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Research has established a connection between industrially-produced food and negative health outcomes. Scholars have also shown a significant link between poor food environments and health. This paper explores the experiences of university extension program agents in order to initiate greater dialogue about the role of extension in lessening the deleterious health impacts of unequal access to high quality and sufficient quantity foods. Specifically, we consider the role of food self-provisioning instruction (e.g., food gardening, preservation).

The paper draws on semi-structured interviews with 20 university extension program officers in the state of Washington.

Although our participants report that demand for education in food production skills is on the rise across Washington, there are barriers to the equitable distribution of self-provisioning skills.

There is considerable promise for extension programs to have positive implications for health and nutrition for communities struggling to access quality foods. To meet this progress, extension must be more aware of serving the entire public either through hiring agents mirror their constituencies or funding a more diverse array of programming.

Little existing research examines or evaluates using university extension programs as a vehicle for teaching food self-production, though these topics have been taught since the founding of extension.

Among the food system's outcomes, food and nutrition security remains a key concern also in developed countries. This chapter analyzes food and nutrition security issues, unpacking the four dimensions in which the concept is articulated: availability, access, utilization and stability. Then the concept is explored, beyond the official definitions, through a description of the various frames that shape the public debate on food and nutrition security. These frames are: the classical productivist view emerged in the early post-war period; the neoproductivism, promoting a sustainable intensification aimed at producing more food while reducing negative environmental impacts, the entitlement approach based on Sen's reflections on people's capability to access food; the food sovereignty (Via Campesina, 1996) which regards food insecurity as an outcome of unequal power relations: the livelihood approach focused on the assets that determine the living gained by the individual or household; the right to food (De Schutter, 2014) based on the status of each individual as a rights-holder; the similar but less individualistic food democracy and food citizenship perspective which focusses on the collective dimension of those rights; the community food security, again close to the food citizenship but with stronger emphasis on communities and localization. Finally, the main contributions given by small farms to food and nutrition security are described, as identified on the base of the SALSA project outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenge of interpreting the growth in arbitrage opportunities at the Ukrainian‐Romanian border within a rural Ukrainian border community. The author illustrates that whilst the proliferation of economic activity through the border has provided a boost to the local economy, it has also led to the development of discursive performance around these practices within rural Ukrainian communities, which both mitigates the potentially negative impacts of economic growth in Romania and also reflects emerging views of consumption as a cultural competence.

The paper draws on more than 18 months of participant observation in three rural communities on either side of the Ukrainian‐Romanian border between September 2007 and May 2010.

The discursive performance of consumption has emerged as an important means for the production of values amongst the low income households of Diyalivtsi (pseudonym). As part of this performance, the villagers of Diyalivtsi differentiate themselves from their Romanian neighbours through critical analysis of Romanian consumption practices, which are viewed through the prism of cross‐border economies.

This is one of the first papers to consider how the diverse economies of post‐socialism are (re)performed in the communities in which they have become embedded. Rather than seeking to theorise or quantify cross‐border economies and the practices of trading and consumption, it illuminates the social aspects of them for rural Ukrainian communities.

Purpose – This chapter responds to the re-centering of agriculture and food in official forums and public discourse in the current crisis context.

Design – It re-examines the assumptions of the agrarian question through the lens of food regime analysis.

Findings – By examining these developments, particularly the recommendations of the IAASTD report, it is clear there is growing interest in the multifunctional conception of farming that is attentive to ecological and social sustainability.

Research implications – This rethinking is symptomatic of a transformation of the agrarian question: moving away from a concern with the political trajectory of capital in agriculture and the process of depeasantization, towards a concern with ‘peasant’ renewal. This registers an ontological shift towards an agro-ecological paradigm in which an ecologically driven conception of ‘value’ addressing social reproduction rather than capital accumulation is emerging.

Practical implications – New research on “repeasantization” undergirds this claim, and complements the global mobilization of small farmers around the project of food sovereignty. Practically, food sovereignty projects mean growing land rights claims and adoption of diverse forms of biological (rather than chemical) farming.

Social implications – This implies stabilizing rural populations and the possibility of health food and environments.

Value – Intellectually, such developments call for an analytical shift (in food regime and other analyses) towards values other than those of price and productivism in assessing the contribution of agriculture to human survival in a climate-challenged future.

