Caroline Durand

Caroline Durand, ” ‘Arrêter, une fois pour toutes, de manger de la vache enragée’: Le Groupe Action- Alimentation de Pointe-Saint-Charles et le droit à l’alimentation, 1970–2000.” Labour / Le Travail, 96, 33–66.

Durand investigates the activism of a group of low-income women and their facilitator in Pointe Saint-Charles, a working-class area of Montreal deeply impacted by de-industrialization, and later gentrification. She outlines the group’s insistence over three decades on the systemic nature of food insecurity, ultimately demonstrating their influence on the Quebec government’s 2002 law against poverty and social exclusion. These women worked to improve their knowledge of nutrition and cooking in the face of insufficient resources, to document the impact of poverty on their lives, to argue that access to healthy food was a right and condemn the use of food banks and charity in an era of growing neoliberalism. Durand notes that while they did not all call themselves feminists, they did not suggest that men had differential nutritional needs or attempt to cater to men’s tastes. Situating their fight in a long history of working-class resistance, Durand’s work contributes meaningfully to the history of feminism, working-class history, urban history, food history, the history of adult education and the history of the welfare state.