Martin Aucoin's De-Naturalizing the Poultry Plant is the winning essay from TABLE's 2024 Essay Challenge. The Challenge asked participants to consider the question, 'Should food systems be more natural?'Martin's essay reflects both on our understanding of the word 'natural' and on the deeply embedded but often invisible structures our food systems rely upon. Distilling questions from his own experience and research, he proposes the poultry plant as a natural consequence of a modern way to eat and feed. Martin Aucoin grew up in the rural Brazos Valley of Texas, never far away from people growing food: "Being surrounded by massive corn and soy fields, pecan orchards, and cattle and poultry operations, impressed upon me the vast scale at which modern agriculture operates. This made me feel disconnected from the food I ate – too small to even count. I felt this even more distinctly when I moved to the Dallas area for my undergraduate studies. The disjuncture between producer and consumer drove me to get involved in Dallas/Fort Worth local food movements and inspires my work to this day. Since then, I’ve worked as an environmental educator in Massachusetts, a Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia, and am currently finishing my graduate studies. My current life in Boston leaves little time or space for growing food other than a small garden, but I try to take as much pleasure as possible in cooking food and serving it to people. I dream of greater connectivity with the food I eat, the people who grow it, and the other species whose lives nourish humanity. I think many people share this dream, even if subconsciously; my work and writing explore this disjuncture and seek innovative pathways towards putting people back into relationship with their food."

In this piece, Elena Lazos Chavero draws on years of fieldwork in the Sierra de Santa Marta of Veracruz to illuminate how livestock-raising has spread into the region’s indigenous territories, and the role livestock have played in Mexico’s recent history. 

Affordable food, particularly fresh produce, is a key feature of food system goals in the EU, but the provision of year-round fresh fruit and vegetables relies on a growing system that offers little stability to its workers. Researcher María Alonso Martínez asks what we can learn from the resilience of the workers in this community, and how to reconcile affordability with the precarity it seems to require. María Alonso Martínez is Junior Officer in Circular Development at the ICLEI World Secretariat. This research was carried out at Wageningen University & Research, Netherlands. 

This blog entry is part of TABLE´s expansion to the Americas, and it aims to reflect on how the topics covered in TABLE´s Nature theme are present or not in the debate around food systems in Colombia, what the differences are, and what other topics or angles exist in the country.About the author: Camilo joined TABLE in December 2023 as part of the team at the University of Los Andes (School of Government) in Colombia. He holds a BA in Economics, MA in Development Studies and MSc in Agroecology. 

In keeping with our goal of sharing diverse perspectives on food systems worldwide, TABLE is delighted to announce that it is expanding the collaboration. We are very pleased to welcome two new partner organizations to the TABLE family: Universidad de los Andes (Uniandes), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

The following interview was originally recorded in October 2021 between podcast co-host Samara Brock and the Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, Shalmali Guttal. It has been edited for clarity and length.Focus on the Global South (Focus) is an Asian activist, policy research think tank that works with social movements, civil societies, government officials and the public on various aspects of globalization, economic financial policies, and environmental ecological issues. Focus brings diverse actors together to share and deepen the analysis of emerging power patterns and power relations, and to build broad collective mobilizations for global change. It produces analyses that illuminate relations of power, how they create and perpetuate inequality, exclusion, environmental destruction, and entrench marginalization at national, regional and international levels. It also aims to generate high quality, credible and accessible materials that contextualize, inform and support people’s struggles.