Cidadania alimentar: panorama da produção científica e relação com suas dimensões constitutivasAbstract
Food citizenship represents a theoretical and practical approach that highlights the behavior of actors who support, rather than threaten, more democratic, socially and economically just, and environmentally sustainable food systems. Beyond the social right to food, the expanded concept emphasizes obligations and responsibilities, articulated through eight constitutive dimensions of food citizenship. This article aims to explore the scientific literature published in English on the topic in recent years and to identify how these constitutive dimensions have been addressed. The study adopted a hybrid systematic-narrative approach, including publications from 2017 to 2023, a period delimited based on the theoretical framework proposed by Lozano-Cabedo and Gómez-Benito (2017), which redefines the concept of food citizenship in its expanded formulation. The main keywords identified were food citizenship itself, sustainability, food democracy, food insecurity, and food literacy. All constitutive dimensions are addressed, either as elements associated with the alternativity of the object of study or as direct objects of analysis, with emphasis on the recognition of the right to sufficient, healthy, and quality food; the recognition of all as subjects of citizenship, the manifestation of citizenship in private and public spheres, and the governance of food citizenship.
Keywords:
Food System; Constitutional Dimensions; Systematic-narrative review; Rights to food; Liabilities
Resumo
A cidadania alimentar representa uma abordagem teórica e prática que põe em evidência o comportamento dos atores que apoiam, em vez de ameaçar, sistemas alimentares mais democráticos, social e economicamente justos e ambientalmente sustentável. Além do direito social a uma alimentação, o conceito ampliado reclama as obrigações e responsabilidades, destacadas em oito dimensões constitutivas da cidadania alimentar. O objetivo deste artigo é explorar a produção científica em língua inglesa sobre o tema nos últimos anos e identificar como as dimensões constitutivas vêm sendo estudadas. A investigação adotou uma abordagem híbrida sistemático-narrativa em publicações realizadas entre 2017 e 2023, período definido a partir do marco teórico de Lozano-Cabedo e Gómez-Benito (2017), que redefine o conceito de cidadania alimentar em sua formulação ampliada. As principais palavras-chave identificadas foram a própria cidadania alimentar, a sustentabilidade, a democracia alimentar, a insegurança alimentar e a literacia alimentar. Todas as dimensões constitutivas são abordadas, seja como elementos associados à alternatividade do objeto de estudo, seja como objeto direto de análise, destacandose o reconhecimento do direito a uma alimentação suficiente, saudável e de qualidade; o reconhecimento de todos como sujeitos da cidadania; a manifestação da cidadania nas esferas privadas e públicas; e a governança da cidadania alimentar.
Palavras-chave:
Sistema Alimentar; Dimensões Constitutivas; Abordagem Sistemática Narrativa; Direitos; Obrigações
Resumo
A cidadania alimentar representa uma abordagem teórica e prática que põe em evidência o comportamento dos atores que apoiam, em vez de ameaçar, sistemas alimentares mais democráticos, social e economicamente justos e ambientalmente sustentável. Além do direito social a uma alimentação, o conceito ampliado reclama as obrigações e responsabilidades, destacadas em oito dimensões constitutivas da cidadania alimentar. O objetivo deste artigo é explorar a produção científica em língua inglesa sobre o tema nos últimos anos e identificar como as dimensões constitutivas vêm sendo estudadas. A investigação adotou uma abordagem híbrida sistemático-narrativa em publicações realizadas entre 2017 e 2023, período definido a partir do marco teórico de Lozano-Cabedo e Gómez-Benito (2017), que redefine o conceito de cidadania alimentar em sua formulação ampliada. As principais palavras-chave identificadas foram a própria cidadania alimentar, a sustentabilidade, a democracia alimentar, a insegurança alimentar e a literacia alimentar. Todas as dimensões constitutivas são abordadas, seja como elementos associados à alternatividade do objeto de estudo, seja como objeto direto de análise, destacandose o reconhecimento do direito a uma alimentação suficiente, saudável e de qualidade; o reconhecimento de todos como sujeitos da cidadania; a manifestação da cidadania nas esferas privadas e públicas; e a governança da cidadania alimentar.
