This open access book offers an elaboration on foodways as both a geographical concept and an area of study that recognizes local food systems as essential to social justice and long-term sustainability. Approaching food through the lens of foodways provides an alternative to classical scholarship on food security, which often focuses on poverty in order to propose new globalized solutions. Instead, this perspective directs research toward the preservation of cultural and biological diversity, the protection of land rights, and the promotion of social justice.

With a specific focus on the MENA region, contributors to this edited collection engage with reflexive and collaborative methodologies, including participatory visual methods, storytelling, radical learning, land-based and socially rooted knowledges, embodied practices, visceral methods, and community mapping. Such approaches can help negotiate outsider–insider tensions while co-producing knowledge that is accountable to communities and relevant to wider societal debates.

Paola Minoia is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Turin. Her main research interests focus on the political ecology of water and food, postdevelopment and the coloniality of international cooperation, Indigenous education, and tourism gentrification in cities, with an emphasis on relational methods in geographical research. She is the Principal Investigator of the project Post-development Geographies of Local Food Systems: Community-based Networks Addressing Food Insecurity (PRIN/PNRR 2022). She is coeditor of Plurinationality and epistemic justice (2024), Geografie critiche della cooperazione internazionale (2024), and Platform-mediated tourism (2023).