Volume 3 (2025)

Sustainable food systems are essential for societies to be able to thrive within planetary boundaries. Multiple visions compete to cast light on the future of food production and consumption worldwide. However, it has become difficult for many to imagine pathways to just and sustainable food systems. To navigate this bloc, this essay explores food system sustainability from a degrowth perspective. Departing from socio-technical and socio-ecological readings of food systems’ unsustainability, degrowth builds on a critique of our dominant socio-economic system that pursues growth at all costs, resulting in human exploitation and environmental destruction. Thus the purpose of this essay is to sketch visions and pathways for post-growth food systems, stimulating readers to imagine and practice food systems – and other forms of society and economy more broadly – that ensure environmental justice and a good life for all within planetary boundaries.

Skeptics of degrowth often place their hopes in clean energy technologies, such as wind turbines, to offset the consequences associated with a growing economy that demands equally high rates of energy. Rather than reduce economic production, as proponents of degrowth argue is necessary to mitigate social and environmental consequences, clean energy is held up as a perfect ‘business as usual’ solution that will allow economic growth to continue. Taking a degrowth perspective, this paper uses a supply chain analysis to de-fetishize the wind turbine as a source of immaterial clean energy. While affirming that renewable energy technologies such as wind turbines and solar panels are necessary, they are insufficient from a degrowth perspective to offset the consequences of continuous growth. Instead, technological improvements, including wind power, must be complimented by policy that reduces economic impact overall.

Drawing on Marx's previously unpublished research, Saitō argues for a radical rethinking of Marxist theory. The book critiques both green capitalism and state-led climate solutions, revealing how market mechanisms merely displace the contradictions of capital. Instead, Saitō advocates for degrowth communism through commons-based production, shortened work weeks, and worker cooperatives. These findings suggest that a revolutionary strategy of class war is more suitable to achieving social-ecological transformation rather than a reformist approach to markets and states.