Webinar: Food Justice and Rights at the Centre of Food System Transformation
29 September @ 14:00 – 15:00
We know, more or less, what a healthier and more sustainable food system could look like. So why is change so slow? The answer from the 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission on Healthy, Sustainable and Just Food Systems is that transformation is technically feasible, but it won’t happen unless we treat justice not as a nice-to-have, but as the mechanism that makes change possible in the first place. This means confronting the imbalances of power, structural inequalities and unfair distribution of benefits and burdens that keeps the status quo in place.
Over the past year, Root and Reason has asked how to make the UK food system more resilient: to climate shocks, geopolitical disruption and rising costs. But a food system can be resilient and secure and still fail the people within it. In the UK, millions still cannot reliably access healthy, sustainable and affordable food. As we open a new series on food justice, we start with a fundamental question: what would it take to put justice at the heart of how we grow, govern and distribute our food?
Professor Molly Anderson, a leading voice on the right to food in wealthy nations and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), will set the scene. What do we really mean by a ‘just’ food system: fair outcomes, a genuine voice in decisions, respect for different ways of knowing? Why does injustice persist even where there is more than enough food to go around? And how do justice and resilience depend on one another, rather than pulling in opposite directions?
This is the first in a new Root and Reason series on food justice, following our series on food system resilience. Molly’s framing will set up the practitioner voices to come on the right to food, community growing, land-workers’ rights, and food justice in the devolved nations
About Molly:
Molly Anderson is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Institute for Agroecology at University of Vermont, working on regional food governance, international collaborations and education for agroecology. She is also the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Food Studies Emerita at Middlebury College in Vermont, where she directed the academic program in Food Studies and taught classes for 10 years. She is a member of the International Panel of Experts in Sustainable Food Systems and on the board of the local food relocalisation organization in her county. She published Transforming Food Systems: Narratives of Power in 2024. She is interested in the many ways that we need to move toward more sustainable and just food systems, and in finding fair alternatives to current inequities. Her academic background is in ecology and natural resource management.
About Angelina:
Angelina Sanderson Bellamy is Co-founder and Director at Root and Reason, and Professor of Food Systems at UWE Bristol. She has led on numerous projects to improve sustainability, health and equity within the food system, both in the UK and internationally. Angelina co-chairs the Bristol Good Food 2030 Partnership Steering Group and sits on the boards of Food Policy Alliance Cymru, Food Sense Wales, and Riverside Market Gardens. She has previously worked at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
About this webinar series:
This webinar is part of a monthly series run by Root and Reason (formerly AFN Network+) which explores the transformation of the UK agri-food system with leading movers and shakers. Expect deep and varied insight from across the sector, including farmers, scientists, policy analysts, community leaders, retailers, politicians, businesses and health professionals.