve presented where I’ve identified tensions amongst the KFPC community – not that KFPC is immune to interpersonal conflict, but it did indeed occur very rarely and for the most part not in ways that were germane to my analysis. However, tensions did regularly emerge when deciding how to move forward, not as I initially theorized would appear as conflicts in selecting between this project or that project, but in the sense of: “can we handle everything we’re doing?” and “do we have the capacity for this right now?” I observed regular efforts to “scale in” – particularly when applying for project-based grants – aiming to find a way of structuring the application around a “project” that would give KFPC the maximum flexibility to invest in what it already had on the go. Yet the capacity to take things on, if not infinite, seemed at least to emerge in tandem with the projects, and the intentional effort to cultivate the generative decentralization of emergent strategy. More expansive projects are not in and of themselves necessarily more valuable than the earlier initiatives taken up by KFPC, at least not in the sense of the desires, passionate interests and relational entanglements that brought them into being. But they are more expansive. And the 102 web of relations that informs them, and the number of things to be in right relation-with is more expansive as well. One of the most important multiplicities for which KFPC is holding space, and where there is a necessary and generative tension, is a wicked question40 (perhaps the wickedest): “How can we simultaneously support Indigenous food sovereignty efforts while working on unceded territories within colonial structures?” (BC Food Security Gateway 2020). I want to quote in an extended way here from a blog post of the BC Food Security Gateway, a province-wide Community of Practice (CoP) that several KFPC members participate in. This summary, from the February 2020 meeting, describes a snapshot of how KFPC is leaning into the Indigenous food sovereignty conversation: CoP participants Carole Hebden and Sandra Frangiadakis, Chair and Community Food Action Lead respectively, of the Kamloops Food Policy Council have been participating in workshops on white supremacy in the food system and the Decolonizing Research and Relationships: Cross Cultural Framework, led by Dawn Morrison and [the Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty]. They shared a story from just east of Kamloops, in Secwepemcúl̓ecw, where a cherry orchard is being installed on the South Thompson river. It got approved through all the local government processes. No Indigenous consent was sought or needed. A sensitive bank was bulldozed to access irrigation and interrupted ancient movement patterns of deer and increased sediment runoff into the Thompson River impacting migrating wild salmon and returning fry. While Indigenous hunters are expected to go to individual settler farms to seek permission to hunt, a project that destroys a major deer corridor on unceded land does not reciprocate permission-seeking from those whose land they’re on. We work with wicked questions to name the paradoxes we work in- the tensions between accepted approaches and actual circumstances. We came into this conversation asking “How can we simultaneously support Indigenous food sovereignty efforts while working on unceded territories within colonial structures?” and this led to more questions that begin to suggest valuable strategies for our work. 40 A wicked question is a facilitation strategy within the Liberating Structures methodology, intended to support a group to articulate the paradoxical challenges they must confront to success. Wicked questions “bring to light paradoxical-yet-complementary forces that are constantly influencing behaviors and that are particularly important during change efforts” (Lipmanowicz and McCandless n.d.). 103 How are we — as both a CoP and broader movement of people and organizations working in food — responding to the call to “centre Indigenous ecological knowledge, wisdom and values”? How can local and regenerative agriculture complement indigenous food sovereignty? Can we build relationships with not just local municipal governments, but band councils, traditional Indigenous governance and grassroots communities? How will we do this in ways that de-centres and unpacks white privilege and settler colonialism? What stories will we hear, acknowledge, and act on? (BC Food Security Gateway 2020) So, together with collaborators at the KFPC and the broader community of practice we’re embedded in, I’m thinking expansively about what counts, and what might be included in the circle of kinship – what has been drawn in, and what is yet to be drawn in. One last thought to close this chapter, as a reminder that expansive visions do indeed start small: “Emergent Strategy is about shifting the way we see and feel the world and each other. If we begin to understand ourselves as practice ground for transformation, we can transform the world” (brown 2017, 191). 104 Chapter 6: A Theory Project of Value We alone can devalue gold by not caring if it falls or rises in the marketplace. Wherever there is gold there is a chain, you know, and if your chain is gold so much the worse for you. Feathers, shells and sea-shaped stones are all as rare. This could be our revolution: to love what is plentiful as much as what's scarce. -Alice Walker This world which could be free must be built from those desires that break us out of our rituals, our habits, our melancholic attachment to socialisms past and our need to always be scrolling through our smartphones. What are those desires that scare us, a little, to admit? It is those desires that will take us forward into that world of plenty. -Sarah Jaffe | Cybergothic Acid Communisms Now …but if I can just muster a little hope, if only for a split of a split of a second, I feel less despair and more belief in the overall capacity and audacity of the folks moving through the world to transform this collective of beings and existences and stories and knowings towards something a little bit less awful, degrading, and extractive. Humans are capable of such great violence and destruction. But also such magic. -Zoe Todd | Gratitude and Magic The first time I ate a Popcycle fruitpop, it was after one of the monthly network meetings, though I can’t recall which one – my notebook had already been tucked away in my bag so the experience doesn’t appear in my fieldnotes, and my description here instead relies on my strong sensory memories of the moment. I had been chatting with one of the KFPC staff members in the hallway as she was tidying up after the meeting and the last stages of potluck clean up were taking place in the main hall behind us. “We’ve been experimenting with our first popsicle 105 recipes,” she told me. “Actually, would you like to try one?” I waited in the kitchen while she went to get the key to the outdoor entry to the basement, and when she returned, I watched while she wrangled a popsicle out of its mold and passed it to me. Apricot is an anchor fruit for Kamloops, and for the KFPC, so it wasn’t a surprise to me to bite into a popsicle beautifully layered with honey-sweetened apricot puree and vanilla yogurt. The thing that did surprise me was the quick work that popsicle did to melt all my reservations about the KFPC Social Enterprise project (and at the time, these reservations were plentiful). Between the space of that first bite and licking the last bits off my popsicle stick, I felt transformed. I wanted to eat that popsicle forever and I was totally sold on deepening our investment into whatever program was going to keep making those popsicles available. It wasn’t just me who felt compelled in that direction – a small group had congregated around the kitchen, eating popsicles delightedly, and although the vanilla flavor was deemed slightly too strong by one person, the overwhelming consensus was to support the concept on its merits. The challenge with writing in a time of climate crisis and crumbling world orders41 is that very few solutions are at the scale of the problem. An artisanal fruitpop, no matter how delicious, is obviously not to scale. But small changes build capacity for an expansive vision and understanding how and why the KFPC is moving forward with the Popcycle program is a generative example to think with regarding how and why their initiatives move forward more generally – and for thinking through the complicated relationships between desire and value that this example reveals. In this section I build on a proposition popularized by David Graeber but 41 As Samantha Marie Nock, a Cree-Metis writer and poet, puts it: “I felt the world end with Colten Boushie; my ancestors watched the end of the world with the death of the bison; we have seen the end of the world daily, we have been raised with world’s end in our DNA. The magic in knowing that the end of the world is imminent and constant is that you are born with the stubborn knowledge of how to start again: like yoskipem growing through cracks in the sidewalk. Then you’re born with many ends and many beginnings, you know when you’re standing on the edge of dystopia” (Nock 2019). 106 evident in the cumulative literature of economic anthropology: value brings universes into being.42 I’m interested specifically in how this happens in the Kamloops food network – in other words, how do collective desires shape decisions and actions? How exactly (read ethnographically) does value bring universes into being? I’m working towards a theory of value for this community context – not as a unified or static framework, but as Michael Carolan suggests, as a way of thinking about how “value is contested and made real” (2017). Ultimately, what I hope to illustrate is that the relationship between value, desire and power is critical to enabling the imagining and enacting of new worlds. How are the desires of a collective translated into worlds? I’ll start with a concrete question embedded in my local contingencies: “Who doesn’t love popsicles and bicycles?” 6.1 Popcycle: “Who doesn’t love popsicles and bicycles?” KFPC’s Popcycle project originated in 2017 with a successful application to the Maple Leaf Centre for Action on Food Security Feed Opportunity Innovation Fund. The grant provided a small fund over two years to support a part time program coordinator to pilot a social enterprise initiative that would process excess gleaned fruit from the Gleaning Abundance Program (GAP). KFPC also secured a small grant from the Sprott Foundation to support the purchase of food processing equipment, such as dehydrators, freezers and food processors. As described in the initial project proposal to Maple Leaf: Every year we glean an abundance of fruit that goes to volunteers, emergency food providers and homeowners. However, there is often excess fruit that the homeowners do not take and emergency food providers do not have the capacity to process. We often leave some trees unharvested because there is nowhere to take the fruit. 