Palavras-chave:
Sistema Alimentar; Dimensões Constitutivas; Abordagem Sistemática Narrativa; Direitos; Obrigações
Introduction
Driven by the justification of feeding an increasingly larger and more urban population, food systems have seen their organizational foundations transformed, propelled by maximizing efficiency, standardization, scale, and profit processes. Although the figures achieved by large production companies, associated industries, and food distribution clearly indicate relative success, the contradictions are severe and troubling and strike at the very core of food systems in different countries around the world. The protests by Spanish farmers in March 2024, denouncing the sector’s difficulties, for example, represent only one manifestation of the contradiction that, coincidentally, during the same period, the country’s largest supermarket chain was celebrating record revenues (Galindo, 2024).
The lack of income reported by farmers is only the surface expression of other contradictions, including pressure on natural resources and biodiversity loss (Wanger et al., 2023), increased population exposure to health risks (Skidmore; Sims; Gibbs, 2023), chemical contamination of food (Ribeiro et al., 2021), inadequate diets (Fuseini, 2022), obesity, undernutrition, and climate change (Swinburn et al., 2019). The outcome is harmful, self-destructive, unsustainable, and undermines the very conditions for reproducing the very current food system (Rose; Lourival, 2019).
Although food is vital to the functioning of urbanized societies, it has been a neglected issue (Pothukuchi; Kaufman, 2000), placed only after political and economic issues and infrastructure works. In general, governments have been indifferent to food system issues and have taken measures that strengthen, rather than alter, its mode of organization and functioning. Food ends up being a marketable commodity like any other activity, product, or economic sector, for which price control plays a role in market organization (Renting; Schermer; Rossi, 2012).
Despite the complex nature of food and human culture (Gracia-Arnaiz, 2021) and the backdrop of corporate food system domination (Rose; Lourival, 2019), the agenda of promoting global outcomes in human health, ecological health, social equality, and economic prosperity is urgent (Swinburn et al., 2019; Pereira et al., 2020). Citizens are demanding a place on the agenda in order to minimize these signs of failure.
More than the behavior of stakeholders fulfill regular legal rights and responsibilities associated with membership in the State, we need the behavior of citizens with both the desire and the capacity to act collectively, eager to challenge routines, understandings, and practices (Carolan, 2017). Just as democracy cannot exist without democratic citizens, sustainable societies cannot exist without ecological citizens and nor can there be sustainable food without food citizens (Lozano-Cabedo; Gómez-Benito, 2017). Becoming a food citizen involves a critical assessment of the current food system and the definition of a desirable alternative imaginary, negotiations between good and bad practices, and the identification of roles and collective actions in favor of change (Turunen; Aro; Huttunen, 2023).
Food citizenship is an emerging theoretical and epistemological commitment that allows the debate on the rights and duties associated with general citizenship to be transposed to the field of food (Lozano-Cabedo and Gómez-Benito, 2017). It emerged to highlight that the needs and values of consumers as active citizens can build sustainable food systems (Renting; Schermer; Rossi, 2012; Turunen; Aro; Huttunen, 2023), but also with the character of a food social movement (Brady et al., 2023; Moon, 2022). Wilkins (2005) is one of its precursors and defines food citizenship as engaging in food-related behaviors that support, rather than threaten, the development of a democratic, socially and economically just, and environmentally sustainable food system.
Lozano-Cabedo and Gómez-Benito (2017) distinguish the consumer citizen from the food citizen, showing that while the former is more confined to consumption decisions, the latter is more involved with the food system’s configuration. The authors studied the food citizenship characteristics and formulated a definition around eight constitutive dimensions, which range from the individual right of people to feed themselves and make choices to a broader right that also considers their obligations and collective and public actions.
Thus, food citizenship is characterized by: 1) recognizing the social right to sufficient, healthy, and high-quality food; 2) being a matter of justice, equality, and equity; 3) being based on autonomy and the right to truthful, sufficient, and understandable information; 4) being a matter of responsibilities regarding: (a) human beings (including future generations), (b) all other living beings, (c) other stakeholders in the agri-food system, and (d) the environment; 5) recognizing all citizens as subjects of food citizenship; 6) manifesting itself in individual and collective spheres, as well as in public and private spaces; 7) signifying the right and the obligation to participate in food system governance; and 8) having a cosmopolitan nature.
This theoretical proposition is an abstract, ethical, and normative model that opens up new avenues for investigation, but it needs to be revisited and confronted with new studies. Given this context, the research questions are: which countries, universities, and authors stand out most in food citizenship research? What are the characteristics and methodological approaches used? How have the constitutive dimensions of food citizenship been studied in recent years? The answers to these questions will make it possible to map countries and universities that are references in studies on the role of citizens in transforming food systems, as well as to understand theoretical and practical approaches based on the constitutive dimensions of food citizenship.
