Introduction: Localising the Global

Abstract

In a Canadian city, a ghettoising enclave of high-rise apartments holds thousands of poor families on social assistance allowances. Most are single-parent families. Most live well below the poverty line. Most cannot afford healthy food. If they could, they would first have to weave their way past convenience stores selling high fat, salt, carbohydrate and sugar processed foods offering cheap but unhealthy bursts of energy. A stalwart group of single mothers decides that they have had enough of being preached to about nutrition. They have as good an understanding of what is better and worse for themselves and their children as most non-poor households. They’re clear: It’s about access. It’s about affordability. It’s about exerting control over their environments. They start a community garden which, in turn, starts a small movement in low-income neighbourhoods across the country. The garden, though, is only minimally about the food. It is primarily about the capacity that it creates: the empowering experience of negotiating successfully, and from a position of agency, with all the authorities and individual professionals whose ‘gaze’ of regulatory watchfulness has been so disabling in the past. For some in the group, the garden is an organising tool best used to mobilise more political activism against welfare retrenchment and income inadequacies. For others, the sense of control and coherence so important to the experience of health exists in the simple act of tending their tomatoes. For the health promoters involved, their role is one of opening the communicative channels between the women and the state agencies that have the resources the women need, and supporting the legitimacy of the women’s claims to these resources.

The average plate of food eaten in western industrial food-importing nations is likely to have travelled 2,000 miles from source to plate. Each one of those miles contributes to the environmental and social crises of our times.

(Bello 2002)