42 This proposition runs through his foundational work on value (Graeber 2001) and is revisited in a more recent article (Graeber 2013) as well as thematically in much of his public writing. 107 Last season, it was brought to our attention that the local Boys and Girls Club, one of our recipient agencies, purchases an enormous quantity of pre-packaged snacks such as granola bars, dried fruit and frozen fruit and berries which they provide to children and families in their programs. While much of our local abundance goes uneaten, our kids are eating purchased commercial snack products! We would like to turn this problem into an opportunity by implementing a pilot project for creating a variety of snack foods for the Boys and Girls Club using gleaned fruit. We envision this as a social enterprise, where we could replace some of the packaged or frozen products that the Boys and Girls Club is paying full retail price for, with healthy local snacks made from fresh fruit at the same or lower price. This would help the low-income students have healthier local snacks, create a new outlet for our abundant local fruit, and increase the self-sufficiency of our gleaning program in Kamloops. We also would like to support the Boys and Girls Club to include their students in food literacy education activities where the kids can come and help us make the local snacks. (KFPC Feed Opportunity Application, July 26, 2017) In the first few months after receiving funding, the project had taken some slow steps towards its goals – members of the KFPC shared leadership team had completed a food premise approval application to Interior Health to allow for processed and packaged food, purchased a dehydrator and tested several products. However, clear direction and a feasible way to sustainably produce the products were lacking. In early 2018, the City of Kamloops had announced a separate social enterprise stream to their annual social planning grants. This stream would allow successful recipients to access one year of coaching from Purppl, a for-profit social enterprise accelerator based in Kelowna, followed by two years of a small grant to support start-up expenses. In its successful grant application to the city, KFPC describes the early evolution of their project concept: Because our end users are the Boys and Girls Club, we are not aiming to turn a profit, but simply to cover the costs of ingredients and supplies for following years. However, financial sustainability has been identified as the number one risk in this social enterprise venture. We do not want to ask the Boys and Girls Club to stretch their budget further, so we would like to use this opportunity to receive training and support from the City of Kamloops and Purppl to explore a secondary stream of products such as apricot salsa, jams, or jellies that can be sold at a higher price to more affluent markets to support the products we supply the Boys and Girls Club. (KFPC Social Enterprise Accelerator Application, March 22, 2018) 108 In May 2018 the part-time coordinator was hired and the business mentorship process began, and the project continued to evolve. The dehydrated products that had been tested were prohibitively expensive to produce, and in the absence of another clear and viable product idea, the coordinator began chopping and freezing fruit to store. An attempt to find a market for the frozen fruit resulted in approximately $300 of sales to local restaurants, but it quickly became clear it wouldn’t be a viable product in the long run. In the October 2018 report to the funder (Maple Leaf Foods), the Social Enterprise coordinator reported the results of a market survey that had been conducted during the summer via the KFPC Facebook page and email list (see Figure 7). Popsicles were the second lowest rated product. The program coordinator described for me how the decision to move forward with popsicles took more factors into account, using a matrix provided by the Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) providing business mentorship that gauged projected product revenue against projected cost to produce/sell: So we used that metric and we put some things into it like baby food and fruitpops and a few other things. We also broke down the labour and the expenses and how much it would take to make all these various items and then we also factored in the amount of excitement each one generated for us personally. It wasn't that we were totally throwing that customer discovery research out the window. 109 Figure 7: Popcycle Market Survey Responses, 2018 Source: KFPC Maple Leaf Report Oct 2018 During this evolution, the KFPC board was receiving regular updates about the challenges the project was encountering. At the October meeting in particular, the discussion was weighted with a series of concerns: the EIR was struggling to connect with KFPC staff who were feeling pressured to get to their “first sale” without feeling confident in their business plan; the coordinator was struggling to secure kitchen space at the partner location; freezer and cold storage space were at a premium, but without being able to decide on the specific product, the staff were hesitant to commit to purchasing equipment or freezers that would resolve the issue. The minutes from this meeting sum up the frank conversation with a terse note: “Discussion around whether to continue with a social enterprise or not -- is this what we want to focus energy on” (KFPC Board Minutes, Oct 17, 2018). Of course, this was the time that the staff team was deciding to move forward with the popsicles, and as the program coordinator liked to say when promoting the project: “Who doesn’t love popsicles and bicycles?” 110 Developing a Popcycle theory of change for the project, with the support of a new EIR (this one based in Kamloops and with specific experience working in the food system and with KFPC), was significant in building the staff team’s confidence in the project, and their understanding of the project’s role in their broader food system work: Social Enterprise Coordinator (SE): No I think that's really great, it's so great and the Popcycle theory of change has that built into it as well, is how Popcycle is just one little bicycle on a path towards systemic change of the food system, with other bicycles on that same path, like a food hub. LH: So when you're thinking of Popcycle as a bicycle on the path, is it just the idea of building a revenue stream that's going to feed into KFPC that's going to change the food system? Or are there other aspects of Popcycle as an organization that you think might be leveraged towards those bigger goals? SE: I think Popcycle as I'm currently envisioning it can't be divorced from the KFPC. It's always going to be a project of the KFPC with KFPC doing the bigger stuff. I'm humble enough to admit that at the end of the day it's just a popsicle. LH: Right. SE: Only so much of the world you can change with a popsicle, though that is my plan, is to change the world one popsicle at a time, but I think that Popcycle’s role is to be a supporter of the KFPC, to help the KFPC move along. 111 Figure 8: Popcycle Theory of Change Source: Kamloops Food Policy Council, Reprinted with permission By all sorts of measures (even perhaps including ones that allow for alternative valuations), Popcycle is not (yet) a success. In its second year, Popcycle generated just over $4000 in total sales, an amount that covers only a fraction of the program expenses, including wages for the part-time coordinator and a summer student employee, and comes nowhere near contributing any self-generated revenue to the KFPC. And although I’m drawing on it as a starting point to discuss how desire and value are operative in the Kamloops food system, it isn’t even necessarily a good example of collective desire – a nuanced discussion about the project has continued even to the time of writing. Certainly, the popsicle/bicycle combination has 112 generated excitement as a concept,43 and the KFPC popsicle flavours are deliciously addictive. KFPC staff also keenly want access to reliable, unrestricted core funding for the organization – as has been mentioned to me on more than one occasion, “Even $50 of core funding makes a difference.” However, certain of the barriers to running the program remain – particularly kitchen rental space during prime hours for gleaning volunteers to process harvested fruit. This problem was resolved for the 2019 season by the occurrence of another unanticipated problem: a challenging winter cold snap that wiped out apricot buds across the city and resulted in significantly lower gleaned fruit harvests. Kitchen space was expected to be an issue again in future years, when fruit harvests returned to normal levels. The program coordinator discussed these concerns with other KFPC staff and board members, weighing the advantages of either scaling up the program to boost sales, or scaling it down to a level of production that could be handled by gleaning volunteers. Given these complicated desires, the thing I find particularly interesting is not the presence of desire for Popcycle itself, but rather the role it plays in the KFPC’s more expansive vision for the food system, and how at least part of the reason the KFPC has stuck with the project is about what it does, what it imagines, rather than what it is in and of itself. I want to draw on this example to theorize value and desire more robustly, and to think about how KFPC is imagining and building worlds, but first, I turn to situate Popcycle in the economic landscape. 6.2 Diverse Economies In part at least, capitalism establishes its ongoing global dominance by the apparent simplicity of market theory as a totalizing system of value. It engenders many critiques from 43 In addition to local news stories about the program, including a CBC radio feature, Popcycle was recently featured in a Globe and Mail article about the popsicle/bike trend (Baron Cadloff 2019). 