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This review aims to reexamine the main issues of the food problem under a new concept coined as “Four Ss with one F”. It aims to provide a stimulus for thinking food problems through a simple formula “Four Ss with one F” for getting the “full” story at a glance.

This descriptive paper is based on an extensive literature review as well as personal observations gained from previous studies.

The three Ss, security or insecurity, safety, and sovereignty have been major topics in the public agenda for a long time as food‐related problems. When the basic idea “food for all” is considered, these are not inclusive enough. The fourth concept can be described as shareability. These concepts are not competitive but complementary, even overlapping to some extent. Food sovereignty and shareability can be considered opposing concepts to the available free‐market based approaches in the efforts to bring all people food security and food safety. This revision evidenced that despite the many efforts in this field for several decades, present free market oriented approaches have not led to solutions to the problem of food security and providing safe food to all people, i.e. “food for all”. Hunger does not result from a shortage in the food supply as generally argued. The food problem is related to poverty and the inability to purchase food. It is not possible to solve hunger and nutrition problems and maintain a permanent social peace without equality and justice in income distribution throughout the world in such a way that poor people have enough income to access vital basic food needs.

This paper introduces a new concept in food science as shareability along with considering previous concepts of food, security, safety and sovereignty, all together.

Our global food system today is characterised by an unprecedented scale of centralisation, intensification and concentration. The record‐high food supplies are supposed to suffice the mouths of seven billion and famines become something in history, which is ironically not the case today. The purpose of this paper is to study whether the globalised food system in the current form is sustainable for all and whether the alternatives are available.

The paper will discuss the benefits of, as well as challenges facing, a localised food system. It will also analyse how the “Food Empire” undermines universal “food security” and “food sovereignty”, especially the way the underprivileged in the south are being exploited.

Created by several transnational corporations, the “Food Empire” dominates the global agri‐food industry, from agricultural inputs to food retails, under intensive globalisation of agri‐production and liberalisation of international trade. Instead of a globalised food system, this paper argues that it is better to have localised food systems as they can offer people an equitable access to food and ensure long‐term productivity of our farmlands as part of the agenda for sustainable development.

We have to review trade rules and stop the food war against nature, the poor and justice. “Free market” and “green revolution” in which many believe are not whole of the answers to achieve a sustainable food system, but only the “political will” to change the way food is produced and consumed from now on.

Research in the field of indigenous value chains is limited in theory and empirical research. The purpose of this paper is to interpret values that may inform a new approach to considering value chains from New Zealand Maori kin community contexts.

The paper derives from research that develops Indigenous research methods on positionality. By extending the “included researcher” (Kawharu, 2016) role, the research recognises the opportunity of being genealogically connected to one of the communities, which may enable “deep dive research” relatively easily. Yet practical implications of research also obligate researchers beyond contractual terms to fulfil community aspirations in innovation.

Research findings show that a kin community micro-economy value chain may not be a lineal, progressive sequence of value from supplier to consumer as in Porter’s (1985) conceptualisation of value chains, but may instead be a cyclical system and highly consumer-driven. Research shows that there is strong community desire to connect lands and resources of homelands with descendant consumers wherever they live and reconnect consumers back again to supply sources. Mechanisms enabling this chain include returning food scraps to small community suppliers for composting, or consumers participating in community working bees, harvesting days and the like.

The model may have implications and applicability internationally among indigenous communities who are similarly interested in socio-economic growth and enterprise development.

The apper’s originality, therefore, derives from addressing a research gap, showing that indigenous values may provide a new approach to conceptualising value chains and developing them in practice.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the food system professionals’ opinions of a new senior secondary school food literacy curriculum named Victorian Certificate of Education Food Studies in Victoria, Australia.

A purposive sample of 34 food system professionals from different sub-sectors within the Australian food system was interviewed individually in late 2015 and early 2016. Interviews were analysed using the template analysis technique.

Most participants appreciated the extensive coverage of food literacy aspects in this new curriculum. However, many suggested amendments to the curriculum including pay less emphasis on food history-related topics and pay more focus on primary food production, nutrition awareness and promotion, and food security, food sovereignty, social justice, and food politics.

A well-structured, comprehensive secondary school food literacy curriculum could play a crucial role in providing food literacy education for adolescents. This will help them to establish healthy food patterns and become responsible food citizens. The findings of this study can be used to modify the new curriculum to make it a more comprehensive, logical, and feasible curriculum. Moreover, these findings could be used to inform the design of new secondary school food literacy curricula in Australia and other countries.

The exploration of perspectives of professionals from a broad range of food- and nutrition-related areas about school food literacy education makes this study unique. This study highlights the importance of food professionals’ opinions in secondary school food-related curricula development.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the consumer adoption literature on local food. This study discusses the applicability of traditional models of adoption and diffusion to understand new phenomena such as the development of local food networks.

A systematic review of the literature on the adoption and diffusion of local food systems was conducted.

A total of three main challenges within the literature on the adoption and diffusion of local food are identified: the lack of a clear definition of what constitutes local food, divergent market assumptions and divergent consumer assumptions. In addition, this study points to the need for new perspectives on consumer adoption and diffusion of local food practices.

This paper provides an overview of current local food research streams and contributes to the literature on consumer adoption and diffusion of local food consumption.

This paper aims to study how activists involved in consumer-initiated cooperatives, in a specific context, challenge the practices of the neoliberal system and develop counter-practices that are ingrained with their values. It aims to access the transformative capacity and inclusiveness of consumer-initiated cooperatives and the role played by prefigurative practices in changing the status quo. Three practices – defetishization of agricultural commodities, surplus generation and distribution, prefiguration – that enable the inclusion of those groups who are marginalized in the food production and consumption nexus by neoliberal policies are identified.

