From Short Food Supply Chains to Social Security for Food: Concrete Economies and Political Narrative for Food Solidarity
Inequalities in access to quality food are a marker of contemporary societies. By confirming them, the COVID-19 crisis has also given greater visibility to food solidarity initiatives aimed at reducing these inequalities by relying in particular on short food chains and local food. In this article, after presenting the two main approaches to these initiatives in the literature, we propose an interdisciplinary analytical framework that allows us to question them as concrete economies, embedded in social relations, rooted in territories and participatory, shaped in part through their relations with public policies. We apply this framework to a wide range of initiatives identified in France in 2020 and thus show a diversity of strategies implemented to facilitate access to quality food for people in precarious situations, while highlighting the associated difficulties. While combining certain strategies can help reach more precarious people, food solidarity initiatives do not have the capacity to provide access to quality food for all. We then conclude on the universalist perspective opened up by the social security for food project, as a political narrative federating a diversity of actors and initiatives, but also giving rise to debates, on a national scale and through local experiments.