113 many different perspectives but also operates by shutting down or co-opting the ability to imagine alternatives. However, capitalism is in a value crisis – even according to its own logic, it can’t make sense of value anymore.44 Economic anthropology has long understood that value comes into being through social relations – the concept of a rational, individual economic actor does not have much credibility amongst anthropologists, if it ever did, at least not since economic anthropologists endeavoured to challenge economists’ orthodoxies.45 Economic anthropology instead refuses to define economic activity as a “bottom line” calculation and brings to the forefront the social relations, desires and structures of meaning making that make up economies, even capitalist ones (Graeber 2001; Gudeman and Rivera 1990). The legacy of Arthur Manuel in Secwepemcúl̓ecw means that this region (the land and its people) is a global leader in challenges to capitalist valuation. Through both his activism and writing, Manuel demonstrated an intuitive sense for the inner workings of capitalist economies, advancing the idea that Indigenous rights and title to their lands are a risk factor for business as 44 The claim of a “value crisis” is now coming at capitalism from multiple fronts. Indigenous assertion of land claims that amplify the calculation of risk in the pricing of extractive natural resource projects is one. There is a longstanding line of feminist substantivist scholarship that has made visible the care labour that capitalist economies brush aside as externalities (Bear et al. 2015). More recently, there has been attention to the challenges of valuing immaterial and commons-based peer-to-peer production (sharing many parallels with feminist care economies) (Arvidsson and Peitersen 2013; Arvidsson, Bauwens, and Peitersen 2008; Bauwens and Niaros 2017). Finally, the public outcry is bolstered as late capitalist fuckery gets increasingly more obscenely ridiculous in its exploitation of workers, consumers and environments (see for example Popper 2019; Callahan 2019). 45 See Gregory (1982) for a discussion of the limited explanatory power of the economics approach compared with the political economy approach – a key text in economic anthropology that differentiates between the value systems generated by commodity and gift economies: Commodity exchange is an exchange of alienable objects between people who are in a state of reciprocal independence that establishes a quantitative relationship between the objects exchanged…Gift exchange is an exchange of inalienable objects between people who are in a state of reciprocal dependence that establishes a qualitative relationship between the transactors. (1982, 100–101) Value is defined differently in each: commodities have use/exchange value that is created by treating humans (or at least human labour) as objects; gifts are valued for their social relations and obligations. Gifts and commodities are set up by Gregory as useful abstractions, intended to clarify how, within specific historical contingencies, people move back and forth between them (1982, 116). 114 usual (Manuel and Derrickson 2015; 2017). Economist D.T. Cochrane has been building on Manuel’s intuitive understanding of capitalism to illuminate what mainstream economics obfuscates and making visible the entangled processes of evaluations that accompany price setting/valuation. In an essay called “What is Value?”, Cochrane critiques the way mainstream marginalist economic theory erases the functions of power and social relations that shape our desires and definitions of value: Value is a function of power…Meanwhile, mainstream economic theory makes power disappear with its theorization of atomistic individuals maximizing their utility via market competition.46 Evaluation should not be abdicated to markets or owners – and wealth redistribution would redistribute power, which would alter evaluations. There is no given, necessary, or objective basis for value. As such, there can be no true value. Instead, value is what we make it to be, it is a social responsibility. And indeed, what values would democratic evaluation produce? (Cochrane 2019, 24). The idea of “The Economy” is a particularly persistent myth. For Latour, “The Economy” is a field of unquestioned internal laws (much like “Science” was before the introduction of Science and Technology Studies) oriented around the cold calculation of interests. A mythical free market economy remains the bulwark of contemporary economics, including the policy settings of the non-profit sector in which the KFPC operates. The narrative proceeds: choose evidence-based program, write funding application, implement program, monitor outcomes, write assessment report to demonstrate success, rinse and repeat, all amid increasing levels of frustration about how difficult it is to demonstrate value in narrowly conscribed value frames. Elizabeth Povinelli suggests that within the constraints of a neoliberal framework, any social investment, regardless of its life-enhancing nature, is an economic and 46 Although Cochrane’s broad statement that mainstream economic theory makes power disappear doesn’t specifically acknowledge the ways economics as a discipline does “account for” power, I understand this statement to be a gesture at power of a different sort: the underlying power of the universalizing ideology of capitalism that normalizes and maintains the system itself. Following Bichler and Nitzan: “Power, we argue, is not an external factor that distorts or supports a material process of accumulation; instead, it is the inner driving force, the means and ends of capitalist development at large” (2012). 115 moral failure if it does not result in market value (2011a, 23). In its own logic, “Neoliberalism works by colonizing the field of value—reducing all social values to one market value—exhausting alternative social projects by denying them sustenance” (Povinelli 2011a, 134). However, even though “we imagine a capitalist logic of value that has taken over the world,” instead we find that “capitalist commodity value is everywhere created through tapping and transforming non-capitalist social relations” (Tsing 2013, 21). There is intellectual and political purchase to be found at the “rough edges” and messy historical contingencies where capitalism meets non-capitalism.47 Likewise, in Latour’s view it isn’t enough to critique the cancer of capitalism; this is just another way to leave intact the economy and its claims to produce “value-free” indisputable facts. The ongoing processes of deliberation undertaken by KFPC reflect what he describes as the “passionate interests” of actors: intense attachments between members assembled around matters of concern that result in a reconceptualization of “value” as impromptu, mobile, and intransitive (Latour 2013). The “surprise of value” emerges 47 Tsing follows Gregory’s discussion of gift economies to consider how matsutake mushrooms move back and forth between gift/commodity status. In her analysis, gifts “include all objects of exchange in which parts of the giver are embedded, extending social relations beyond the transaction…. Using this definition, many commodities-in-the-making have a life as gifts. However, if they will channel profits to the propertied class—that is, become capitalist commodities—the gifts must be taken out of them” (Tsing 2013, 23). She coins the term “alienation assessment” to describe this process of translation, unique to supply-chain procurement in which independent contractors make it more difficult to sever their social relations than in the factory discipline of Marxist analysis. As matsutake are sorted and re-graded, multiple times along the supply chain Tsing traces, the process of assessment erases and replaces social relations. Here she describes the implications of the process: Despite the power of capitalism, all capitalist commodities wander in and out of capitalist commodity status. This is because the discipline of labor and natural resources, which builds alienation and privatization into the commodity, is never fully successful. Capitalism always requires non-capitalist social relations to accomplish its goals. This is particularly obvious in supply-chain capitalism, where lead firms do not even try to discipline labor and natural resources, limiting their discipline to inventory. (Tsing 2013, 37) It is important to note that Tsing emphasizes the more-than-human attention that is needed to create this analysis. She writes: “a full understanding of alienation in the process of commodification requires attention to the life worlds of species other than humans. Multispecies ethnography meets political economy in this emerging field” (Tsing 2013, 39). 116 each time we articulate our course of action (Latour 2013, 437). This approach to value necessitates an approach to calculation that differs from what economists have traditionally counted – rather than an economics that short-circuits the active practice of scruples, it demands a collective uncertainty over ends and means in pursuit of the optimal common life.48 “When calculations appear, they are there to reinforce, emphasize, amplify, simplify, authorize, format, and perform the distribution of agencies, not at all to substitute for the experience of being set in motion, moved, attached, excited by things that are different on each occasion. To give 48 In The Science of Passionate Interests, Latour and Vincent Antonin Lepinay undertake a curious thought experiment, imagining that instead of Das Kapital, Gabriel Tarde’s Psycologie Economique had been the text to define political economy in the 20th century and benefit from a century of commentary on it. Latour and Lepinay capture the heart of Tarde’s work: “At no time does Tarde ask us to choose between cold economics and warm subjectivity. Instead, it is from the free play of passionate interests that he expects more quantification, which is to say more social connections, to ‘card chaos’ into a world” (2009, 87). This concept of passionate interests carries forward into Latour’s most recent major project, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME). Latour’s project in AIME is to systematically investigate how we might choose “ecologizing” over “modernizing” (2013, 8). It is the positive project to complement We Have Never Been Modern: if we have never been modern, what have we been? An anthropology of the moderns is needed to combat modernity’s false transparency (we have never been modern but believed we were, and further believed in our own self-awareness). Not only is this a chance to correct our category mistakes divorced from our actual practices, it also offers an opportunity to benefit from modes of existence such as law, religion or politics that were trampled by the authority carried by Science in modernity. The dissolution of the economy is perhaps the most significant innovation. Latour identifies three gaps between the economy and ordinary existence, which Salmon and Charbonnier summarize as follows: The cold calculation of interests on which economics is supposedly founded confuses the 'passionate interests' behind our emotional attachment to the things of the world [ATT] with the formatting required to make them fit into systems of accounting [ORG]. By presenting these calculations as unquestionable facts, whereas they always leave out a number of externalities (as is still very much the case, even now, with environmental damage), economics short-circuits the ‘experience of scruples’ [MOR]: it gives economic partners the illusion of being absolved of any obligation once a transaction is completed, without having to go through a collective discussion about the distribution of ends and means. (2014, 572) The mode of morality is Latour’s response to the Modern’s practice of allowing a unified, globalized economic order to short circuit public debate and calculate facts (indisputably), what Latour calls the “avoidance of Modernism: treating those close to us as strangers to whom we owe nothing because we have discovered a source of absolute certainty, indifferent to values” (2013, 449). The mode of morality, rather, requires the active practice of scruples, an uncertainty over ends and means in pursuit of the optimal common life. There are two ways to approach the modern paradox of the economy, Latour writes, “The optimum must be calculated even though it is incalculable….In one case, there are indisputable facts/values; in the other, around arrangements for calculation, debate begins, again and again” (2013, 462). 