The impact of Russian food security policy on the performance of the food system

Abstract

Food security has guided Russia’s food policy since 2010. The article examines the impact of food security policy on the food system. The Russian model of food security combines government intervention in the form of assistance for domestic production while simultaneously restricting market access. Food security does not appear to have a deleterious impact on the food system. We measure impact on four dimensions. Financial support for agriculture continues to increase in nominal rubles. In food production, the beef and dairy branches continue to lag, but increased grain production has made Russia a global leader in grain exports. Average per capita food consumption improved, although the poor consume much less, and the decline of the ruble affects the way Russians shop. The largest impact of food security has been on food trade. Food security policy has brought food to the forefront as an instrument of foreign policy. Food trade is politicized, witnessed by the food embargo against the West and food import bans against Turkey and Ukraine.     

“Not a Club for Ethical Culture”: The Early Writings of Max Weber,Liang Qichao,and Kang Youwei on the Stock Exchange

This paper examines early discussions of stock exchanges by Max Weber, Liang Qichao, and Kang Youwei and considers their contemporaneity. Despite different contexts, the discussions shared a nineteenth-century preoccupation with global competition and Darwinian struggles for survival. All reveal the attendant anxieties of latecomer nations experiencing belated modernity. Weber, however, wrote from a position that embraced German colonialism, whereas Liang and Kang’s advocacy of stock exchanges was marked by concerns for the Chinese nation that emerged as a result of the experience of colonialism and economic imperialism.     

改革开放以后北京城镇居民食品消费生活的变化

改革开放以后的20年,北京城镇居民的食品消费生活经历了从勉强温饱到温饱再到小康状态的转变。在前一阶段,居民主要是追求吃的数量的扩充,主要特点是实现了从以“主食”消费为主向以“副食”消费为主的转化;在后一阶段,居民开始追求吃的质量的提高,营养、新鲜、方便、快捷的食品受到普遍欢迎。北京城镇居民食品消费生活的这种变化在某种程度上是中国居民生活水平普遍提高的反映,而中国绝大多数人的生活能够不断地得到改善,这一看似简单的现象正是中国渐进的社会主义改革不断取得成功的社会基础。     

Eating,serving, and self-realisation: food and modern identities in contemporary Indian women's writing

The ‘new Indian woman’ is often invoked in popular and academic discourse as the embodiment of a modern nation—the ‘new India’. Feminist studies of this figure typically focus on the body of the imagined ‘new woman’ as a site upon which modernity is inscribed, allowing little room for the agency of women who actively contest imposed identities and roles in the quintessentially modern project of self-determination. In this article I argue that narratives of food in contemporary fiction and fictionalised autobiographical writing by Indian women challenge both dominant feminist critiques of the ‘new woman’, and influential accounts of modernity as ‘rupture’ in masculinist theoretical literature. In these texts food, and particularly the practice of serving food to others, is used by women as a tool for gaining independence, as a weapon to combat oppression, and as a means of negotiating migrant identities, among other things. The texts thus demonstrate the importance of appreciating the gendered nature of modernity, recognising women's modernities to be genuinely transformative of the individual, as well as continuous with traditional and conventionally feminine practices rather than necessarily opposed to them.     

Exploring children's foodscapes

In this article, we discuss children's becoming as food consumers in the intersection of various foodscapes. We draw from a project, Children as co-researchers of foodscapes, where we have been working with children as co-researchers, using basically ethnographic methods, and as co-designers in a collaborative design effort. This article focuses on the findings from a theoretically inspired perspective, using the concept of foodscapes. These are food-related structures of different kinds, which evolve as the child explores them and where children as food consumers are generated. In this article, we highlight the scapes of taste, routines, people, things, commerce, child (as opposed to adult) and health and give brief accounts of the way the children related to them. Finally, we turn to the benefits of working with foodscapes for a better understanding of children's becoming as food consumers in the intersection of various foodscapes. This article is based on data gathered by the children, but also on our fieldwork notes and observations following the children in their foodscapes.     

