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The Shepparton Food Hub project, situated in regional Victoria, Australia, is a community response to a crisis in the local economy and food system due to contracting markets for traditional canned fruits, as they became unable to compete with cheaper imports. Food production in Shepparton depends on the SPC Cannery, the Shepparton Preserving Company and a former farmers’ collective, but now a subsidiary of the multinational, industrial food processing corporation Coca-Cola Amatil, which has supply chains throughout Australia and internationally. SPC imports cheap fruit from overseas to process and thus buys less produce from local farmers. The Shepparton Food Hub project drew on the significant body of research examining ways to decentralize and localize food supply chains as well as the evidence of successful strategies used in other entrepreneurial projects. Since 2016, transformational praxis has led to convivial design experimentation. This has turned Shepparton into a living laboratory for convivial food systems design and a place where rich learnings can take place on approaches to transform industrial food systems into convivial ones. Food systems are critical to human health, ecological sustainability, and local economies while providing cultural texture to community life ( Dixon, 2011 ). Currently, corporate-controlled and globalized food systems undermine these contributions. In the case of the Shepparton region, processing plants in both fruit and dairy became privatized companies, and farmers’ collectives serving the interests and needs of locals and farmers were locked out of decision-making processes at the whims of larger global forces. The Shepparton Food Hub project looked at how the region could transition away from a reliance solely on broad-scale farming. |
