Research Expertise

The UNESCO Chair on Food, Biodiversity and Sustainability Studies focuses on three main areas of areas of expertise:

• Sustainable food getting
• Traditional and Indigenous foodways, and
• Just food systems

The Chair’s areas of expertise provide a framework for identifying connections between projects and allow us to develop new, thematic networks for more robust knowledge sharing. In other words, our areas of expertise help us to describe what we do.They also inform our communications planning and research outputs and allow us to draw on our collective expertise in order to better advocate for meaningful sustainable food systems change.

Sustainable Food Getting

Sustainable food getting refers to the full set of practices, relationships, and systems through which people access food, going beyond narrow concepts like procurement or sourcing. The term “getting” is intentionally used to reflect the diverse, place-based ways food is obtained across cultures and contexts, including harvesting, farming, fishing, foraging, trading, sharing, and informal food economies.

Sustainable food getting uses scale-appropriate and place-specific practices to ensure the environmental, social, and economic well-being of producers, communities, and landscapes without compromising the needs of future generations. It also prioritizes the lived experiences of food producers and looks to traditional and Indigenous knowledge holders for guidance. Sustainable food getting methods that incorporate the principles of food sovereignty and the right to food create resilience while conserving biodiversity in rural, peri-urban, and urban spaces.

The UNESCO Chair on Food, Biodiversity and Sustainability Studies is uniquely positioned to engage in sustainable food getting research, advocacy, and education by building on its longstanding relationships with food producers using agroecological and ecological methods in Canada and around the world.

Through community-led research and knowledge sharing, the Chair will foster innovative and place-based solutions to improve resilience in regional food systems and create opportunities for robust engagement of BIPOC communities, women, youth, elders, and persons with disabilities in sustainable food getting initiatives.

Traditional and Indigenous Foodways

Understanding and supporting Indigenous and traditional foodways is fundamental to building more sustainable and equitable food systems around the world. Ensuring that traditional knowledge about the land, food systems, and biodiversity is valued, included in policy, and shared between communities and generations is key to food systems self-determination and realizing the right to food.

The UNESCO Chair on Food, Biodiversity and Sustainability Studies works closely with Indigenous and traditional communities to address the longstanding impacts of colonialism by helping to imagine and build the food systems that communities want. This work hinges on prioritizing Indigenous and traditional ways of knowing and being as well as the recognition that food is at the heart of culture and community resilience.

Through community-led research, the creation of formal and informal educational opportunities, support for Indigenous youth and elders, and increased knowledge sharing across networks, the Chair engages with community leaders and knowledge holders to support sustainable food system initiatives that centre culture, language, and land stewardship. This work builds on the Laurier Centre for Sustainable Food Systems’ existing trust-based relationships with communities engaged in reimagining their food systems.

Just Food Systems

A just food system centres universal access to healthy, sustainable, and culturally appropriate food as a basic human right. Just food systems engage with all actors along the supply chain and prioritize the rights of all people, future generations, non-humans, and the environment. They ensure that people can determine what kind of food they eat, where that food is grown, and how it is processed and distributed. They include democratic processes that see the right to food as the guiding tenet.

The UNESCO Chair on Food, Biodiversity and Sustainability Studies works with researchers and community partners in the Global North and South to examine multi-scale structural solutions to address food system inequity. Building on existing cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary networks, the Chair creates opportunities for collaborations that overcome existing barriers to just and sustainable food systems.

Through strategic public education and communications, the Chair helps bring language around food sovereignty, the right to food, and agroecological production methods into everyday discourse. By sharing knowledge through farmer-to-farmer and community-to-community learning, public education, and formal learning opportunities, the Chair supports communities as they build the capacity to transition to more just, ecologically regenerative, economically localized, and robust food systems.