Beyond Alternative: Exploring the Potential for Autonomous Food Spaces

Abstract: Much attention has been given in recent years to the rise of alternative food networks However, the very concept of “alternative” has come under increasing scrutiny, as theorists grapple with what is meant by alternative and whether the concept adequately captures the key components of such a diverse range of networks and communities. Drawing on poststructuralist political economy, I propose the concept of autonomous food spaces as one possible lens for approaches food‐provisioning activities that situate food within the broader context of non‐capitalist communities seeking to build relationships of mutual aid and non‐market exchanges. I use the examples of a radical collective kitchen, Food Not Bombs, and a community‐supported agriculture operation, Vegetables Unplugged, to explore the potential for autonomous food spaces as part of a broader “politics of possibilities” beyond capitalism.     

The Socio‐Nature of Local Organic Food

Abstract: The concept of socio‐nature asserts that social relations are inherently ecological and that ecological relations are inherently social. This paper examines how, and with what consequences, discourses and practices of support for local and organic food reflect this idea. It argues that proponents of local organic agriculture view the food they promote as simultaneously social and the product of human labor. However, advocates’ understanding of the concept is partial and constrained by social privilege. It does not extend to industrial agriculture or paid farm labor. The literature on socio‐nature coheres around the revelation that what is understood as natural is also social and vice versa. In contrast, this paper takes a new approach, examining socio‐nature as a practice‐shaping discourse already embedded in social life. Investigating the on‐the‐ground ideological work performed by the concept also allows for assessment of its political consequences.     

“If I were hungry,I would not tell you” (Ps 50, 12): Perspectives on the Care and Feeding of the Gods in the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

In the Hebrew Bible, sacrifices are described as food for Yahweh and thus the sacrificial system corresponds with the general Ancient Near Eastern system of the “care and feeding of the gods” At the same time, human-divine commensality is problematized in narrative texts such as Judges 6 and 13, where the burnt offering is stressed as the only and necessarily different way the deity may consume food. Finally, some passages, such as Psalm 50, quoted above, explicitly reject the notion that sacrifices and offerings should be required as sustenance for Yahweh since he is the creator and owner of the world and everything in it.

This article offers a survey of various views on sacrifice as food for the deity in the Hebrew Bible and discusses these views in their Ancient Near Eastern context. It is suggested that the main understanding of sacrifice as meal in the Hebrew Bible is one that emphasizes difference through commensality and stresses the incompatibility of the human and the divine sphere through the social locus of the meal.     

A Late Neolithic vertebrate food web based on stable isotope analyses

Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses of bone collagen, and stable carbon and oxygen isotope analyses of the bone's structural carbonate, were performed on 120 individuals representing 33 vertebrate species, including a single human bone find, collected from the Late Neolithic settlement at Pestenacker, Bavaria, Germany. We were thus capable of reconstructing a rather complex food web and could also address particular issues, such as whether humans influenced the diet of their domestic animals as opposed to their wild relatives, or whether humans perhaps had to compete over food with their domesticates. A rather unexpected result was that freshwater fish, which could be captured in the nearby river Lech, a major tributary of the Danube, contributed to the human diet only occasionally. As for mammals, it was also possible to recognise different trophic levels for birds and aquatic vertebrates, applying stable isotope analyses to both bone collagen and structural carbonate. In the case of fish, δ¹⁸O values at least revealed a physiological regularity in terms of temperature preference, besides diet. Conceivably, variability of δ¹⁸O in surface water as reflected, for example, by species that avoided human settlements, may help to characterise past ecosystems and to define site catchment exploited by Neolithic man in the course of food acquisition. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

绿色食品生产基地农业生态环境综合评价模式构建——以苏北里下河地区为例

发展绿色食品生产是生态农业建设规划的重要组成部分。本文根据绿色食品产地环境质量标准要求,客观评价里下河地区发展绿色食品生产的环境状况,得出里下河地区具有发展绿色食品生产显著的农业生态环境优势,并且,从苏北里下河地区评判案例出发,总结出绿色食品生产基地农业生态环境综合评价模式,从模式的原理、指标的选取、具体评价方法等进行论述。为各地开展绿色食品综合评价提供模式和方法。同时从农业循环经济的原理论述绿色食品,有机食品是高效生态农业的产物。为地方政府在制定发展绿色食品生产基地建设规划时参考。