117 calculations their rightful place, we must let passions – calculations of passions – take their rightful place as well” (Latour 2013, 427). J.K. Gibson-Graham has perhaps gone the farthest in articulating how, from the perspective of academic researchers, we can learn to perform and celebrate the things that push back against the all-consuming logics of capitalism, and in so doing, open spaces for alternative valuation (2006). Thinking about the positioning of the researcher, they ask: “How might those of us interested in diverse economies choose to think and theorize in a way that makes us a condition of possibility of new economic becomings, rather than a condition of their impossibility?” (Gibson-Graham 2008, 619). Popcycle can be seen as one example of the proliferation of alternative economic projects they herald in their diverse economies framework. They note academia’s tendencies to preference critique of these types of project: “This means that experimental forays into building new economies are likely to be dismissed as capitalism in another guise or as always already coopted; they are often judged as inadequate before they are explored in all their complexity and incoherence” (Gibson-Graham 2008, 618). A critical approach would not map well to the ambivalence expressed by Popcycle coordinator: I really enjoyed the Purppl mentorship, learning about business, and sometimes I hear myself talking and I'm like, oh man I sound way more capitalist than I used to, which is scary, but also I think it's good to get a diverse set of views and knowledge and perspectives and now that I know more about managing a business, and capitalist ideas around making a profit, and how to drive that and build on it, I can maybe subvert it for better purposes, I don’t know. The diverse economies framing makes space for this kind of ambivalence via the mechanism of “weak theory” which can hold space for ambivalence and by which we would not be able to tell that economic experiments “are doomed to fail or destined to reinforce dominance; it could not tell us that the world economy will never be transformed by the disorganized proliferation of local projects” (Gibson-Graham 2008, 619). 118 I agree with Gibson-Graham about the importance of activist research that performs diverse economic initiatives that complicate and destabilize capitalist dominance, without being too quick to judge whether or not they are coopted or insufficiently subversive, and I aim to take this stance towards Popcycle. My difficulty lies in thinking seriously, together with the KFPC, about what constitutes success for these initiatives, because the pressing question – should we keep investing our energy into this? – ebbs and flows as the bicycle hits multiple speed bumps along its journey. Here is a series of questions to move forward with: do diverse economic projects risk becoming an end in and of themselves?49 What does it look like when they emerge from a collective desire for multiple experiments? What about when they emerge organically vs. as an intentional effort to generate systems change? In the KFPC timeline, the social enterprise project was underway before the organization engaged in the expansive visioning process I outline in the previous chapter. In the spirit of small changes build capacity for an expansive vision I want to turn in the next section to thinking about some KFPC initiatives that came before Popcycle, and one initiative that came after it. 6.3 Looking Back, Looking Forward, Still Looking for Success Non-capitalist ways of being – gift exchange, solidarity, cooperation, unpaid care labour – have always proliferated inside/outside capitalism, and work within the Kamloops food system is no different. Popcycle isn’t the first alternative economic experiment in the KFPC’s history; several past projects listed in chapter 4 would also fall into this category. The Kamloops 49 This question I take from the social ecologist Murray Bookchin, who writes: “Where cooperatives have been able to maintain themselves against capitalist competition, they tend to become introverted, basically centered on their internal problems and collective interests; and to the extent that they link together, they do so in order to focus on ways and means to stay alive or expand as enterprises. Above all, they rarely, if ever, become centers of popular power—partly because they are not concerned with addressing issues of power as such, and partly too because they have no way of mobilizing people around visions of how society should be controlled” (1999). 119 Regional Farmers’ Market is the longest running and most successful example, with its origins in social justice organizing and an intentional focus on supporting local farmers. By all measures a successful large market, according to the province wide economic impact assessment done in 2012, it is one of the most visited markets in the province and generates an estimated 3.1m annually (Connell and Frisque 2012). Despite its continued success as a profitable market and its allegiance to its origins, the farmers’ market has not evolved significantly in recent years, to either expand its impact or adapt to changing conditions. As one KFPC member shared: The farmers’ market, it's a bit of an institution at this point and has maybe lost some of its agility in that regard, but it also still has some very radical underpinnings. I think it's doing great things to the local food economy even if it has lost some of its agility – 40 years old, that’s an institution and I think that's really awesome it's been around that long and it's still as radical as it is. The Good Food Box, launched in 1997 as a collective buying group, is another example. The project was organized by the Salvation Army who had a representative participating in the early days of the KFPC. For a small monthly fee, and two hours of volunteer service, participants received a monthly box of produce (meat, milk and egg options were added in later years), accessing the savings afforded by collective purchasing. Newspaper coverage of the program led to a “runaway growth of demand” (KFPC Minutes, Nov 5, 1997) with customer numbers reaching 150 by 1999, and box sales continued for several years. A gap in KFPC archives and collective memory means that the reason and timeframe for the end of the program is not clear, though the labour intensive process to run the program and changing community priorities around developing a food recovery program through the Kamloops Food Bank may have contributed. The Kamloops Organic Food Co-operative Association started out in 1998 with conversations among KFPC members and local farmers that resulted in a project of fundraising and membership development that lasted for several years. Fundraising primarily took the form 120 of social events: dinners, auctions, concerts, and dances. In 2000, the Organic Co-op received $8,500 from the Community Enterprise program of the provincial Ministry of Community Development, Cooperatives and Volunteers, to develop a business plan for the retail outlet (BC Government News Release, Feb 25, 2000). By 2001, the group had a business plan in hand (scaled down from early ambitions), and launched new fundraising options (member pledges, member loans and advance “active membership” purchases), in addition to their “ever popular Co-op dances” to secure the remainder of the capital investment needed to open a storefront (KOFCA Newsletter #4, Feb 2001). Once the retail outlet launched in late 2002, the Co-op struggled to establish viability, continuing to hold dances and fundraising events to supplement its revenue, before closing its doors in early 2004 (KFPC Minutes, March 25, 2004). When asked the reason the Organic Co-op folded, one KFPC member involved in its development shared, “It was before it’s time. People just weren’t ready for it.” Despite starting up with what the organizers hoped was a viable business plan, the co-op wasn’t successful financially. It sold exclusively organic products but wasn’t able to find support for their higher price point, and it struggled with its location which didn’t provide significant retail traffic. The Kamloops Organics Buying Club evolved out of the defunct co-op, coordinating monthly bulk ordering as an informal collective. These monthly orders have continued over the last 15 years, and the current membership list includes approximately 200 households. The buying club, though loosely organized and completely dependent on volunteer organization, is a potential force for an expanded project to emerge; organizers have recently taken steps toward including local produce and/or prepared products in their catalogue, though logistical challenges have prevented their ideas from moving forward to date. 121 Heartland Foods, started in 2007 as a producer cooperative to great fanfare in the community, was the next attempt to build the local food economy. A local rancher who was involved in starting the project was quoted in a local news story describing the purpose: “What we’re trying to do is build a value chain that is shorter and simpler…Basically we’re trying to put more jingle back in the producer’s pocket and have the producers grow more of what the consumer wants” (Youds 2007). KFPC was one of the organizing partners, together with Community Futures Thompson Country who provided a seed funding grant of $30,000 to conduct market research which included both producer and consumer surveys. The completed report identified a proposed business structure and breakeven analysis for a producer co-op, but didn’t explore operational risks in detail and based its conclusions on the consumer willingness to pay a premium for local products on a very small sample (Watt 2007). In 2008, Heartland was profiled as an example of successful local government support in a Provincial Health Services Authority report A Seat at the Table: Resource Guide for Local Governments to Promote Food Secure Communities. By October 2008, Heartland had moved to a new location near the Mount Paul Agricultural Centre (at the former KXA grounds), sharing a building with the First Nations Agricultural Lending Association (FNALA) (KFPC Minutes, October 1, 2008). Once control of the storefront and the producer co-op was handed over to FNALA, within the KFPC network, there is little available knowledge about the specific reasons why Heartland closed. From the perspective of those who accessed the storefront as consumers, a combination of challenges with staffing, maintaining inventory, and poor location were contributors. Following the hand-off of Heartland, KFPC’s efforts turned first to the Public Produce initiative, and then to the Gleaning Abundance Program, which in the way they framed 122 these projects, turned the attention back towards waste reduction and household food security rather than economic experiment. 