This article aims to provide an overview of scientific production published in English in recent years and identify how the constitutive food citizenship dimensions have been studied. The decision to focus on English stems from its academic relevance in several domains and its role as a global lingua franca. The methodology combines quantitative and qualitative approaches, together with other methodological steps presented in the second section of this article. The results section is divided into two parts: 2017-2023 scientific production indicators, and an analysis of the findings based on food citizenship’s constitutive dimensions. The final considerations section seeks to systematize some of the implications of this work.
Methods
The research adopts a hybrid systematic-narrative methodology, structured from elements typical of different approaches, in order to attach greater robustness to the results obtained (Turnbull; Chugh; Luck, 2023). First, the search criteria and the inclusion/exclusion criteria for articles composing the corpus of analysis were defined through systematic review protocols based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement (Galvão et al., 2022). Subsequently, to identify countries and universities interested in the topic, as well as the co-occurrence of keywords revealing the research landscape, a bibliometric analysis was applied (Aria and Cuccurullo, 2016). Finally, a narrative review was conducted in order to synthesize the results obtained (Fleischer, 2012). The Boolean search was conducted in February 2024 in Web of Science and Scopus, using the English descriptor for food citizenship (food citizen*), limiting the search to the 2017-2023 period. These two databases are considered the most comprehensive sources of publication metadata and impact indicators (Pranckutė, 2021). The temporal cutoff beginning with the publication of Lozano-Cabedo and Gómez-Benito (2017) was theoretically guided, since it constitutes a conceptual turning point in the food citizenship literature by redefining the concept as an expanded normative framework.
Sixty publications were found in Web of Science and 61 in Scopus, leaving 72 for analysis after the exclusion of 49 duplicate studies. These 72 documents were manually reviewed, resulting in a final corpus of 32 articles after eliminating publications that did not meet the following criteria: a) download was not possible; b) they did not analyze the food citizenship concept; and c) they mentioned the term food citizen or food citizenship fewer than five times in the body of the text. This inclusion criterion of five mentions was defined to ensure a minimum density of the concept as the central analytical object and to avoid peripheral contextual mentions.
The 32 articles were analyzed with RStudio using the R-Bibliometrix interface, a package that facilitates a more comprehensive bibliometric analysis of scientific mapping due to the use of specific tools for quantitative bibliometric and scientometric research. The data are processed in it, and authorship, citations, and keywords are linked (Aria; Cuccurullo, 2016). Figure 1 shows the procedures used to obtain the final sample of documents, which was analyzed in section 3.1 of the results and subsequently used in the narrative review.
Schematic representation of the methodology for identifying, selecting, determining eligibility, and including publications for bibliometrics and narrative review.
The narrative review was adopted to gather the most recent material on the topic, identify gaps in the existing studies, and guide future research (Fleischer, 2012; Gregory; Denniss, 2018). Eighteen texts containing more than 12 mentions of the term food citizenship in their content were selected, not including the publication by Lozano-Cabedo and Gómez-Benito (2017), which constitutes the predetermined theory of analysis.
This restrictive threshold of 12 mentions was defined after a pilot screening, when it was found that this number of occurrences ensured that the concept was addressed more consistently as an explicit object of theoretical construction. The texts were coded according to the constitutive dimensions and grouped into categories of similar content based on their recurrence, in order to represent the diversity of topics and study contexts developed in recent years. The results are shown in section 3.2, with each dimension identified in italics or by numbering.
Results and Discussions
The results obtained are presented in two sections: the first addresses the findings of the bibliometric analysis, and the second highlights the main contributions and syntheses that emerged from the narrative analysis.
International overview and characteristics of scientific production on food citizenship
The countries with most publications on food citizenship were the United States (9), followed by Argentina and Spain (4 each), and Italy and the United Kingdom (3 each). The university with the highest number of publications was the University of San Andrés (Argentina), with four documents. The University of Iowa School of Public Health and the University of Colorado Springs, both in the United States, published four and three articles, respectively. The most cited articles, in descending order, were: Meyer and Reguant-Closa (2017), Poulsen (2017), Carolan (2017), Sieveking (2019), Lozano-Cabedo and Gomez-Benito (2017), and Hatanaka (2020).
