Summary
The United Kingdom’s Sustainable Food Cities network believes that eating less meat and more plant-based food can have positive effects on health and the environment. Within the network are urban food partnerships (UFPs). The authors explore how UFPs are reframing an important aspect of these initiatives: dietary biopower. This concept captures how food choices are influenced by various factors, including the availability of certain foods and the information people receive about them.
By examining primary and secondary data sources from award-winning cities, the authors found that these cities reframe dietary biopower in favor of plant-based sources using two “truths”: 1) the meat we eat now is unsustainable, and 2) eating more fruits and vegetables is good. Further, two strategies were identified to promote this reframing: 1) encouraging new relationships with food from animals (e.g., promoting “higher welfare” products and reducing meat consumption) and, 2) promoting the growing and eating of plant foods, particularly in fun and community-building ways.
A limitation of this study is the authors only interviewed 11 people. Although this is an acceptable sample size for expert interviews, the information received could have been more insightful if a larger sample size was used. A strength of this study is that the term ‘food from animals’ was used instead of meat, dairy and eggs, to keep the discussion open and allow the interviewees to talk about other topics related to animal products, such as meatless events and animal welfare.
The authors suggest that this study has many implications, one of which is for people involved in urban food governance to take a comprehensive approach that recognizes the “synergies” between “ plant-centered eating, food poverty, and local plans for economic development.
Recent years have seen an increase in actions to address a key feature of food in the Anthropocene: the over-production and consumption of animal-based foods or “animalisation” of diets. However, it is unclear whether such efforts can be understood as a coherent institutional level response that will challenge hegemonic dietary biopower, a regime of governance that normalises and reproduces animal-based food consumption. Building on scholarship that explores food governance initiatives in urban contexts and dietary biopower across a range of empirical cases, this paper explores whether, how, and with what consequences governance actors within urban food partnerships (UFPs) of the UK Sustainable Food Cities (SFC) network are working to reframe dietary biopower so that humans are disciplined to eat less animal-based food and instead to adopt a more plant-centred diet. Document analysis and semi-structured interviews with SFC representatives suggest the breadth and depth of current UFP actions do not add up to a sustained challenge to hegemonic, animal-based dietary biopower. Rather, they reveal a plant-centred dietary biopolitical project in the making, while specific cases suggest that this project is more accurately conceptualised as arrested due to the pursuit of food system actions that are counter to and in tension with the promotion of plant-centred eating. We suggest that a more coherent reframing of dietary biopower would entail urban food governance actors engaging consistently and robustly with the debates surrounding animal-based foods, as well as identifying and enacting synergies between plant-centred eating, food poverty, and local economic development agendas.