50 One economic development professional, with a long history working in the region, observed the challenges for experimental economic projects like these to find long-term sustainability: In what I call a social enterprise, food security side, people have this anathema towards business, that it’s bad somehow. And making a profit is bad. So I see them as their hearts are in the right place, they want to provide local healthy meals from local produce to local people … That's all great. But it has to be sustainable and that's the part that's my frustration is that they can't see – you know, like if you try and say “hey look you know we have to we have to run this like a business” and my point is we have to make this sustainable, then they just disconnect and go “ah, you know that's bad, that's evil.” You know, bad capitalism. But you want sustainability in what you're doing because if you can't do this year after year after year then your goals, your aspirations which are ultimately good, fail… I don't necessarily give up on these things I just realize sometimes you have to wait for people to change or people to recognize that their approach isn't going to work. Sometimes it's just the timing is bad. You know, the personalities. But again, that's fundamentally what I see as one of the challenges is taking these really good ideas and figuring out how to make them last over the long term. In the past examples considered here, analysis of their success or failure still turns on specific contingencies – who was there, who was doing the work, did they have the capacity, what external or structural challenges were they up against? In the case of the Farmers’ Market, it’s operating successfully at least within the scope it defined for itself. In the case of the Organic Co-op or Heartland Foods, the organizers were happy to accept economic development support funding to study the market and write up business plans, although from the economic development perspective, there is still a great deal of idealism that colours what is considered feasible within these plans. Is it only with the benefit of hindsight that the numbers in their 50 Though others have connected similar urban gleaning programs to Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies framework – see for example Ballamingie, Poitevin-DesRivieres, and Knezevic who analyze Hidden Harvest Ottawa for the ways that it challenges and destabilizes mainstream economic values (2019). 123 business plans look soft? Or would it have been evident at the time, if the analysis was done by someone whose desire to get the projects off the ground wasn’t quite as strong? A not-insignificant percentage of for-profit businesses fail too, of course. The following exchange from my interview with the Social Enterprise Coordinator illustrates this kind of thinking-in-the-moment about the project’s relationship to “bad capitalism”: SE: I really enjoyed the Purppl mentorship, learning about business, and sometimes I hear myself talking and I'm like, oh man I sound way more capitalist than I used to, which is scary but also I think it's good to get a diverse set of views and knowledge and perspectives and now that I know more about managing a business, and capitalist ideas around making a profit, and how to drive that and build on it, I can maybe subvert it for better purposes, I don’t know. LH: Yeah, I mean I'm doing a lot of thinking about subversion myself. I remember I have a picture of your sticky note that's like “the end of capitalism and the downfall of the American Empire,” [see Figure 9] you know that one on the wall when we were doing that visioning exercise, and it was like right there front and centre, someone actually willing to say it out loud. SE: Oh yeah, that's high up in my life’s goals. LH: So I'm wondering if you can make a connection for me between that lofty vision and what you're doing with Popcycle? SE: Well that's a big gap, and I don't even know if I’ve fully bridged it myself, but one thing that I was raised with was the notion of “think globally, act locally” and to just do what you can in the here-and-now. Pick something that you're passionate about and make that what you're fighting for, because you can't solve all of the world's problems and if you try to, you're just going to burn yourself out, you're going to have to go down an emotional wormhole of despair, there's so many things broken that need to be fixed so I guess focusing on Popcycle is my way of acting locally. I still I have some concerns around the whole notion of social enterprises as a concept in general because it is very much, or at least the way Purppl was pushing social enterprises, in that it’s trying to take a capitalist idea and I guess subvert it in some ways but on the other hand not subvert it, just like run with it. So that's been a challenge for me to think about as well, for Popcycle, how are we not being capitalists, we’re making a product and we are taking that money but that's where the theory of change that we made comes in because we sat down and we thought about the ethics of what we're doing – we have reasons why we're doing it. 124 Figure 9: Drafting a vision for “Food commons” Source: Photo by author, November 7, 2018 125 I also want to position Popcycle in contrast with the next initiative that the KFPC is creating, the Kamloops Food Processing and Innovation Hub (“Food Hub”) pilot project, which launched in August 2019. The project developed out of the collective impact process facilitated by the KFPC (described in Chapter 5), as increasing value-added food processing capacity and facilities in the region was identified as a shared aspiration for the collective. The pilot project focused on providing tailored business mentorship and acceleration support to five food businesses, alongside proactive coordination to build resources and elicit partnerships for shared commercial kitchen facilities, and a research study to identify a feasible model for scaling the pilot into a fully implemented Food Hub. I was closely involved in the development of the Food Hub project. I was employed by the Province of BC in the Regional Economic Operations Branch as a Program/Policy Analyst until April 30, 3019 and in that role was notified about an upcoming funding opportunity from the Ministry of Agriculture to support a network of “food hubs” across the province. In June 2019, in a volunteer capacity as a KFPC Board Director, I wrote an initial proposal document and budget, coordinated partnership conversations and one-on-one meetings, and chaired a working group meeting to reach a group consensus about the direction of the project. I also co-authored the grant application, which was submitted to the Ministry of Agriculture in early July. Once the funding was confirmed, a project manager was hired, but I continued to participate as a working group member, joined several partnership development meetings, and edited the interim feasibility study report. Shortly after submitting the grant application, I was on a phone call with a fellow KFPC Board Director. I had been talking about my experience working on the application, and sharing how burnt out I felt given the significant time investment I had dedicated to the project while I 126 should have been working on my dissertation. In response, she asked me to challenge myself to think about why I wanted the Food Hub so badly. Although it wasn’t a question I could answer in the moment, I spent a lot of time reflecting on it. Why did I want the Food Hub so badly? In and of itself, it comes across as a fairly typical economic development project, focused on food businesses of course, but not necessarily speaking anything outside the language of the status quo capitalist economy. I came to the growing realization that I wanted the food hub not particularly for itself, but for what it would mean for the bigger vision, for what it could be leveraged into, for the capacity that would be built by having it. I know I am not alone in my desire to see the Food Hub move forward. The collective desire for this project to succeed is evident – within the KFPC network and beyond. In September and November 2019, the monthly network potluck meetings were focused on the Food Hub – the former to introduce the project and pilot businesses, and the latter to share the proposed model for full implementation. Both meetings had the kind of attendance that required more tables and chairs to be pulled out as the crowd grew, and both meetings attracted several participants visiting the KFPC for the first time. As the project manager reflected on her own investment in the project: What’s been so nice about the food hub, even though I feel sometimes torn about how much time and energy I’m spending on it, when I’m able to step back and think, when this is launched, there’s going to be so much power in it. It will be such an amazing jumping off point for all of this other work that we’re doing and we’re hitting such an important leverage point if we do it right, which I have faith that we will. It’s such an important leverage point for the rest of that rubric, because capitalism is holding so much back, right? And not being able to imagine what a different economic system will look like. If we do the food hub right, it’ll be a constant imagining of what that economic system could look like. Her reflections continued, comparing the Food Hub project with the Popcycle experiment: 127 In a way the experiment of Popcycle, if taken on its own it’s just a popsicle… but there’s still a lot of learning and value that can come out of it. And one of the biggest values of it is how concrete it is. People can hold it in their hands and taste it, they can see on the packaging that it’s from gleaned fruit, there’s the whole plan that went along with it with the bicycle, and that’s really valuable. At the end of the day, as you’re acknowledging, if it’s not