The Stakes for Food Literacy: The Co-Production and Coherence of Agri-Food Systems

Food literacy has become a productive concept in food studies, spawning a large measurement literature and debates about curricula across many countries. Yet its scope remains slippery, and as a global "initiative" it is still underspecified, perhaps because the topic is taken up by nutritionists and educators rather than a wider coalition of theorists. A critical strand (Hirata Kimura, Caraher, Sumner) has long argued that food knowledge is collective and political rather than individual and neutral. Pushed further, this recasts food literacy as agency: not competence measured in individuals, but the capacity to co-produce agri-food systems through collective, contextualized practice. Knowing food becomes inseparable from shaping it, and the repertoires through which people grow, gather, process, and exchange food are the same ones that hold agri-food systems together as coherent cultural and ecological formations.

This implies that what is at stake when food knowledge declines is not only a matter of personal health or lost tradition (Jaffe and Gertler), but erosion of the knowledge that sustains agricultural biodiversity, reproduces heritage, and underwrites resilience against homogenization. When a cultivar or recipe loses its knowers, the broader agri-food support structure supported by that repertoire cannot easily regenerate, a phenomenon felt now acutely in the Global South (Chattaraj).

We invite theoretically engaged, empirically grounded contributions treating food knowledge as collective, productive, and political: capability versus competence; the deskilling thesis; transmission and its breakdown; the curricula that contain food education; links between knowledge, biodiversity, and heritage; and co-production between local and global regimes.