Beyond the Dinner Plate: Rethinking Food Justice for Humans and Nature

Socorro Dove

30-09-2025

Standing on the side of the bountiful crops, Kingfisher leisurely starts a small talk. Oddly though, there are barely any answers. Some plants are busy flexing their muscles to counter the wind, while others are struggling to keep their heads intact or completely occupied with fighting off the rapacious birds. With their backs bent and faces down, no one is in the mood for idle chitchat.

In “Light and Free”; Wild Wise Weird [1]

© Elaine Casap

Alternative food movements (AFMs)—from farmers’ markets to urban gardens and food sovereignty campaigns—are often celebrated as solutions to global hunger and unhealthy diets. But do they truly create justice in food systems? A new global review of 140 studies offers a sobering answer: while AFMs provide important alternatives, most remain reformist, catering mainly to urban middle classes, and rarely challenge the industrial food regime’s deeper injustices [2].

The review applied machine learning to group existing research into several key topics, including food banks, health-focused food aid, policy coalitions, agroecology, and food sovereignty. These clustered into two themes: technical food provisioning and governance innovations. Food banks, for example, deliver emergency relief but often trap recipients in cycles of dependency while normalizing food waste from supermarkets [3,4]. By contrast, food sovereignty movements, rooted in Indigenous and agrarian struggles in Latin America, represent more emancipatory approaches. They promote communal control over food systems and embrace “kincentric” philosophies that see land, plants, and animals as relations, not resources [5,6].

This shift points toward multispecies and planetary justice—ideas that extend fairness beyond humans to include ecosystems and future generations [7]. Yet such perspectives are still rare. Most AFMs continue to reflect Western liberal notions of justice centered on human distribution of resources. As a result, low-income, racialized, and LGBTQ+ communities often remain excluded, while ecological harms such as biodiversity loss are overlooked [8].

High NQ entails recognizing that human well-being is inseparable from the vitality of soils, rivers, pollinators, and cultural food practices [9]. While some AFMs—especially food sovereignty and agroecology—cultivate this intelligence, the review shows a need for broader structural shifts in how societies imagine justice. Moving “beyond the dinner plate” toward eco-surplus culture requires embedding relational, more-than-human ethics into food policies, urban planning, and citizen action [10].

References

[1] Vuong QH. (2024). Wild Wise Weird. https://books.google.com/books?id=N10jEQAAQBAJ

[2] Pant LP, et al. (2025). A global scoping review of alternative food movements calls for food justice and justice beyond individual humans. Global Food Security, 46, 100877. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2025.100877

[3] Booth S, et al. (2018). ‘Sustainable’ rather than ‘subsistence’ food assistance solutions to food insecurity: south Australian recipients' perspectives on traditional and social enterprise models. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15, 2086. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15102086

[4] Riches G. (2002). Food banks and food security: welfare reform, human rights and social policy. Lessons from Canada? Social Policy Administration, 36, 648-663. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9515.00309

[5] Altieri MA, Toledo VM. (2011). The agroecological revolution in Latin America: rescuing nature, ensuring food sovereignty and empowering peasants. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 38, 587-612. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2011.582947

[6] Grey S, Patel R. (2015). Food sovereignty as decolonization: some contributions from Indigenous movements to food system and development politics. Agriculture and Human Values, 32, 431-444. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-014-9548-9

[7] Winter CJ, Schlosberg D. (2023). What matter matters as a matter of justice? Environmental Politics, 33, 1205-1224. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2023.2220640

[8] Russomanno J, Tree JMJ. (2020). Food insecurity and food pantry use among transgender and gender non-conforming people in the Southeast United States. BMC Public Health, 20, 590. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-08684-8

[9] Vuong QH, Nguyen MH. (2025). On Nature Quotient. Pacific Conservation Biology, 31, PC25028. https://doi.org/10.1071/PC25028

[10] Nguyen MH. (2024). How can satirical fables offer us a vision for sustainability? Visions for Sustainability, 23(11267), 323-328. https://doi.org/10.13135/2384-8677/11267