ABSTRACT
Food sovereignty challenged the concept of ‘food security’ and the privatization of land, seeds and water and advanced an array of environmentally sustainable and socially equitable alternatives to the destructive practices of the corporate food regime. Food sovereignty is one of the pillars of the global counter-movements to neoliberalism. Food is a physical good, embedded within property regimes used to govern its production and use. The materiality of food grounds its many meanings, but also sits objectively outside these meanings. The Roman Empire divided property into res publicae, res privatae and res communes: state, private and commons. The notion of food sovereignty comes from a long history of peasant struggle that began, notably, with the struggle for the Commons in the face of enclosures pushed by large landowners and textile manufacturers beginning in the sixteenth century. An embedded food commons should constitute, or at least reflect, the aspirational social relations of food sovereignty.