As for the word cloud (Figure 2), we selected 80 keywords according to frequency. The term “food citizenship” appeared 18 times (56%), “sustainability” six times, “food democracy” four times, and “citizenship”, “food insecurity”, and “food literacy” three times each. Another nine words appeared twice, and 34 appeared only once. These results show the food citizenship concept’s broad and interdisciplinary nature, as well as its relationship with sustainability and democracy.
The term sustainability indicates its importance in the context of citizen participation in food system transition processes, whether as a theoretical perspective (O’Kane, 2016; Bindi; Belliggiano, 2023) or as a shared ideal among stakeholders who share risks and responsibilities (Hatanaka, 2020). The term democracy reflects the search for equal opportunities among the parties involved in defining the organization and functioning of food systems on a global, national, local, or community scale.
Pungas (2023), Carolan (2017), and Richardson and Fernqvist (2022) use the concept of deep democracy to refer to the active and regular involvement of subjects in decision-making processes that include rights and responsibilities in the transformation of food systems. This approach aligns with citizenship as a collective right, as it encompasses competences that go beyond civic participation, recognizing ambiguities, differences, and tensions while maintaining commitment, empathy, and orientation toward the public good.
Although the concept of democracy rarely incorporates cosmopolitanism as a central analytical axis, food citizenship presents a cosmopolitan constitutive dimension, insofar as it is grounded in universal rights, recognizes the structural interdependence of food systems, and assigns to citizens responsibilities that transcend local boundaries (Lozano-Cabedo; Gómez-Benito, 2017).
Empirical research focuses on experiences and solidarity networks among producers, processors, distributors, and consumers, cooperatives, collective organizations, councils, and community experiences within Alternative Agri-Food Networks. Besides emphasizing the failures of the food system and the importance of connections between farmers and consumers (Tittarelli et al., 2022), these studies show that such food landscapes influence civic engagement, promoting more attentive and empathetic behaviors compared with those of people who do not participate in them (Carolan, 2017).
The investigations predominantly use qualitative methodologies – in-depth interviews, focus groups, ethnographies, and participant observation – whereas quantitative methods appear on a smaller scale, mainly through online questionnaires. These differences among methodological types expose implications when investigations seek to understand rights and obligations in food citizens and when they aim to understand collective commitments on the basis of individual choices.
Recent advances and contributions of food citizenship studies
The publications included in the narrative review, according to the established criteria, are distributed across international interdisciplinary journals, with a predominance of the areas of sustainability, food, food and nutrition security, nutrition, social sciences, public policy, and environmental ethics (Table 1).
The food citizenship concept has represented a challenge in favor of more sustainable food systems and has been addressed through different approaches that directly or indirectly encompass the eight constitutive dimensions of the expanded concept. The studies recognize it as a fundamental and inalienable right to access healthy and nutritious food, produced in a fair and sustainable way, as well as the obligations and responsibilities that all members of the food system must fulfill (Rose; Lourival, 2019; Moon, 2022; Bindi; the publications assess experiences that recognize Belliggiano, 2023; Brady et al., 2023; Turunen; Aro; food system problems and seek to guarantee the Huttunen, 2023). right to information in choosing higher-quality
Regarding the first constitutive dimension – the food, in order to overcome the disconnection social right to sufficient, healthy, and quality food – between who produces food, how it is produced, and where it is produced. They also traverse a spectrum that moves from the individual right to food toward collective responsibilities and obligations associated with other stakeholders, in the face of other structural aspects of the food system.
To do this, they mobilize different empirical cases and approaches, whether in terms of professional practice (Richardson; Fernqvist, 2022), social and community organization (Hatanaka, 2020; Moon, 2022; Verfuerth et al., 2023), small-scale food production and the valuing of agroecological practices (Pungas, 2023), recognition of materialities (Turunen; Aro; Huttunen, 2023; Stehrenberger; Schneider, 2023), or the economic protection of territory (Bindi; Belliggiano, 2023). In general, the publications reflect the second constitutive dimension, which understands food citizenship as a matter of social justice, equality, and equity, but they also seek to defend the community and the commons (fourth dimension) and, through collective and public actions supported by solidarity (sixth dimension), strive to improve positions in the face of an increasingly complex and conflict-ridden food system governance (seventh dimension).
