A critical reparative approach towards understanding community food initiatives: Acknowledging hopes and troubles

Community food initiatives (CFIs) bring people together to reconfigure their relations with food, place, and one another. Such initiatives are driven by the specific needs, values, and concerns of people in different places who take collective action to re-design and challenge systems of food provisioning. They span the rural and urban, consumption and production, alternative and mainstream, charity, mutual aid, and (social) entrepreneurship. While agri-food scholars use different theoretical lenses, concepts, and ways of knowing as entry points to study CFIs, such initiatives have largely been described in terms of their hopes and possibilities or troubles and failures. In this chapter, we transcend the polemic of hope and trouble and introduce our critical reparative approach, which consolidates multiple understandings of CFIs. Our approach invites both a reparative stance oriented towards hope and possibility and a critical gaze oriented towards trouble and failure in CFIs. In this introduction, we sketch such a critical reparative approach through the theoretical conceptualisations and empirical research that compose the chapters in this volume. A critical reparative way of knowing emphasises that CFIs are realised through collective actions addressing the place-specific needs and available resources of different communities.