This month at Briarpatch!

A sneak peek at our next issue, "Decolonizing Food"

We'd like to offer you a preview of our September/October issue! Currently on its way to mailboxes and doorsteps, this issue is ripe with sharp critiques and inspiring analyses on the quest for more sustainable food and agricultural systems. Here are a couple of highlights:

Fair trade and empire: an anti-capitalist critique of the fair trade movement
While fair trade does reduce the number of intermediaries in the supply chain as compared to the free trade system, it also serves to reinforce racist and colonial distinctions between the poor Global South farmer and the benevolent Global North consumer. Although it may channel slightly more income into agricultural communities, it ultimately fails to address the colonial capitalist structures that produce the impoverishment of farmers on an ongoing basis.

Propagating the food movement: a uniquely decentralized and mighty movement
Community-based food researcher Charles Z. Levkoe invokes the rhizome as a metaphor for the Canadian food movement – a decentralized network of diverse, self-organizing, interconnected initiatives with no identifiable beginning or end. Still not convinced of the depth and breadth of Canada's food movement? Check out our compilation of 20 innovative and inspiring food initiatives from across the country.

Exciting changes at Briarpatch!

In an effort to continue to improve the timeliness and quality of Briarpatch content, we are excited to announce a shift away from themed issues. The shift began with our unthemed July/August 2011 issue, which received overwhelmingly positive feedback and unprecedented online readership. We expect that releasing ourselves from the constraints of adhering to specific themes will enable us to respond more meaningfully to current events and pressing issues as they arise, and to more actively seek out the highest-quality and most relevant content for every issue. We have three unthemed issues planned for 2012 (see our submissions guidelines for the full 2012 editorial schedule) and look forward to your feedback about this change.

We'd like to welcome Rachel Penner De Waal and Victoria Abraham to our editorial team. An experienced word nerd and grammar enthusiast who has been volunteering with Briarpatch for two years, Rachel is now our dedicated copy editor. Victoria Abraham, a journalism student at Carleton University, has been volunteering with Briarpatch for the past four months and is now our dedicated fact-checker. The two join longtime Briarpatch cracker-jack proofreader Kim Kovacs as our critical final frontier in the editorial process.