Possibilities for decolonizing food planning: Addressing ontological dominance, affective and relational dispositions, and (re)imagining just food futures

In this paper, we invite readers to engage with different possibilities for relating to the world and to food by imagining and enacting future food systems rooted in relational ontologies and interrupting the ontological dominance of settler-colonial food systems. We outline a framework that supports individuals, communities, and organizations to unlearn and disinvest from a Eurocentric agrifood paradigm that requires violence and oppression, and employs neoliberal, racist, patriarchal, capitalist logics. The framework is intended to provide language and concepts that may support food system actors to engage with critiques of colonialism, and their own complicities in maintaining contemporary food systems and structures. We advance promising pathways to creating relational communities of respect, care, accountability, and reciprocity These pathways are vital to healing intergenerational trauma, embodying reciprocal forms of mutual aid, unlearning dominant ontological and epistemological foundations, and imagining and enacting alternative food system configurations and relationships to food, nature, and other-than human beings in pursuit of just food futures and food sovereignties.