Congratulations to all those involved in the new open access book Beyond Global Food Supply Chains: Crisis, Disruption, Regeneration.

Edited by Victoria Stead and Melinda Hinkson, the collection takes the upheaval of the pandemic as a springboard from which to interrogate a larger set of structural, environmental and political fault lines running through the global food system. In a context in which disruptions to the production, distribution and consumption of food are figured as exceptions to the smooth, just-in-time efficiencies of global supply chains, the essays examine the pandemic not simply as a particular and acute moment of disruption but rather as a lens on a deeper, longer set of structural processes within which disruption is endemic.

The thirteen chapters offer short, sharp interventions that track disruptive forces & political possibilities at key points along the global food supply chain – and, critically, beyond it. They traverse subjects ranging from agri-investment to corporate and alternative food production systems, labour relations, pandemic supermarkets, logistics systems, the politics of hunger, the limits of consumer ethics, and the possibilities of supply chain disruptions as moments of reprieve. They offer rich, generative reflections on the contemporary global food system, and would also be very well suited to being used as teaching resources.

Chapters

1. Introduction: Beyond global supply chains by Melinda Hinkson and Victoria Stead
2. Supply chains as disruption by Lauren Rickards and Melinda Hinkson
3. Agri-investment cashing in on COVID-19 by Sarah Sippel
4. Putting the crisis to work by Victoria Stead and Kirstie Petrou
5. Going against the grain in the West Australian wheatbelt by Kelly Donati
6. Reviving community agrarianism in post-socialist China by Daren Shi-Chi-Leung
7. Fantasies of logistics in Aotearoa New Zealand by Matthew Henry and Carolyn Morris
8. Reproducing hunger in pandemic America by Maggie Dickinson
9. The pandemic supermarket by David Boarder Giles
10. Disruption as reprieve? by Jon Altman and Francis Markham
11. The UN Food Systems Summit: Disaster capitalism and the future of food by Tomaso Ferrando
12. Against consumer ethics by Christopher Mayes and Angie Sassano
13. Afterword: Temporary measures by Alex Blanchette

The book is available free to download here.