This is the story of Slow Food University of Wisconsin, a student organization that grew from one woman’s idea to a community of over 3200 people dedicated to making sustainable, fairly produced, delicious food accessible in a small city, with a big university, in the heart of the United States. Along the way SFUW has fostered new ideas, developed skills, and built relationships through conscious food procurement, cooking and eating. This essay describes the evolution of the organization and its four (...) projects: Family Dinner Night, South Madison, Outreach and the Café. It hasn’t always been easy, but it’s always been delicious. (shrink)

Sustainability has become a powerful discourse, guiding the efforts of various stakeholders to find strategies for dealing with current and future social-ecological crises. To overcome the latter, we argue that sustainability discourse needs to be based on a critical-emancipatory conceptualization. Therefore, we engage two such approaches—environmental justice approaches informed by a plural understanding of justice and feminist political economy ones focusing on care—and their analytical potential for productive critique of normative assumptions in the dominant sustainability discourse. Both of these approaches (...) highlight aspects of sustainability that are particularly relevant today. First, although sustainable development was conceptualized from the outset based upon a twofold notion of justice (intra- and intergenerational), the integration of justice in the dominant sustainability discourse and praxis often manifests merely as a normative aspiration. Meanwhile, the environmental justice and care approaches offer conceptualizations of justice that can act as a powerful lever and as transformation-strategy. Second, the dominant sustainability discourse largely remains within a neoliberal economic framework that continues to promote economic growth as the means to reach prosperity while neglecting the bases of every economy: care work and nature. Its focus lies solely on paid work and the market economy. By integrating (a) social and ecological ‘reproductivity’ (unpaid care and subsistence work as well as nature) and (b) democratic processes for just distribution of environmental burdens and benefits, as well as participatory equity in relevant decision making, feminist political economy and environmental justice approaches offer substantial strategies towards building humane, just and caring societies. (shrink)

Small-scale, artisanal livestock production is framed as “other” by conventional livestock producers, and rural communities. This alterity, although not without cost, allows women to be involved as active entrepreneurs and managers in artisanal livestock production and also allows farmers to pursue management strategies with the explicit purpose of enhancing animal welfare. The case study presented here, an artisanal goat dairy farm managed by three women, demonstrates that by embracing feminine care identities, these women carve a space for themselves within livestock (...) production in which they can pursue their own economic and affective goals. Analysis of ethnographic data also demonstrates that farmers’ decision-making regarding animal production is based on both affective and instrumental concerns. If we are to understand and operationalize the affective component of farmer decision making based on the livestock–farmer relationship, we must begin to consider to what extent livestock themselves are social actors. (shrink)

The chicken meat, or broiler, business in the United States is a vertically integrated industry in which integrator corporations control all aspects of the business. Primarily through a series of business acquisitions, an industry duopoly has evolved. The two dominant integrator corporations, Pilgrim's Pride and Tyson Foods, are profitable, and their officers and stockholders benefit from the corporations’ financial success. The multitude of local growers who nurture the chickens to maturity for the integrators, however, benefit minimally from the financial success (...) of the integrators, as the growers face a myriad of financial, environmental, community, and health problems. Many growers have difficulty in extracting themselves from an occupation that requires their initial, personal expenditure, or debt of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Additionally, many who live in regions or states of broiler growing facilities suffer from gases emitted by these facilities and correspondingly lower property values. Several demographic, economic, education, health, and quality of life metrics were analyzed for the 50 U.S. states to provide insights regarding the ethics of the broiler industry and why some states produce significantly more broilers than others. (shrink)

Since 1997 there has been a significant increase in the number and percentage of Kansas farmers who are women. Using Reskin and Roos’ model of “job queues and gender queues” I analyze changes in the agricultural industry in Kansas that resulted in more women becoming “principal farm operators” in the state. I find there are three changes largely responsible for women increasing their representation in the occupation: an increase in the demand for niche products, a decrease in the average farm (...) size, and greater societal acceptance of women as farmers. This study adds to the growing literature on women principal farm operators in developed countries, and is among the first to explore why women are becoming a larger percentage of the occupation in the United States. (shrink)