Sustenance Festival is a city-wide festival that celebrates arts, food, and culture in Vancouver. Alongside community groups, artists, and local organizations, Sustenance Festival pushes the boundaries of food innovation.
“Since 2009, the Sustenance Festival has served Vancouver as a platform for community groups, artists, and social service organizations to celebrate and push the boundaries of food innovation in our city. The festival planning committee maintains a deep commitment to reflecting on, and responding to, global trends and current issues impacting the everyday intersections of Vancouver’s food systems with its people.
The Sustenance Festival is ready once again to embark on a more ‘inclusive’ experience and build upon relationships and concepts developed through the research phase of the last year. A new partnership and planning table has emerged which includes representatives of several Neighbourhood Houses, Vancouver Park Board, Vancouver Food Policy Council, and non-profit organizations such as the Hua Foundation. This table brings together the Sustenance Festival concept with the legacy of the Vancouver Food Summit (est. 2016) around shared themes of celebration, inclusion, anti-oppression and decoloniality in food systems. This partnership recognizes that both the Sustenance Festival and Summit are currently under-resourced, but through our “connectedness of purpose” and shared values, we can continue advance justice-oriented food conversations.
We are committed to working together towards greater awareness, and realizing a vision of justice in Vancouver’s food landscape. It is a future vision that foregrounds and uplifts the cross-pollination of cultures, food, and art. It affects our communities in deeply personal and political ways — ultimately feeding providing sustenance for a healthy community in the present and for the future.
The 2018 Sustenance Festival will act as an umbrella for “food conversations” (workshops, panel discussions, dialogue circles, food celebrations) independently organized by our many partner organizations from September 22-November 22, 2018. These events and initiatives will share broad thematic linkages, but will express the unique character and mandate of the organizing partners.”
[1] Food movement is an umbrella term describing the growing popular response to the social and material consequences of globalized and industrial food systems. Action typically centres on consuming local and organic food. Thus, participation has tended to emphasize “voting with your fork” or growing your own food. Sustenance Festival recognizes that there are many ways to engage with the food system that may or may not fall into this framework.
