Post-Pandemic Food Discourses in the Philippines: Social Enterprises and the Corporate-Environmental Food Regime

A few months into the COVID-19 pandemic and city dwellers in Metro Manila were presented with a dreadful choice: death by virus or by hunger. Spurred by severe lockdown measures imposed to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, more and more consumers turned to food delivery services to source their household needs, particularly for fresh produce. Among the actors directly connecting farmers to consumers were food-focused social enterprises which purported to embody a shift towards more sustainable, socially just configurations of the local food system. While they position themselves in contrast to global, industrial food provisioning systems, it remains unclear whether these social enterprises can be deemed “alternative” to the more nuanced notion of an emergent corporate-environmental food regime, which selectively appropriates social and environmental concerns for continued capital accumulation. Through a critical discourse analysis of what was expressed and internalized by those closely involved with local food-focused social enterprises, this paper shows how dominant discourses around the ways food is produced, consumed, and governed have diffused into ostensibly “alternative" spaces. A systematic comparison of the discourses at play revealed the embeddedness of the corporate-environmental food regime’s hegemonic ideologies among the social entrepreneurs. However, there were discernable inklings of an oppositional alterity to these dynamics given that some of these smaller, less prominent actors explicitly highlighted the non-economic dimensions of food whilst questioning the workings of power and politics in the system. As more research has emerged on the post-pandemic recovery of food systems across the world, this paper provides a glimpse of the complex and changing ideological tides around food provisioning in the global South, offering a look into possible trajectories towards more sustainable and socially just food futures, with a focus on the social enterprise as an increasingly important actor.