embedded within this whole other web of programs as well as web of intentions and experiments, then it’s not going to make the change on its own. I feel like the food hub goes to just that next level of power or intention or potential outcome….But with the food hub, as soon as we got into those conversations and we got that funding and now with it being that much more concrete, yeah, it feels great, but if we’re not careful, just like [the Social Enterprise Coordinator] talks about with Popcycle, we could just find ourselves speaking that capitalist language and fitting in to that mold, so it’s so amazing to have that rubric to refer back to and those visions to refer back to and say, ok but are we pushing it far enough? There are no guarantees that the Food Hub will scale successfully beyond the pilot project – there are strong partnerships and great momentum but too many contingencies and stiff competition for start up funding make it impossible to tell at this stage where the project will end up. So far, that hasn’t stopped anyone from wanting it. 6.4 We need to spend more time wanting things When I think about the way I’ve been describing my research question over the last several years (how grassroots community groups make decisions about the projects they want to pursue) I’m struck with some of the naïveté embedded within that question. First. Do they make decisions? They do pursue initiatives and projects, as my history identifies. But did they decide to do them?51 Because out of all the projects that have started during my time with the group, 51 In The Power at the End of the Economy cultural studies theorist Brian Massumi is invested in deconstructing the individual, rational economic actor, but from a bodily, affective perspective. Massumi draws attention to the affective level that lies under the level of individual microeconomics, an infra-economic level where affective commotion churns and the individual becomes the “dividual”. At this level, uncertainty and a relation to the future unknown divide and multiply the individual. Drawing on his previous work describing the politics of preemption and the affect of fear, Massumi suggests that the more fraught and uncertain the economy, the more preemptive action becomes an imperative. As he states, “This makes the economy more affectively activating than it is effectively rationalizing. It runs more on perturbations and cascading amplifications than determinate acts of choice” (Massumi 2015, 13). If the individual is not the autonomous rational subject, who or what is? Massumi suggests it is instead the autonomy of the act of choice itself, coming from the nonconscious, infra-individual level. Rational calculation is 128 even with projects that I personally have been instrumental to moving forward, I don’t feel like I’ve made decisions about them. I feel like they happened to me. I did want them. Perhaps I wanted them into being? And yet there are so many things that I also want that I cannot will into being, so the question perhaps still applies, why these projects? It seems ridiculous to think that I could engage in this PhD process without learning anything, yet I still find myself surprised to have been so utterly transformed by the experience. To be embedded in the community, but actually embedded, in deep and lasting friendships and a complex network of social relations. To start a fledgling practice of solidarity. To commit long term to community organizing and research and decolonization in Secwepemcúl̓ecw. To be awed and devastated by this degree of transformation, which I wrote about when I framed the initial proposal, but somehow still didn’t understand what it would be like to feel it, to live it. In this section, my ambition is to explore the ways we can trace desire and how it becomes collective – it is not just about wanting things, but wanting them together.52 I find out, “intuition” as an “embodied thinking-feeling in movement” is what we can call the choice that makes itself (Massumi 2015, 45). Massumi points to the 1990’s obsession with chaos theory and neoliberal market deregulation as the source of capitalists’ turn to the art of decision-making as a way to “transmute uncertainty into profit” (2015, 21). In this context, “The neoliberal wager of making self-interest the fundamental principle of the economy depends on maintaining a strict equation between life-satisfaction and rational calculus of choice”, even while risk is harder to calculate than we believed and, as examples from behavioural research indicate, intuition produces more satisfactory choices than rationality (Massumi 2015, 23). Massumi suggests we need a politics of dividualism that would embrace complexity and the oscillating poles of rationality/affectivity, and would be a “directly qualitative, relational and situational politics” (2015, 35). He argues that “Counterpower cannot rely on a programmatic politics of cognitive persuasion” (Massumi 2015, 42). We cannot ask an individual to choose resistance (its “true” interest). As a result, we must engage neoliberalism where it draws its power: not from rational decision making and market logic but in paradox, arbitrariness and dividualism. Massumi provides an intriguing account that seeks to respond to neoliberalism at the root of its power. 52 As an alternative to the path that I take here, interesting work is being done to draw on the metaphor of “desire lines” (organic pathways that are forged outside of centrally planned pathways) to theorize “social desire lines” as the ways that cumulative individual actions build organic structures outside of state sanctioned norms (Nichols 2014; Smith and Walters 2018). In an example of this theory applied to food systems, Bernard Soubry’s (2019) study of small-scale farmers in the Maritimes analyzes disparate emergent activities by individual farmers as social desire lines that cumulatively create adaptive capacity for resilient food systems. The contrast here is with the KFPC’s recent efforts to intentionally drive system-level change, as opposed to individual efforts that cumulatively demonstrate desire (which Nichols identifies as one of seven criteria for identifying social desire paths). However, it would be easy to overstate this difference – given that the KFPC is grassroots, partnership-based, and practices 129 desires both slippery and incorrigible and struggle to find theoretical language that captures what I want to say about how desire is operative in my community. In fact, the absence of a theoretical language for desire (unless you have a particular affinity for Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari or Foucault) is one of the challenges Graeber observed as a hindrance to developing an anthropological theory of value (2001, 258). Here I think it’s useful to draw on the work that Eve Tuck has done to articulate desire-based research frameworks – in particular, the way she both builds on and breaks with Deleuze and Guattari to describe how desires are both smart and agentic, how they carry the wisdom of a collective. 53 As she writes: “Desire, yes, accounts for the loss and despair, but also the hope, the visions, the wisdom of lived lives and communities. Desire is involved with the not yet and, at times, the not anymore” (Tuck 2009, 417). I appreciate as well that way she summarizes the way Deleuze and Guattari’s desire assembles: For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is not an absence - not something that is blocked or missing, so therefore wanting. It is not a hole, not a gap, not a lacking, but an exponentially growing assemblage. Their interest in it is in how it loosely accounts for unexpected and unanticipated turns in humanity and history. How is it that everything does not go as planned? As predicted? How is it that human beings act in ways that do not match their intentions? Even betray themselves? Desire, multiplicitous, complicated, paradoxical, is a way to begin to explain. (Tuck 2010, 640) When desires are complicated (that is, nearly always), when we want things that have true radical potential, when we know they will be or already are co-opted by capitalism or were never very radical in the first place, when we want things despite the most realistic assessments telling us they won’t be successful, Tuck helpfully navigates the dichotomies: distributed/shared leadership, there are still many parallels to social desire paths that originate in the acts of individuals. 53 I want to comment explicitly on the basis for Tuck’s work which is her Indigenous epistemology, and contrast between the agency/wisdom accumulated in collective desire built over millennia compared to the collective desire built within an organization over 30 years or my own involvement with friends and colleagues at the KFPC over the past five years. 130 Desire is a thirding of the dichotomized categories of reproduction and resistance. It is neither/both/and reproduction and resistance. This is important because it more closely matches the experiences of people who, at different points in a single day, reproduce, resist, are complicit in, rage against, celebrate, throw up hands/ fists/towels, and withdraw and participate in uneven social structures—that is, everybody. Desire fleshes out that which has been hidden or what happens behind our backs. Desire, because it is an assemblage of experiences, ideas, and ideologies, both subversive and dominant, necessarily complicates our understanding of human agency, complicity, and resistance. (Tuck 2009, 419–20) All this theorizing about desire to notice, we actually don’t have enough of it, or more specifically, we have a gap in our ability to collectively imagine different worlds. “How is it that we collude in our own oppression, when there are so many of us, that if we ever truly stood up, or sat down and said, 'No, not anymore', we would bring the globe to a grinding halt? Why do humans, throughout history, tolerate fascism?” (Tuck 2010, 643). Graeber echoes this sentiment in another way: “the hidden reality of human life is the fact that the world doesn't just happen. It isn't a natural fact, even though we tend to treat it as if it is—it exists because we all collectively produce it. We imagine things we'd like and then we bring them into being. But the moment you think about it in these terms, it's obvious that something has gone terribly wrong. Since who, if they could simply imagine any world that they liked and then bring it into being, would create a world like this one?” (2015). In Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown makes a similar claim: “At this point, we have all of the information we need to create a change; it isn’t a matter of facts. It’s a matter of longing, having the will to imagine and implement something else” (2017, 21). Shortly after the Occupy movement took off in 2011, Rebecca Solnit, in a public