There is a set of publications that seeks to understand how the individual food choices of consumers concerned with individual satisfaction (consumer citizen) reverberate in collective spheres of the right to food (food citizen) (Migliorini et al., 2020; Tittarelli et al., 2022; Estandarte et al., 2022; Brady et al., 2022; Brady et al., 2023). Tittarelli et al. (2022) related food citizenship to fruit and vegetable consumption when consumers perceived the ethical impact of their choices on biodiversity and on commitments to other stakeholders in the food system.
Estandarte et al. (2022), in turn, observed these behaviors among university students in Georgia when influenced by sociocultural context, traditions, prior knowledge about sustainable food systems, and financial situation. Brady (2023), in turn, categorized the factors influencing food choices among people over 50 years old who face economic constraints and receive support from food agencies in the United States, regarding their citizenship responsibilities. These factors may lie outside individual control (prices or food availability), may be associated with personal responsibilities (health or taste preferences), or may concern responsibilities to others (supporting farmers or environmental sustainability).
The “to others” factors were given little weight in how stakeholders interacted with the food system (Brady et al., 2023), emphasizing the underlying tension between the individual and collective dimensions of the right to food. Similar results, with the predominance of individual motives over collective interests, were also observed when people devote time to work to earn money, to the detriment of civic orientations and forms of solidarity that transcend social class (Bindi; Belliggiano, 2023; Hatanaka, 2020; Moon, 2022; Stehrenberger; Schneider, 2023; Verfuerth et al., 2023).
This tension between meeting immediate needs and short-term choices and guaranteeing the collective right to sufficient, healthy, and quality food is a warning that the studies bring to the construction of food citizenship, and that needs to be considered, especially among low-income households. According to Brady et al. (2022), individuals in situations of social vulnerability or without organization tend to assign to the links in the production chain, to regulatory agencies, and to the State the responsibility for guaranteeing healthy food, produced and distributed ethically, accompanied by truthful and sufficient information to guide their choices.
In order to minimize criticism regarding structural and social barriers to the lack of healthy food consumption among the most vulnerable (second constitutive dimension) and to integrate subjects who are not involved in the remodeling of food systems (fifth constitutive dimension), Verfuerth et al. (2023) analyze an intervention by food aid organizations that purchased food from a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) group in order to donate it to low-income households.
Even with improved access to diverse and quality food, food socialization, sensitivity to sustainability, and interest in keeping a healthy diet, scaling up these initiatives depends on micro-community partnerships and consistent funding sources. Brady et al. (2023), when studying food-insecure older Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic, make the same point and suggest connecting these demands with public food security policies.
The approximation of stakeholders engaged in building new structures and practices in the face of the technical and organizational complexity of the food system may increase the scalability of actions, since food citizenship involves a wide variety of parties committed to social and environmental sustainability (Lozano-Cabedo; Gómez-Benito, 2017). By offering positive food experiences, sharing ideas, and inspiring new behaviors, chefs are examples of players who can form alliances around a desirable imaginary of the food system (Richardson; Fernqvist, 2022).
Universities also constitute strategic spaces by developing experiential venues that sensitize students to academic, professional, and civic responsibilities (Estandarte et al., 2022; Migliorini et al., 2020). Fins and Aisenstein (2022) believe, however, that food citizenship education requires broader educational interventions, integrated with food and nutritional changes and with the participation of public policies. These results are aligned with the sixth constitutive dimension and highlight the importance of generating knowledge, sensitizing public opinion, and offering viable alternatives concerning food systems, but they also call attention to the responsibility of subjects to participate in food system governance.
The publications reveal two central approaches for advancing food governance studies. The first, derived from Jhagroe’s studies (2019), emphasizes the need to overcome the dichotomy between democratic and neoliberal perspectives in order to study governance structures in food citizenship. The author believes that this governance emerges from the heterogeneity and fusion of powers in regimes and practices, in which citizens, while subjected to dominant food systems, gain portions of control over food production and distribution.
Bindi and Belliggiano (2023) investigated the experiences of three young entrepreneurs with high education levels who returned from abroad to a depressed region of South-Central Italy and took part in the public discussion of the desires and expectations of their communities regarding food democracy and sustainable development. The authors identified heterogeneous practices, ranging from the recognition of social norms and values proper to democratic governance structures, through an emphasis on economic sustainability, to the complete commodification characteristic of neoliberal food governance. In practice, the fluidity of community relationships generates an assemblage of forms of power that Jhagroe (2019) names neocommunity governance, in which the prefix “neo” highlights the specific and contextual character of this modus operandi, responsible for giving rise to new institutional identities of food citizens.
