Food security is a complex issue with no single definition. It involves ensuring all people have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food through physical and economic access. Key elements include availability, accessibility, adequacy, acceptability and agency. Food security is interconnected with other issues like food sovereignty, sustainability, safety, justice and linked to broader systems like climate, environment, politics and economics. Understanding food security requires a systems perspective as it exists within complex, multidimensional environments that structure discourse and experiences around food.

1. COMPLICATING FOOD SECURITY
‐ A canary in the global mine?
‐ A deliverable commodity?
‐ A technological achievement?
‐ An effect of private property rights … or a ‘commons’?
‐ A byproduct of market/trade/pricing reform?
‐ A form of justice; a human right?

2. Rhetorics of food security
F.A.O.
“Food security exists when all people, at all
times, have physical, social and economic access
to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet
their dietary needs and food preferences for an
active and healthy life.”
(World Food Summit, 1996)

3. Rhetorics of food security:
U.S.D.A.
‘Food security for a household means access by
all members at all times to enough food for an
active, healthy life. Food security includes at a
minimum (1) the ready availability of
nutritionally adequate and safe foods, and (2) an
assured ability to acquire acceptable foods in
socially acceptable ways (that is, without
resorting to emergency food supplies,
scavenging, stealing, or other coping strategies).’

4. ‘Defining Elements’ of food security:
Ryerson C.S.F.S.
• Availability ‐ sufficient food for all people at all times
• Accessibility ‐ physical and economic access to food for
all at all times
• Adequacy ‐ access to food that is nutritious and safe,
and produced in environmentally sustainable ways
• Acceptability ‐ access to culturally acceptable food,
which is produced and obtained in ways that do not
compromise people's dignity, self‐respect or human
rights
• Agency ‐ the policies and processes that enable the
achievement of food security

5. Complex associations:
Food security and …
• Food sovereignty
• Food sustainability
• Food safety
• Food integrity
• Food justice
… as they relate to provision and consumption

6. Linked issues & tangled webs
• Climate change, climate wars
• Water, flood and drought
• Demographic strain
• Geopolitics, bioterrorism
• Transportation systems & their consequences
• Property regimes, commodification
• Industrialization & rationalization of food production
• Rationalization & ‘disenchantment of food’
• Land (as more than a seedbed …)
• Democracy and political participation
• Democracy, knowledge, policy formation

7. Food security as a ‘systems issue’
• Systems as
‐ manipulable complex objects
‐ environments
• Incredibly complex systems
• Intersecting and multidimensional systems
• Systems which are not ‘objects’

8. Systems as constitutive environments
• We study, live within, are constituted by food
systems
• ‘Food security’ as a system of discursive practices
– The unconscious is structured like a language (Lacan)
– ‘Food security’ is structured & practised like a language
(Ramp)
• De‐securitizing the ‘household’ & language of food?