During the 15th, 16th and early 17th centuries, otherwise known as the Age of Renaissance, Europe underwent profound social and agricultural transformations that still bear their mark on today’s food systems. While the elites of the time dreamt of travel, gold, spices, and sugar, their explorations set the stage for the horrors of colonization, genocide, and chattel slavery, each of which was instrumental in creating today’s global food trade. Most Europeans worked in agriculture and lived in rural areas where they were forbidden to access forests to hunt. In preparing for the agricultural revolution, England famously underwent the beginning of the Enclosure Acts and imposed legal property rights to open fields formerly managed as commons. The new system further impoverished rural areas and led to revolts, many of which were organized by women and were often met by witch hunts. As women were targeted, so were several structures and groups providing care to the natural environment, agriculture, and society. Further developments would lead the world to the globally integrated, hyper-productive yet deeply unequal and often destructive food systems that we know today, in which more people need food, fewer people grow it, and structures of ecological and social care are domesticated and abused. However, it does not have to be this way. 

      Several traditions and knowledge systems provide examples of food system models that are rooted in principles of care for all life forms based on the core notion that all beings are ontologically interdependent. Among them, we find permaculture, ecofeminism, agroecology, and Traditional Ecological Knowledges (TEK), which incorporate the evolving knowledge acquired by Indigenous and local peoples over centuries through direct contact with the environment. In my dissertation, I discuss how integrating principles of care in food systems – that is how we think of, grow, transport, distribute, prepare, and discard food – provide opportunities to increase resilience, enhance well-being, and promote sustainability. I draw on different approaches to care and the interviews of experts in food systems in Cuba, France, and Arizona to offer a definition and a conceptual map of care in the context of food systems and to identify how different care practices enhance sustainability. Integrating these practices into our food systems requires a degree of reform, some of which are political, while others are value-based, agricultural, emotional, and spiritual. Revaluing food-producing activities, farmers, and farmworkers is one such redefinition that needs to occur. As well, we must relearn to take time; the time to respect the biological cycles of the soil, the plants, the fruits, and the seasons, and to patiently nurture their rebirth. It is care, in fact, that holds the power to heal and repair much of the social and ecological wounds, and to enact food systems’ renaissance.