The second line of findings highlights the importance of understanding social food practices in order to analyze the emergence and circulation of power in food citizenship governance. For Jhagroe (2019), these practices reveal understandings, interests, and values concerning how stakeholders constitute themselves as food citizens within broader regimes of knowledge and power.
Turunen et al. (2023), in turn, emphasize that, beyond human interactions, it is necessary to consider the influence of materiality on human agency: field, body, and time configure arrangements that condition degrees of participation and may stimulate or discourage engagement in the construction of food citizenship. The interdependence between human and material agency underlines the ethical responsibilities of citizens toward human beings, other living beings, stakeholders in the agrifood system, and the environment (fourth constitutive dimension), as well as the influence of contexts in strengthening the power structures that enable the construction of sustainable food systems.
Pungas (2023) investigated attitudes, collective action, and social practices of households that produce food for self-provisioning in small agroecological gardens located on urban plots known as dachas in Latvia. Although apparently of low impact, requiring few resources and receiving little visibility in public policy, these experiences express political engagement that circulates subtly through social practices and confronts the negative repercussions of the food system. Unlike national policies, which do not always touch people’s everyday reality, these micro-community connections influence bottom-up solutions and construct models of solidarity (Verfuerth et al., 2023), which are vital for the formation of a more horizontal and inclusive governance.
Considering the challenges of multiscale or multisectoral forms of governance, the publications also call attention to the importance of local or territorial governance scales in reacting to the current forms of food system operation (Hatanaka, 2020; Rico Mendez et al., 2021; Bindi; Belliggiano, 2023; Moon, 2022; Turunen; Aro; Huttunen, 2023). Rico Mendez et al. (2021) analyzed a biodistrict in Italy that sought to achieve collective objectives in local food systems through a model of political decisions made by municipalities, universities, and civil society associations. Even with a shared purpose among the stakeholders around food citizenship, involvement in collective actions was hindered by frustrating collective experiences, lack of leadership and financial resources for projects, and was deteriorated by voluntary involvement, minimal government support, the lack of a feasible action plan and of technical support to help with collective uncertainties (Rico Mendez; Pappalardo; Farrell, 2021).
In order to minimize these situations and avoid future welfare dependency, the availability of resources in interventions aligned with sustainability and including mechanisms for inclusion and social involvement in governance processes becomes imperative (Brady et al., 2022). Both the State, through its public policies (Brady et al., 2023; Verfuerth et al., 2023), and private initiative can act as funders and contribute to these initiatives (Estandarte et al., 2022).
Another relevant aspect concerns the integration of marginalized individuals and communities into the construction of food citizenship (Bindi; Belliggiano, 2023; Moon, 2022; Richardson; Fernqvist, 2022). Even when institutional policies are in place and seek to promote improved people’s living conditions and well-being, the lack of participation from the outset and the lack of understanding of development actions hinder the adherence to and consolidation of behaviors that ensure the continuity of these initiatives at the local, national, or global level (Bindi; Belliggiano, 2023). The authors refer to this as sterilized and distant governance when these multiscale policies are unable to trigger new collective narratives of the common good, which may ultimately generate distrust and lead initiatives to fail.
Two constitutive food citizenship dimensions are implicit in the empirical field, but are not directly addressed in the literature analyzed: food citizenship as a matter of responsibilities among human beings, other living beings, stakeholders in the agrifood system and the environment (fourth dimension), and its cosmopolitan nature (eighth dimension). Initially, we should consider that both constitute the central motivation for transition toward more sustainable food systems, which involves multiple commitments by different stakeholders, in different contexts and levels, proper to a globalized world marked by asymmetries.
Regarding cosmopolitanism, one may suppose that its abstract and distant nature hinders its incorporation into local policies and practices, especially when empirical experiences become central to overcoming concrete challenges in local and territorial contexts.
Furthermore, although Lozano-Cabedo and Gómez-Benito (2017) emphasize that cosmopolitanism does not imply universalization or the elimination of community identity, but rather the transformation of cultural and material boundaries beyond administrative borders, the authors acknowledge the theoretical limits of the concept, especially regarding the a priori definition of public spaces of intervention and the actors involved.
