Addressing social inequities has been recognized as foundational to transforming food systems. Activists and scholars have critiqued food movements as lacking an orientation towards addressing issues of social justice. To address issues of inequity, sustainable food systems education (SFSE) programs will have to increase students’ equity-related capabilities. Our first objective in this paper is to determine the extent to which SFSE programs in the USA and Canada address equity. We identified 108 programs and reviewed their public facing documents for an explicit focus on equity. We found that roughly 80% of universities with SFSE programs do not provide evidence that they explicitly include equity in their curricula. Our second objective is to propose an equity competency model based on literature from multiple fields and perspectives. This entails dimensions related to knowledge of self; knowledge of others and one’s interactions with them; knowledge of systems of oppression and inequities; and the drive to embrace and create strategies and tactics for dismantling racism and other forms of inequity. Integrating our equity competency model into SFSE curricula can support the development of future professionals capable of dismantling inequity in the food system. We understand that to integrate an equity competency in our curricula will require commitment to build will and skill not only of our students, but our faculty, and entire university communities.

Higher education institutions are increasingly offering Sustainable Food Systems (SFS) degree programs in response to societal demand for training a professional food systems workforce. As a relatively young field, there is a need for clearly articulated learning outcomes (LOs) for SFS education to define student learning through degree programs, design new programs, and evaluate and modify existing programs. New and established SFS programs are often fragmented over multiple academic departments which impedes the development of a coherent and holistic curriculum for approaching the complexity of food topics. Here, we address these needs through the co-creation of adaptable LOs for Baccalaureate degree-level SFS programs which are aligned to a SFS Signature Pedagogy and based on outcomes-based education toward contributing to a solid conceptual basis for SFS education. The SFS Signature Pedagogy is a framework that can be applied to develop students' systemic capacities, including holistic, and pluralistic ways of understanding sustainability challenges, multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinarity, experiential learning, and collective action projects. Our co-design of LOs was based on qualitative content analysis of existing LOs of established SFS programs, a cross-sectional survey with SFS educators and refinement of LOs from feedback in an expert panel. This process resulted in the eight adaptable LOs: (1) systems thinking, (2) critical reflection, (3) diverse ways of knowing, (4) practical application, (5) multi-context communication, (6) teamwork, (7) collective action, and, (8) advocacy for SFS. We anticipate the adaptable LOs proposed here to be applicable for diverse student communities and geographic respectively cultural contexts as well as to provide insight for sustainability-related academic programs toward developing professionals equipped with skills and capacities to address complex challenges.

The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and cost economies trillions of dollars. Yet state responses have done little to address the negative externalities of the corporate food regime, which has contributed to, and exacerbated, the impacts of the pandemic. In this paper, we build on calls from the grassroots for states to undertake a strategic dismantling of the corporate food regime through redistributive policies and actions across scales, financed through reparations by key actors in the corporate food regime. We present a strategic policy framework drawn from the food sovereignty movement, outlined here as the “5Ds of Redistribution”: Decolonization, Decarbonization, Diversification, Democratization, and Decommodification. We then consider what would need to occur post-redistribution to ensure that the corporate food regime does not re-emerge, and pose five guiding principles grounded in Indigenous food sover¬eignty to rebuild regenerative food systems, out¬lined here as the “5Rs of Regeneration”: Relation¬ality, Respect, Reciprocity, Responsibility, and Rights. Together these ten principles for redistri¬bution and regeneration provide a framework for food systems transformation after COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted multiple vulnerabilities and issues around local and regional food systems, presenting valuable opportunities to reflect on these issues and lessons on how to increase local/regional resilience. Using the Fraser Valley Regional District (FVRD) in Canada as a case study, this research employs integrated planning perspectives, incorporating comprehensive-systems, regional, place-based, and temporal considerations, to (1) reflect upon the challenges and vulnerabilities that COVID-19 has revealed about local and regional food systems, and (2) examine what these reflections and insights illustrate with respect to the needs for and gaps in local/regional resilience against future exogenous shocks. The study used a community-based participatory approach to engage local and regional government, stakeholders, and community members living and working in the FVRD. Methods consisted of a series of online workshops, where participants identified impacts related to the food production, processing, distribution, access, and/or governance response components of the local and regional food systems and whether these impacts were short-term (under 3 months), medium-term (3 to 12 months), or long-term (over 1 year) in nature. Findings from the study revealed that food systems and their vulnerabilities are complex, including changes in food access and preparation behaviours, lack of flexibility in institutional policies for making use of local food supply, cascading effects due to stresses on social and public sector services, and inequities with respect to both food security impacts and strategies/services for addressing these impacts. Outcomes from this research demonstrate how including comprehensive-systems, regional, place-based, and temporal considerations in studies on food systems vulnerabilities can generate useful insights for local and regional resiliency planning.