The findings of this paper were developed from 23 unstructured interviews, participant observation and analysis of the social media accounts of five consumer-initiated cooperatives located in different districts of Istanbul and which are involved in a collective response to the neoliberal policies.

The study discusses that, in a specific context, political events and economic policies can be a catalyst for the initiation of alternative consumer-initiated cooperatives. The findings indicate that these organizations can develop and articulate prefigurative practices that are influential in transforming the prevailing capitalist food provisioning system to be more inclusive.

The findings offer an alternative view to the dominant capitalist logic and advance the concept of how the economic sphere can be re-politicized and how the persevering notion of financial performance is resolved by invoking values of inclusion, solidarity, responsibility and sharing. The findings are based on the study of five cases in a specific context during a specific period.

This paper focuses on cooperatives owned and governed by activist consumers and presents results concerning their underlying practices for creating a food provisioning system that is inclusive and aiming for social justice and equality. Similarly, it provides evidence of how local political and economic conditions influence the appropriation and development of these practices – commodity defetishization, surplus distribution and prefiguration.

Against a milieu of fragmented research that documents indigenous practices related to food security, and the heterogeneous settings from which the studies have been conducted, this study aims to synthesize the evidence of indigenous knowledge-food security nexus to strengthen the call for the revitalization of indigenous knowledge (IK) as part of the mechanisms to manage food security challenges being aggravated by climate change.

Drawing on insights from sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), this study reviews 122 articles accessed from the Web of Science and Scopus databases, which covered indigenous methods used for producing, gathering, processing, preserving and storing diverse food sources that indigenous people deploy in securing their food systems.

The surge in attention to focus on IK-food security nexus tends to be influenced by the growing acknowledgement of climate change impacts on food systems. Essentially, the IK-based practices adopted address all the four food security pillars that are specified by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) as availability, accessibility, utilization and stability. The main motivation behind the continued use of IK-based ways relates largely to the interest to be food secure against climatic shocks and partly to the desire to maintain people’s food cultures and food sovereignty.

This study deploys the food security pillars provided by the FAO (2012) to demonstrate that IK-based ways of food management are capable of addressing all the four food security dimensions, a critical observation toward revitalizing IK in managing growing food security challenges that are intensified by climate change in SSA.

This paper aims to examine the implications of the efforts to promote a quality-oriented economy that incorporates a vision of environmental sustainability and equitable social development.

The analysis builds on a case study of food procurement in Brazil, which intended to improve the quality of food used in public schools. The case study follows ways that the promotion of quality food has localised the procurement operation, connecting smallholders to citizen-consumers.

The efforts to promote quality food procurement worked to shape reflexive governance in a decentralised political environment and create an institutional device based on cooperative civic participation and state engagement. However, this process highlighted socioeconomic inequality within the country due to uneven local capacities to connect good-quality services to the citizens' everyday places. The study identifies the following paths to tackle this unevenness: improvement of place-based infrastructure; promotion of trans-local cooperation; and building on the existing informal institutional arrangements.

The focus on quality and sustainability in general has been blind to the inequality in local capacities to define and promote the quality-oriented economy in the first place. Recognising inequality through a case study, the paper outlines specific ways for the author to link quality to trans-local equality.

This manuscript focuses on theoretical past, present and future models for defining food culture and cuisine, comparing these principles with contemporary literature evidence of transformative global food practices during public health and environmental crisis. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to explain the point at which traditional practices are discernible from the effects of modern technology, globalization, marketing and the virtualization of consumption. The paper explains how current local and global ecologies contribute to the retainment or disassembly of established culinary borders.

This is a theoretical paper that highlights seminal and present discourse on food cultural practices. Furthermore, it underlines the cultural changes during environmental crises and whether these cultural transformations in food practices will be lasting. The authors suggest a perspective model for the future.

Deciphering whether traditional foodways are moderated by modernity and environmental changes is very complex and multifactorial. This is likely nuanced by the availability of commodities and the steadfastness of particular cultures. Whether or not consumers embrace a new food product is likely contingent on their fundamental familiarity with and availability of the product's traditional components. The integrity of traditional foodstuffs will continue to be valued and demanded by broad groups of consumers into the foreseeable future.

As a primary objective, food producers, manufacturers and governments should not seek to actively diminish cultural borders and markets. Industry and governmental strategists should embrace and promote cultural food messages in any interventional strategies on household food security or marketing strategies and campaigns. The gathering of information from grassroot cultural groups about traditional food practices should ground the development of new policies and products.

Understanding the complexities surrounding traditional cuisines and food ways gives insight into the future of traditional food cultures and how they change. The food industry is undergoing profound transformation due to climate change; the decrease of arable land; environmental crisis, such as floods and droughts; war; food insecurity; aging populations; and chronic food-related diseases and disorders. Therefore, new food products are essential to adjust to these issues. However, the use and effectiveness of these foods would likely be enhanced if they were tailored with ingredients and techniques that have meaning to particular cultural groups.

Social connectivity, the shared experiences of eating together (and the contingent health benefits) may have been subject to contemporaneous or permanent change due to transformation in local and global food ecologies. Whether or not consumers embrace new food products may be contingent on their fundamental familiarity with its traditional components. The integrity of traditional foodstuffs is likely to continue to be valued and demanded by broad groups of consumers into the foreseeable future.

Seminal food culture theories are still being utilized in recent publications to explain contemporary practices, particularly in times of crisis such as the recent pandemic. Current scholarship has indicated, to degrees, that links to traditional food practices may be strong, evolving or are becoming more obscure as they are incorporated into a global fabric. There are gaps in the literature that necessitate more exportation of the impact of environmental changes and health crisis on cultural and traditional food practices. This further raises questions about how the formative theories on food culture apply to modern and future food practices.