Even in the face of relevant reasons for global commitments, the concept is not free from a universalizing logic of development associated with the Global North, which may neglect historical contexts and local knowledge that are fundamental to the equitable construction of food citizenship.
Final considerations
Despite the importance of food citizenship for the transformation of food systems, the topic attracted little attention from the international scientific community during the period studied. This result may represent a limitation of the study, considering the research decisions to restrict the search to Web of Science and Scopus, and only in English. Additionally, the adoption of minimum frequency thresholds as criteria for inclusion of publications may have excluded studies addressing food citizenship with lower terminological recurrence.
The United States leads in the number of publications, while Argentina has the university with the greatest scientific production. As for the research approach, qualitative methods have been employed to understand the implications of rights and obligations in food citizens, while quantitative methods have been used to analyze the individual choices and ethical consumption of consumer citizens in their projection toward collective domains.
All constitutive dimensions of the expanded concept of food citizenship are directly or indirectly addressed either as a research problem or as the context of the alternatives constituting the empirical field of the studies, since investigation has been conducted primarily on the experiences of alternative agrifood networks.
The constitutive dimension of recognition of the social right to sufficient, healthy, and quality food emphasizes the capacity of alternative agrifood networks to mobilize this right, as well as the role of the State and public policies in ensuring its implementation. The perspective of a consumer citizen, centered on the market and on the right to access truthful, sufficient, and understandable information that allows the exercise of power of choice over food in favor of a collective right, also frequently appears in the studies.
On the other hand, the perspective of collective rights and of community control over the individual rights proper to a consumer citizen predominates, highlighting the underlying tension between the two perspectives. Overcoming the social inequalities that restrict individual rights and weaken collective commitments is a challenge for food citizenship, since, although empirical experiences reveal pathways to promoting justice and equality in food systems, barriers, such as the inclusion of low-income populations and historically marginalized communities and the difficulty of scaling up these initiatives, persist.
State public policies may contribute through strategic axes and consistent financial resources for projects and new actions; public and private organizations may become involved in the training and technical qualification of subjects; strategic stakeholders may strengthen alternative food practices and food landscapes in order to foster public and collective commitments that affect spheres beyond the individual and private ones.
The creation of experiential spaces within course curricula, or even small social practices coexisting with the conventional system, represents opportunities to train individuals in new food-related behaviors. These initiatives may involve a diversity of stakeholders, whether as apparently dispersed actions or through structured governance, but in some way, they reaffirm the constitutive dimension that all stakeholders are subjects and may contribute to the consolidation of food citizenship.
Individual and private actions, as well as public and collective ones, are fundamental for providing resources, creating experiential spaces, or promoting forms of solidarity that influence food citizenship. These aspects highlight the importance of the right and obligation of society to participate in political activities for transforming the unequal context of the conventional food system.
Neocommunity governance models allow the formation of new institutional identities for food citizens, showing that governance should not remain polarized between neoliberal and democratic structures, but rather be seen as an “assemblage.” Therefore, just like the identities of food citizens, governance structures are always specific and contextual, and can only be understood when one analyzes the social practices established by subjects in order to exercise power over food production and control, in dialogue with the power of material agency. Simple practices that apparently seem to have no impact also contain their share of everyday activism and the capacity to contribute to food citizenship.
This study offers a theoretical and innovative contribution in understanding scientific production on food citizenship from the perspective of its constitutive dimensions. It also raises fundamental questions to stimulate public policies and initiatives that promote a repositioning of the role of citizens, their responsibilities, and their obligations vis-à-vis food systems. Besides the effort to coordinate these dimensions jointly, this opens opportunities for future research that may understand constitutive dimensions of food citizenship that may not have been identified as clearly in the articles analyzed.
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Finacial support:
Institutional Internationalization Program - CAPES/PrInt.
Acknowledgments:
The first author would like to thank the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) and the Federal University of Santa Maria, through the CAPES/PRINT UFSM Institutionalization of Internationalization Project, specifically the Information and Technology subproject, for providing the conditions necessary to produce this text while serving as a visiting professor at the National University of Distance Education (UNED) in Spain.
Data Availability Statement:
The research data is available in the body of the document.
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Edited by
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Editors:
José Miguel OlivarFernanda Scagliusi
Source: Organized by the authors.
Source: Organized by the authors.