Governing plant-centred eating at the urban scale in the UK: The Sustainable Food Cities network and the reframing of dietary biopower

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increase in actions to address a key feature of food in the Anthropocene: the over-production and consumption of animal-based foods or “animalisation” of diets. However, it is unclear whether such efforts can be understood as a coherent institutional level response that will challenge hegemonic dietary biopower, a regime of governance that normalises and reproduces animal-based food consumption. Building on scholarship that explores food governance initiatives in urban contexts and dietary biopower across a range of empirical cases, this paper explores whether, how, and with what consequences governance actors within urban food partnerships (UFPs) of the UK Sustainable Food Cities (SFC) network are working to reframe dietary biopower so that humans are disciplined to eat less animal-based food and instead to adopt a more plant-centred diet. Document analysis and semi-structured interviews with SFC representatives suggest the breadth and depth of current UFP actions do not add up to a sustained challenge to hegemonic, animal-based dietary biopower. Rather, they reveal a plant-centred dietary biopolitical project in the making, while specific cases suggest that this project is more accurately conceptualised as arrested due to the pursuit of food system actions that are counter to and in tension with the promotion of plant-centred eating. We suggest that a more coherent reframing of dietary biopower would entail urban food governance actors engaging consistently and robustly with the debates surrounding animal-based foods, as well as identifying and enacting synergies between plant-centred eating, food poverty, and local economic development agendas.