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This chapter explores Food for Change, a social entrepreneurial program created by the Houston Food Bank. Food for Change explicitly considers the interlinkages of social problems within an individual. Food for Change collaborates with educational and training organizations and healthcare providers to use supplemental food resources to address clients' needs antecedent to food insecurity. We propose a model to conceptualize how food insecurity is influenced by multiple levels of social determinants. We then describe the Food for Change program and offer lessons about the holistic nature of clients, the productivity and challenges of interorganizational collaborations to address the roots of social problems, and the forethought and courage of organizational leadership to try to create self-sufficient clients who might become liberated from their services.

In the attempt to address food insecurity and food waste, food rescue has been presented by advocates in high-income countries as an alternative model to conventional food banks. Although supermarkets and restaurants in industrialized nations – including New Zealand, the focus of my case study – are constantly stocked with 150–200% of surplus food over what it takes to nutritionally feed their populations (Stuart, 2012), they continue to report high rates of food insecurity, such as in New Zealand where just 60.8% of households report being fully food secure (NZ Ministry of Health, 2019). To explore one approach to food security initiatives in urban areas, I conducted a nine-week ethnographic case study of Kaibosh Food Rescue, a non-profit food aid initiative in Wellington, New Zealand, which collects and redistributes ‘food waste’. By following the food through its social life and interviewing an array of stakeholders, I found that once food is declared as ‘waste’ by supermarkets, in its afterlife rescued food continues to embody multiple values. I argue that not only does this rescued food still hold much nutritional value, but it can also create social spaces, facilitate action and help empower recipients, all of which were facilitated by the presence of food that in the commercial food industry realm was declared to have no value.

This chapter highlights factors, such as stakeholder engagement and changes in operating processes, which can enable retailers to implement an alternative approach to recovering and redistributing fresh surplus food.

A successful fresh surplus food redistribution program was identified as part of a larger research project on food waste and redistribution. The “Buon Fine” program of a large Italian retailer (Coop Lombardia) was described by two senior executives who were interviewed for four hours using a semi-structured questionnaire. Collected information was triangulated with corporate reports and other publications.

Coop Lombardia implemented an expanded supply chain by cooperating with municipalities and food aid organizations. Such a process differed in important ways from the traditional “food bank” model. The latter organizations collected and distributed surplus food to disfavored populations.

The findings of this chapter will help senior executives of retail trade companies to improve the sustainability of their supply chain and help policymakers address food poverty to improve food security in their territory.

Millions of children face food insecurity in the United States. Schools play a major role in addressing the problem of food insecurity through the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program which provide meals to children at little to no cost. During the COVID-19 pandemic, schools abruptly closed leaving students without their primary source of nutrition. This chapter highlights responses from federal, state, and local agencies. Additionally, responses from local organizations and school districts are discussed. The researchers review a partnership built to address emergency food relief after the school closures. Data from an impact and need study conducted by the South Texas community partnership demonstrate gaps in programs which left the most vulnerable populations in severe need of assistance. This study reinforces the need for and importance of community partnerships to identify and address gaps in the current programs.

In Canada, food insecurity is characterized by the consumption of low quantity or low-quality foods, worrying about food supply and/or acquiring foods in socially unacceptable ways, such as begging or scavenging. As of 2012, approximately 15.2% of Ontario, Canada, children are living in food insecure households, a prevalence which has remained steady since 2005. This is particularly concerning when considering that school-aged children are a population whose growth and developing is sensitive to nutritional stress, and the experience of childhood food insecurity is highly associated with the development of adverse physical, mental and learning outcomes. This study aims at establishing the relationship between food insecurity and Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) standardized test scores in order to highlight the incompatibility of the EQAO's reliance on test outcomes in determining Ontarian school's accountability, specifically for those with a high prevalence of food insecurity.

This chapter explores the relationships between organisational type, rationales and the barriers that prevent community food projects from increasing the scale of their operations. From a broad survey of community food projects, organisations were divided according to their primary rationale (e.g. rural economic development and distribution), and then subdivided – by form – as a non-profit, private business, governmental agency or cooperative. Data from the interviews and surveys were coded using a qualitative grounded theory approach, to reveal the barriers experienced by each. Overall, access to long-term stable income is a recurrent theme across all types of projects. However, income sources dramatically change how these organisations prioritise barriers. Similarly, the organisation’s primary rationale and experiences influence the interpretation and approach to collaboration and education. Despite these differences, our results suggest a large degree of convergence that cuts across organisational forms and rationales, and offer a base for broader regional food system conversations.

The World Food Program provides food aid to areas of the world where food security is poor or non-existent – often failed states. Food can be a weapon in such places and food aid shipments a target for capture. This paper investigates the cost-effectiveness of international efforts to protect World Food Program aid shipments destined for Somalia from seaborne pirates off the Horn of Africa.

The lessons of history were ignored by those attempting to prevent food aid shipments from falling into the hands of pirates. The international community initially used very expensive naval assets to protect shipments. Over time, in an effort to reduce costs, the strategy and assets used to secure shipments evolved. This slow, cost-reduction-driven evolution of the international community’s anti-piracy efforts off the Horn of Africa has distinct parallels with the evolution of anti-piracy efforts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One difference between the historic and current anti-piracy strategies is that there does not appear to be an exit strategy for the latter.

Future anti-piracy initiatives might look to previous strategies to avoid the costly experience associated with Somalia-bound food aid shipments.

Achieving food security objectives can be a resource-intensive activity in failed states. This paper provides insights into how the resource cost of providing food security can be reduced.

The work of caring has assumed utmost importance during the devastation caused by the pandemic. We employ the feminist theory of care ethics within the context of food provisioning during the pandemic, and examine the work of Food for Chennai, a group of micro-volunteers in the city of Chennai, India who provide home-cooked meals, free of charge, to COVID-19 patients and households that are in quarantine. Using textual and visual data from social media posts (Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram), interviews with an organizer of the movement, and print – media articles, we trace the evolution of this movement, and argue that this network of care could not have developed or grown without the use of digital infrastructure and the affective campaigning that it enables. We add to the scholarship of three linked bodies of work – digital activism, food ethics, and the ethics of care – by grounding our analysis in the immediacy of the crisis and suggesting avenues for thinking about ethical issues and digital activism as crisis response in the future. We conclude by offering ways of reimagining food systems that could embrace values of care in the post-pandemic world.

Food insecurity in the Latin American region has become a complex problem that significantly impacts people's physical and mental well-being. The factors causing food insecurity are varied, ranging from social, political, and economic causes. Ensuring access to food is not a task with limited responsibilities; on the contrary, both public and private institutions must contribute to creating sustainable and innovative solutions. In general, it is necessary to ensure that the food system flows correctly, ensuring the availability of balanced and nutritious food for the diet of the inhabitants of a given nation. Alternative solutions apart from the government's help include sustainable cultivation, finger millet, and close cooperation with the farmers from the agriculture sector. The present research aims to consolidate theoretical information on the Latin American situation and seek the leading solutions of the parties involved.