This paper explores the contested notion of what constitutes a fair price in the context of grain exchanges in a subsistence farming village in the highlands of Matagalpa. Using ethnographic data, I show how Nicaraguan campesinos’ economic behavior plays out within a local moral universe of fairness: how much to produce and how much to sell in the market (or to give away); how prices and obligations vary depending on the social relation that binds the seller and the buyer (kinship, friendship, community, and so on); in what ways these notions of fair price are articulated and contested by different classes within a rural community; and lastly, what is expected of the State in terms of regulating food prices. Price emerges as the dialectic between the market in its abstract form and the specific social relationships and everyday politics that shape exchanges. What constitutes help (ayuda) and what constitutes exploitation in market exchanges and the determination of price is constantly contested, the moral economy is a discursive battlefield.

This paper analyses Hanoi consumers' evaluation of food risk and response to the perceived risk.

The authors employed the mixed method approach that integrates segmentation analysis on the survey data and information from group discussions.

Based on consumers' risk rating of six food groups and level of food safety worry, the authors identified four distinct consumer segments: low, moderate, high and very-high-risk perception. The authors found the existence of widespread food safety concerns among Hanoi consumers. Living in an urban region was associated with a higher level of food risk perception. Moderate, high and very-high-risk perception segments exhibited a very low level of institutional trust and subjective control over hazards. Response to the perceived risk differed across segments. “Very high-risk perception” was associated with the most risk-averse behaviour, putting more effort into seeking food safety information and engaging more in supermarket purchase. Consumers with a low and moderate perceived food risk participate more in self-supply of food to reduce their food safety concern.

The paper provides empirical evidence on consumers' evaluation of food risk and their risk-reducing strategies to support the risk communication in Vietnam.

Enhancing institutional trust and risk communication including hazard education can improve consumer confidence in food.

This is the first segmentation study on consumer food risk perception in Vietnam.

In this chapter we focus on food sovereignty and agroecology, in the transnational peasant social movement La Via Campesina, as issues which help us analyze mechanisms of internal convergence in rural social movements. We examine such convergence through the building of collective processes, and in the construction of mobilizing frames for collective action. In particular, we analyze the encounter and diálogo de saberes (dialog among different knowledges and ways of knowing) between different rural cultures (East, West, North, and South; peasant, indigenous, and rural proletarian; etc.) that take place within it. This dialog among the “absences” left out by the dominant monoculture of ideas, has led to a process of convergence that has yielded important “emergences,” which range from mobilizing frames for collective action – like the food sovereignty concept – to social methodologies for the spread of agroecology among peasant families.

The first theme is the “problem” of personal relations in the economy. Under neo-liberalism the Market is treated as universal, a trans-historical and trans-cultural entity; it is naturalised and reified, rather than thought of as a set of social relations; it is treated as a given rather than the result of a historical process with complex social actors. This view of the Market dovetails with a particular understanding of the individual, as driven primarily by a (universal and naturalised) desire to maximise material well-being and seek out value for money, while an “invisible hand,” rather than known personal needs, provides the mechanism to relate supply to demand.

In Japan, since an outbreak of mass food poisoning in 2000, consumer interest in food safety and security has increased, focusing on activities such as Chisan-Chishō (Local Production, Local Consumption), Slow Food, and LOHAS. Activities related to food safety and security in Japan have a strong local character, are moving toward industrialization, are not bound by tradition, and can be said to be activities in pursuit of alternative forms of consumption and development. In Japan, most supporters of Slow Food, LOHAS, and Chisan-Chishō have been women. In societies where production is important, consumption has been entrusted to women. Therefore, activities related to food safety and security are tied to social reform with women in central roles. Receiving social recognition, these activities develop business opportunities, move toward globalized industrialization, and, in a gendered society centered on men, become activities with men in central positions. Gender in the area of food does not allow women to take part in production and distribution and is moving to exclude women. To secure women's position in food, it is necessary to industrialize according to women's ways such as maintaining the viewpoint of living nature, mutual support, collective leadership, and networking.

While many characteristics of food consumption have been examined, little attention has been given to the health potential of consuming from local food communities. Local food communities, including community supported agriculture (CSA) are food initiatives, which try to respond to the healthy food, environmental or socioeconomic challenges of the food system. As a step toward understanding local food communities, this study sets out to examine the health-related adaptivity and self-management practices of CSA participation.

The qualitative research approach, which included semi-structured interviews (n = 35), was designed to discover the potential for being healthy: the ability to adapt and to self-manage among CSA participants. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis.

The results suggest that local food communities can influence health-related adaptivity and self-management in the following themes: awareness of product origins; enhanced food-management capability; expanding applicability and usability of the food environment; and strengthening one's food-related self-image.

Increasing the presence of local food communities might be part of developing strategies to evaluate the health effects of the local food environment and to encourage consumers to take responsibility for their own health.

This study extends the food consumption literature to include new knowledge about how local food communities facilitate individual efforts to enhance their own potential for health as well as improving understanding of the mechanisms that underpin a healthy diet.