Pitches wanted (food and cities) | $130 per article

COMPANY/PUBLICATION: FEMINIST FOOD JOURNAL

Deadline: 23 February 2023

We’re calling for pitches for our CITY issue. Please read or pass on the brief below if you’re interested in pitching or know someone who might be. We are accepting story ideas at pitch@feministfoodjournal.com until February 23, 2023. Learn more about how to pitch by reading our full guidelines here.

Cities have changed the way we eat, and the way we eat has changed cities.

Globally, more than half of us live in urban areas — a number expected to balloon to two-thirds by 2050. As urban populations around the world continue to grow, so too will the importance of cities in creating more sustainable food futures. The cities of yesterday grew according to the ways that inhabitants could be fed, but as technology advanced and health and safety standards evolved, the distance — both physical and cognitive — between urbanites and their food increased. The cities of today sit in a stunningly complex web of long-distance supply chains, local food production, dynamic and creative gastro-scenes, visible and invisible labour, and innovation. Each node and link is inflected by inequalities related to gender, race, ethnicity, class, and ability. Who is darting through traffic to deliver soggy sushi on a rainy Friday night? Who emblematizes an urban farmer or trendsetting chef in the popular imagination? Who are public and private food spaces designed to serve?

For the next issue of Feminist Food Journal, we are looking for stories that explore food and cities in all their intensity, inequality, diversity, and contradictions. We want to interrogate what it means to feed or be fed by the city. We want to highlight what food and feminism can tell us about the complex networks, cultures, institutions, and socio-spatial interactions that constitute urbanity. We want to know what feminist food innovations have happened or are happening in your city, why they’re important, and who is behind them.

To pitch for this issue, email us at pitch@feministfoodjournal.com by midnight CET on February 23, 2023. (You can find our full pitch guidelines here; we pay a flat rate of US$130 per contribution.)

To get things started, we’ve gathered some themes and keywords we think might make interesting topics for this issue. All of these ideas need to be unpacked through an intersectional feminist lens and related, in some way, to food. The topics in this list are broad — and we’re open to all other ideas — but please remember to pitch us a story, not a topic. A good pitch will present a compelling narrative and a strong sense of character and place. We’re particularly interested in stories that haven’t been told elsewhere, coming from diverse geographic and cultural perspectives. These stories can be historical or contemporary; what matters is that they offer new ways of thinking about the relationship between food, the city, gender, and power.

URBAN FOOD PRODUCTION

• Urban agriculture
• Controlled environment agriculture (e.g., indoor agriculture, vertical farming, agricultural technologies)
• Urban foraging
• Environmental change and sustainability

URBAN EATING

• Restaurants, bars, cafes, bakeries, and breweries (e.g., rooted in place or emblematic of a city’s food (sub)cultures; racial or gender segregation in public eating places)
• Food trucks, food stands, street hawkers (e.g., the people behind them or their patrons; politics of cleanliness)
• Food markets
• City food guides
• Freeganism

URBAN SPACE

• The built environment (e.g., the role of food and gender in shaping the physical forms of cities)
• Homes (e.g., gender dynamics in home kitchens; homes as sites of production or consumption)
• Supermarkets (e.g., as sites of consumption or as spaces of work; as reflections of globalization, capitalism, industrialization)
• Public space (e.g., how it’s used, who it’s for; how food shows up or doesn’t; policing or “cleaning up” of public space)
• Mobility (e.g., in relation to food apartheid or racist urban development policies; in relation to the transportation of people, of food)
• Migration and urbanization (e.g., how the movement of people has shaped urban foodways; identity politics and food in diverse cities)
• Accessibility (e.g., (dis)ability and food in the city; economic segregation)
• Placemaking (e.g., placemaking initiatives that incorporate food)
• Digitization/digital spaces/augmented realities
• Right to the City

URBAN POLITICS AND ECONOMICS

• Food systems planning, policies, activities (e.g., the role of race and gender in urban food policies and actions)
• Urban food utopias (Sitopia, Garden City of Tomorrow)
• Gentrification
• Houselessness
• Domesticity
• Poverty and inequality (e.g., the historical, economic, and social contexts that give rise to it)
• Slums
• Degrowth or deceleration
• Trade and investment (e.g., how cities’ culinary histories have been shaped by trade networks or colonialism)

URBAN WORK

• Domestic help
• Ghost kitchens
• Food delivery services
• Food collectives
• (De)Industrialization

CONTACT INFORMATION (please do not share the email address publicly):

Questions / submissions: pitch@feministgfoodjournal.com

Website: https://feministfoodjournal.substack.com

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