conversation with David Graeber, suggested the following: It feels that if neoliberalism was first about privatizing desire and imagination before the economy, then we’re in this process of publicizing it again, except we don’t have an equivalent. What’s the opposite of privatize? “Publify”? Collectivize, or something? Bringing people back into the open: both literally, with living in the streets, which is 131 happening suddenly across the country with the revolutions in Occupy last year, but also imaginatively, with the sense of connectedness, etc. (Solnit in Graeber 2012) I think the work that I’m engaging in with the KFPC takes place during a building refrain of publifying, collectivizing, and making visible the collective desires for better worlds. Desire, and imagination for the next world, is something the KFPC – as a collective – has plenty to go on. 6.5 Value in the Kamloops Food System I’m writing this chapter more than a year after I ate my first Popcycle fruit pop, and I’ve eaten several more since then. I know where the box of unsaleable “give aways” is kept, and I can look out of my office window and think about walking the two blocks to the food centre to get one. If I want to. I still can’t tell, as a researcher, whether or not Popcycle is going to make a go of it – whether or not it can be sustainable and successful in and of itself, or whether or not it can be one of the small changes that build toward the ongoing process of iterating our expansive collective vision(s). What I do hope this analysis holds space for is a recognition of the importance of collectivizing desires. Whatever we might be inclined to call this process – passionate interests, immanent value theory, diverse economies – a viable economic vision (and indeed, a viable future) requires restoring relations to calculations of value. For both Popcycle and the Food Hub, their “value” – at least to the extent that I can evaluate – is in the structure of relationships that brought them into being and sustain them moving forward. Lessons taken from the end of the Organic Co-op and Heartland do provide a caution: there is no guarantee of success here, no matter how much collective desire might hope otherwise. What I suspect (and hope) might make the difference is the way these small projects are starting to make explicit articulations of what they contribute to the bigger vision, and to collectivize desire expansively for that possible 132 future. And that process itself relies on the complex web of relations to sustain it. As one of the Food Hub collaborators shared, “bringing it into existence wouldn’t be possible without all the history of work, and the relationships and the intentions and all of that that are behind it.” 133 Chapter 7: Conclusion I want to put forward a conclusion to this work on four fronts: • A multimodal submission, in the form of a short film I produced in July 2020. • My understanding of what, ethnographically speaking, took place over the course of my research, and what that suggests more generally about the possibilities of ethnography in these times. • A summary of the theme small changes build capacity for an expansive vision. • What it looks like and feels like to test capacity and vision in the context of a global pandemic that has wrought unprecedented change to daily life and makes visible the deep insecurities and inequalities within the global food system. 7.1 Multimodality Community based research requires an attunement to the needs of a community, throughout the research process, but also in the way research results are communicated. In the summer of 2020, the KFPC celebrated its 25th anniversary, and I had the opportunity to produce a short film for the online gathering, which also featured a guest address by Minister of Agriculture Lana Popham. KFPC provided a small budget to hire an emerging Kamloops filmmaker, Christo Vutev, and I volunteered my time as the producer.54 I consider this film an important contribution to my conclusion for several reasons: • It narrates both the history and current work of the KFPC, interwoven with the seven value statements that form the basis of our collective vision for the ideal food system; 54 The copyright for the film is held by the Kamloops Food Policy Council (2020b). It is included in the open access digital repository cIRcle as supplementary material to this dissertation with permission. The film is also available, with full transcript and closed captions at https://youtu.be/KnRMKNikv4Q. 134 • It builds the capacity and credibility of KFPC even as it demonstrates the capacity that has been built through the organization’s history; • Its uptake will be far more significant than the uptake of this dissertation or even a written research summary, and it is evocative in ways that my writing is not, thanks to the layered benefits of multimodality; • It includes people and places that I love deeply and richly (though many more loved ones are missing) and makes visible the fact that this research is a co-creative effort. 7.2 Ethnography in these times There are several instances throughout my writing where I make reference to living “in these times.” In most cases, these are references to our climate change times, our late capitalism times, our continued colonial oppression of life and land times, our unprecedented wildfire times. The question “how do we become people made to live in these times?” has been animating my thinking for the last couple of years.55 But it would not be an understatement to say that the phrase “in these times” took on new meanings when you factor in COVID-19: devastating death and strained health systems, unprecedented economic collapse and unemployment, along with social distancing public health measures that rapidly and radically reorganized society at full scale.56 For me, the puzzle of how we become people made to live in these times is a 55 I’d like to acknowledge the Build Soil twitter account which posed and answered this question in a way that inspired me to take it up as a framework: “I wonder how you will first notice that you are already becoming a person made for these times? For me it’s noticing seeds in the ground, being able to laugh without losing sight of what’s needed, finding joy in action. But I really don’t know what it will be for you” (@buildsoil, Twitter post, Jan 12, 2020, 1:20PM). 56 “In these uncertain times” became the opening line to email communication, so much so that it also became the opening line to a viral poem called “The First Lines of Emails I’ve Received While Quarantining.” https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-tuesday-edition-1.5531704/in-these-uncertain-times-teacher-crafts-poem-out-of-quarantine-emails-1.5531710 135 methodological question, if one that expands methodology beyond research and into living. It’s methodology for living as a researcher, or for living while practicing what Tsing calls the “arts of noticing.” This accords with the essential contribution of anthropology as a discipline Anand Pandian defines in A Possible Anthropology: “Anthropology teaches us to seek out unseen faces of the world at hand, to confront its openness through experience and encounter, and to take these openings as seeds of a humanity to come. These are methods both ethical and practical, ways of being as much as ways of doing” (Pandian 2019, 3). The research study I outline in this dissertation advances a clear through line about the necessary foundations of a methodology that supports the arts of noticing in community based research. Like others thinking and practicing ethnography, I have found that an ethics of care, and the process of learning to be a good relation, is the foundation for my work. “Say we took this moment as a chance to imagine and to build a truly lateral anthropology, one that no longer pretended to know the world and its people from on high, or from a distance” (Pandian 2020). Amidst the precarities and vulnerability of an ethnography that is truly lateral, new possibilities emerge. My approach resembles (or aspires to resemble) what Anja Kanngieser and Zoe Todd call a “kin study,” as they write: While the case study operates to sever place and people from their intimate entanglements, the kin study repositions those stories, making both writer and consumer of such histories attentive to the complexities of place. What we need are careful, plural, hyperlocal histories to counter the overwhelmingly white, Eurocentric understandings of global warming that erase the devastation facing minoritized communities (2020, 391).57 Structurally, I have advanced this approach through engaging both with the attention to other-than-human kin prompted by the ontological turn and community based participatory 57 Noting of course that while my study does not avoid entirely an overwhelmingly white, Eurocentric understanding I do hope it demonstrates the beginnings of a genuine move towards a decolonial, antiracist praxis. 136 research. The combination of these two bodies of research literature is, in my mind, uniquely situated to imagine the otherwise. But it is uniquely situated only in so far as they are uniquely selected by me, based on my lineage of learning, resonant with my approach, embedded in what I carry within me that I bring to the potluck table set by my co-conspirators. Critical digital pedagogy scholar Jesse Stommel writes that in teaching praxis, he doesn’t believe in “best practices” but “good-for-some-people-in-some-contexts practices” (Stommel 2020). This approach is closely linked to Freire’s understanding of the teacher as student and student as teacher: the idea of best practice just doesn’t compute for a teacher who is continuously in a lateral learning process. I would argue that this concept is equally relevant in the context of qualitative research: there isn’t a best practice that is always applicable to every community based research setting. Rather, there are good-for-some-people-in-some-contexts practices, negotiated in that reciprocal back and forth between researcher as community member and community members as researchers. If ethnography is the study of relations with relations, I think we need ongoing reflection about the quality of the with-relations, and the different methodologies that enable a researcher to show up to those relations with integrity. This dissertation articulates my answer, captured at this point in time. But I expect other community researchers’ answers will be different, just as I expect my own to be different in the future, possibly by tomorrow, even. 7.3 Small changes build capacity for an expansive vision Respect that payment of energy to entropy that lets the universe happen. ~@buildsoil I’ve woven the phrase “Small changes build capacity for an expansive vision” throughout my work, and in this section, I want to summarize this theme and draw some conclusions that 