Welcome, dear readers, to a delicious offering of student writing about food in Canada! In this special issue of Cuizine, we are sharing with you some of the excellent works submitted by graduate and undergraduate students in courses utilizing food to evoke learning about social issues and problems. As university instructors who have recently taught courses centred on food in Gender Studies, Social Justice Studies, English, and Sociology, we know that students are often keen to share their food-related experiences and think critically about food justice, food security, identities, bodies, memories, and culture among other aspects of food. Student engagement and the excellent pieces produced in our own classrooms prompted us to solicit submissions from students, and as you can see before you, the fruits of their creative and scholarly labour comprise some of the excellent food analyses taking place in Canadian classrooms. In bringing together these pieces, we also asked ourselves what it means to use food as a lens for teaching and learning in our current times. This project was first proposed in December 2020 at a time when many of us hoped that the most significant pandemic-related academic disruptions were behind us. In the months and years that followed, we continued to navigate challenges inside and outside of the classroom. Food production continues to be affected by COVID 19 dealt labour shortages and distribution disruptions, the deepening climate crisis, conflict, and wars, leading many of us to see high inflation and rising food costs in our own communities. These challenges are set against the backdrop of growing social inequalities around the world with activists and scholar-activists seeking food, environmental and racial justice in food systems through anti-colonial and anti-racist strategies of resurgence and resistance. In Canada, Indigenous food scholars and their allies insist that anti-colonial approaches to understanding food and food systems grapple with settler colonialism and its ongoing impacts on Indigenous Peoples, particularly women and girls. As students today contend with myriad physical and emotional health, financial, and environmental concerns, food is often at the forefront of their minds. This is especially true as post-secondary student food insecurity and student poverty is a growing problem in Canada impacting student learning and academic success, with many students, particularly international students, profoundly impacted. Scholars across disciplinary fields continue to broaden the range of connections that they are making and the ways that we situate ourselves and our scholarship in our ever-shifting world. Food plays a role in how we understand our place in the world. We all must eat to live and although consumption or food practices are embodied and individual, they are also material and social informing our individual and collective identities. Current neoliberal market ideology purports that we can all exercise choice when making decisions about what to eat; however, we know that not everyone has equal access to food and choice rhetoric is constrained through structured social differences and corresponding material realities. Attention to the structures of gender, race, class, sexuality, and abilities among other axes of social difference maps on to bodies producing cultural values about what constitutes health that extends to ideas about healthy bodies. Through an intersectional approach to food, feminist food studies scholars are engaging more closely with critical dietetics and fat studies, critiquing the ongoing medicalization of food and bodies that maintain weight stigma and anti-fat bias. Moreover, deploying "obesity" discourses as evidence for the need for food system change is no longer acceptable as critical weight and fat studies scholarship have demonstrated the danger of employing antiquated science such as using the BMI to measure health, and …