137 connect it with the guiding concepts (systems, relationships, response-ability) in my research framework. Other researchers have looked at projects like community gardens, and have concluded that their value lies not in the pounds of fruits and vegetables they produce, but in their intangibles: harder to quantify social benefits like community building or knowledge transfer (Guitart, Pickering, and Byrne 2012). My findings identify those harder to quantify benefits too, but I’m aiming to articulate something different, given the way these initiatives are situated within the socio-ecological system of the Kamloops Food Policy Council’s work as a whole. As I note in my first chapter, I spent a lot of time in the formation of my original proposal thinking about “inefficient” responses to problems in the food system – like community gardens – that accomplish small scale goals but don’t have an appreciable impact on food insecurity overall. Taking my findings collectively, I have come to see that the inefficiencies of these projects is perhaps a particularly significant contribution to the capacity, and indeed, the power, of the KFPC. Small changes build capacity for an expansive vision, and to deepen that refrain further, I understand that small changes also build the power necessary to implement that expansive vision. I would argue this is in part because not despite the fact that small changes are inefficient. To state it very simply: small changes are powerful because they are inefficient. Following Bateson, I ask: What is the pattern that connects? What does it look like to pattern for inefficiency? What does it look like to embrace the inefficiencies of small initiatives because you know that generates more power? I think it looks very much the world created by the KFPC network and the multiple possible futures these network relationships will envision and enact. As I note in my research framework, “Systems change is not about fixing the system. It is about 138 sense-making. The fixing will happen by happenchance, not direct correctives… but only when the interdependencies come into view” (N. Bateson 2019). I’m interested to connect a Batesonian understanding of pattern to the relational scale that I find in Octavia Butler’s science fiction and adrienne maree brown’s interpretation of Butler. In Emergent Strategy, brown quotes her mentor, the late revolutionary activist Grace Lee Boggs who says “transform yourself to transform the world.” brown writes: “This doesn't mean to get lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet” (2017, 53). Our relationships matter. They are where we build the capacity for big change. Like brown, my research finds that “what we practice at the small scale sets the pattern for the whole system” (2017, 53). So much of this practice is embedded in the quality and reciprocity of the relationships we build with each other, like how trans activist and legal scholar Dean Spade describes mutual aid as “actually building new relations that are more survivable.” And if we mean to survive58 (in a pandemic/climate change/wildfire/precarious food system world), we need to turn to interdependence (both human and other-than-human) more than we ever have before, and embed the work of building capacity in the work of building accountable, reciprocal webs of relations. 7.4 Testing capacity and vision I concluded Chapter 6 with an open question about PopCycle: “I still can’t tell, as a researcher, whether or not Popcycle is going to make a go of it – whether or not it can be 58 Referencing here one of Butler’s most impactful themes in Parable of the Sower: A protagonist who declares “I mean to survive.” 139 sustainable and successful in and of itself, or whether or not it can be one of the small changes that build toward the expansive collective vision.” That open question, written before the COVID-19 pandemic, has an answer now: no, a business dependent on selling fruit pops at large public events is not resilient in the face of a global pandemic, and KFPC very quickly decided to put the project on hiatus. In this section, I want to work towards an understanding of what it feels like to have spent several years building an argument that KFPC is an organization that has successfully built capacity, only to have that argument tested by the unprecedented crisis posed by COVID-19. Shortly before the impacts of the pandemic would become evident in British Columbia, in January 2020, the KFPC received a notice from its main funder (the Community Gaming Grant program) that, due to an error that had been made on the presentation of the financial statements in the application, all funding for the next year was being denied. While the amount in question was not huge (less than $40,000), for an organization like KFPC without any core funding, it was a significant blow. It was the “keep the lights on” grant: it had been reliably funding the Gleaning Abundance Program for several years and assisted with most of the basic expenses KFPC needed to keep running. The decision to deny the funding was later overturned in the appeal process, but not without two months of white-knuckle penny pinching, impacts on precarious contract staff members, and a heavy workload (in large part taken up by volunteer board directors, including myself) focused on reorganizing the annual budget and fundraising – all taking place under the growing specter of the pandemic. Was any capacity built at all, or is it all just so fucking precarious? 140 I’m giving that question some space to let it breathe a little. It’s honestly painful to read it now and recall what it felt like to write that question into the working draft of my dissertation at that moment in time. While prior to COVID-19, the KFPC had found itself shifting attention to regional food sovereignty as I outline in 5.2, the conditions created by the pandemic shifted that focus right back closer to home (for many of us, as close as our own backyards and kitchens, as I illustrate in my opening to the first chapter). Figure 10 describes the way KFPC started to conceptualize its work moving forward in response to COVID-19. Though work towards regional food security continued to move forward (albeit slower in some cases, particularly the Food Hub described in 6.3), KFPC shifted into new emergent initiatives supporting emergency and community food security. Figure 10: Fourfold Food Security Response to COVID-19 Source: Kamloops Food Policy Council 2020 141 A focus on meeting the immediate emergency food security needs of our neighbours took on a sense of urgency when we realized that many community meal programs were closing or reducing services, or needed support to transition to delivery models that could conform to social distancing requirements. Although KFPC has counted many of the community’s emergency food providers among its members and partners, it isn’t directly involved in emergency food security. However, we were able to step into a coordinating and convening role, organizing a series of online meetings for emergency food providers to identify gaps and support collaborative strategies to fill them. This evolved into KFPC taking on leadership of the monthly meetings of the Changing the Face of Poverty network. KFPC also provided fundraising support for the Kamloops Covid Meal Train, a grassroots effort initiated by the Kamloops Lived Experience Committee to deliver meals throughout the city, particularly focusing on those most impacted by closures to regular community meal programs. The Butler Urban Farm was a second major initiative that emerged. A loosely organized collective urban farm was started in 2015, when Butler Auto and RV offered the use of an empty lot that owned across from the Kamloops Food Bank on Clapperton Drive. The JUMP program managed the farm for its first few years, but at the close of the 2019 season, had expressed interest in KFPC taking over the site. No decision had been made on that offer, until the pandemic presented the opportunity to redirect some funding targeted to further development of the Popcycle project to the farm. 6360 lbs of fresh produce were harvested from the Butler Urban Farm in 2020, including a significant portion of potatoes, planted in a full quarter of the available growing space by the farm manager, who was prioritizing crops that “pound for pound would produce the most calories.” 142 Though unanticipated prior to the pandemic, these new initiatives nonetheless represent the collectivized desires for possible futures, and in fact have enrolled many new people and partners into those passionate interests. After the development of the vision for the ideal food system described in chapter 5, the KFPC network considered how we think change happens. Visualizing change using a mycelial web, the resulting theory of change suggests “Like mycelium, we support an ecosystem that: moves outward simultaneously in all directions; creates a strong network that can emerge when conditions are right; actively explores potential in new areas as growth occurs; intends for seeds/ideas to be disbursed to new locations.”59 7.5 Final Thoughts In this dissertation, I’ve describing my own transformation into someone more radical. I’m describing how I myself am learning and embodying alternative value regimes, and finding ways of bringing them into being together with the network of people I have formed friendships with and committed to into the future. I’d like to conclude with words that are not my own. I opened Chapter 5 with a statement from KFPC’s Board Chair, made at the 2018 AGM. From the outside, the 2020 AGM looked and felt quite different. No delicious potluck to eat under orchard branches with late day sunshine breaking through the clouds. Far fewer members logged their pixelated heads into the Zoom meeting. Despite the apparent differences, there is still evidence to share about the capacity that has been built for resilience and complex systems change, and I’ll conclude with how the Board Chair summarized it for all of us in attendance: It’s been a wild ride this past year. Like many of us individually, our organization was confronted with a rapid series of completely unexpected changes and they tested our resilience. 59 See Figure 2: Theory of Change for Kamloops Food Policy Council (Pletsch and McLean 2020, 4). 143 I’d rate us so close to a 10 out of 10 on the resiliency scale, that I’m going to just go for it. We’re a 10 out of 10. Why do I rate our Resilience so highly? We didn’t succumb to the setbacks. We looked for upsides and we framed those setbacks as a chance to learn and grow. We stayed nimble. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Interdisciplinary Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Evans, Mike, 1961-
Passionate interests and community decision making : building the local food system in Kamloops, BC
Text
Moving Image