Participant Voices: Personal Stories from the Food Sovereignty Movement

Bandung, February 2025 — At the conclusion of the Food System Diplomacy Training, participants were given an assignment unlike typical training evaluations: create a "Foods Buku" (Food Book) documenting their personal food sovereignty journey through essays, photos, and reflections.

FOODS training participants documenting their food system experiences

What emerged were nine powerful testimonies revealing how food systems education catalyzes personal transformation—from passive consumers to active change-makers. These voices, representing diverse experiences across disability, gender, and economic status, offer a ground-level view of food sovereignty in action.

Anindita: From Food Waste to Food Justice

Anindita, a 2024/2025 environmental engineering student at Winaya Mukti University, came to the FOODS training with existing commitments to environmental justice. Active in youth organizations like Pemuda Peduli Lingkungan Asli dan Bersih (Youth Care for Clean Native Environment) and YOS Indonesia, she had already connected environmental degradation to food systems through her community service work.

"My interest in sustainable food systems deepened during community service in Pakemitan subdistrict, Cinambo, Bandung," Anindita wrote in her Foods Buku essay. The project, a collaboration between the Environment and Forestry Agency, regional higher education coordination, and private universities, exposed her to household food waste patterns.

What struck Anindita was the disconnect: some residents understood organic waste management, using maggot farming and ecoenzyme production to convert food scraps into resources. But many others remained unaware of how household food waste contributes to landfill methane emissions and environmental pollution.

The FOODS training gave Anindita a systems framework for understanding this disparity. "I realized food systems include not just production and distribution, but responsible consumption and post-consumption management," she explained. Her participant photos documented Pakemitan's community composting initiatives, showing practical food waste solutions already working at grassroots level.

Anindita's takeaway: "Change can start with small actions done consistently. Simple steps like public education and environmentally friendly technology can create major impacts toward sustainable food systems. With strong collaboration between government, academics, and communities, Bandung can become an example of a city with more inclusive, environmentally friendly food systems."

Windi Hefitriani: Seeing Urban Agriculture Anew

For Windi Hefitriani, the training reframed urban agriculture from a hobby for middle-class households to a climate adaptation strategy with justice implications.

Her Foods Buku essay reflected on how limited space in Bandung's dense urban neighborhoods constrains food production. But rather than accepting this as fixed, the training taught her to identify opportunity spaces—rooftops, balconies, vertical systems, community lots.

Windi's photos captured creative urban agriculture solutions she observed post-training: a vertical herb garden constructed from recycled plastic bottles, a rooftop tomato system using wicking beds, a community food forest on previously vacant land.

"Before FOODS, I thought urban farming was nice but not essential," Windi wrote. "Now I see it as infrastructure—as necessary as roads or water systems for city resilience."

She left the training with plans to organize her apartment building residents to convert a shared courtyard into a food garden, demonstrating how individual learning translates to collective action.

Muhammad Azmi: Defending Traditional Food Markets

Muhammad Azmi Nizar Daifulloh Wahab, a young photographer, used his Foods Buku to document Bandung's traditional markets—pasar (markets) where vendors and customers have relationships spanning generations.

His photo essay captured the textures of traditional food commerce: hands exchanging rupiah and vegetables, vendors arranging produce in aesthetic patterns, the social interactions that happen alongside transactions. These aren't just economic exchanges, Azmi argued, but sites of food sovereignty.

"Supermarkets are replacing traditional markets in Bandung," Azmi observed. "But when you shop at pasar, you know who grew your food, you negotiate prices, you're part of a community economy. That's food sovereignty in practice."

The FOODS training gave Azmi language for what he'd intuitively understood through his lens: that food system transformation requires preserving what works while building new alternatives. Not all innovation is progress; some traditional practices embody values worth fighting for.

Azmi's photos now circulate on social media with captions explaining food sovereignty concepts, turning his art into advocacy.

Yunita Aghniya Rahmani: Disability and Food Access

Yunita Aghniya Rahmani's Foods Buku photos documented a dimension of food systems often invisible in mainstream discourse: physical accessibility barriers that persons with disabilities face in accessing food.

Her images showed: market entrances with steep stairs and no ramps, aisles too narrow for wheelchair navigation, produce displayed on high shelves beyond reach from a seated position, vendors who speak to companions instead of directly to customers with disabilities.

"Every trip to buy vegetables requires planning like a military operation," Yunita wrote. "Which markets can I enter? Which vendors won't patronize me? Do I need to bring someone to reach items on high shelves?"

The FOODS training validated Yunita's experiences as food justice issues, not just personal inconveniences. The session on gender and intersectionality resonated particularly deeply, revealing how marginalization compounds: being a woman with a disability in a low-income household creates triple vulnerability in food access.

Yunita's post-training advocacy focuses on accessible food retail. She's documenting inaccessible markets with photos and written descriptions, building an evidence base for advocacy campaigns. Her Foods Buku photos have been presented to Bandung's Public Works Department as part of the push for universal design in market renovations.

Khirania Azzhura Sentosa: Youth Organizing for Food Change

Khirania Azzhura Sentosa came to FOODS as a youth organizer curious about applying community organizing strategies to food issues. Her Foods Buku documented not ingredients or markets but organizing infrastructure: meetings, strategy sessions, relationship-building conversations.

"Food organizing is about relationships," Khirania wrote. "You start with conversations—what are your struggles with food access? What would make it better?—and build from there."

Her photos showed the social fabric of food organizing: small groups discussing campaign strategies, neighbors exchanging seedlings and gardening tips, youth planning a food cooperative buying structure.

Khirania's key insight from FOODS: "We were taught food systems are complex, and they are. But that doesn't mean ordinary people can't change them. Every person has knowledge and power. Organizing is about aggregating that distributed power into collective force."

Post-training, Khirania has been recruiting other young organizers to work on food issues, demonstrating the multiplier effect of transformative education.

Rahma Tasya: Connecting Food and Climate

Rahma Tasya entered the training knowing food and climate were connected but unclear on mechanisms. Her Foods Buku essay traced her learning journey from vague awareness to systems understanding.

"I knew climate change was bad and food security was important, but I didn't know how they linked," Rahma wrote. The training showed her multiple pathways: agricultural emissions contributing to climate change, climate impacts reducing crop yields, extreme weather disrupting supply chains, temperature increases altering what crops can grow where.

Rahma's photos documented climate impacts on Bandung's food systems: vendors displaying wilted vegetables damaged by unseasonable rains, farmers discussing drought-resistant crop varieties, agricultural extension workers teaching climate-smart practices.

"Now when I eat, I think about emissions," Rahma reflected. "Where did this food travel from? Was it grown in a way that sequesters carbon or releases it? These questions didn't exist for me before FOODS."

She's now volunteering with a climate justice organization, bringing food systems analysis to their campaigns and food sovereignty framing to climate organizing.

Imanuael Ezra Prawira: Food Entrepreneurship with Justice

Imanuael Ezra Prawira came to FOODS with entrepreneurial interests. He'd been considering food businesses—a café, catering service, or food delivery platform—but hadn't thought about justice dimensions.

The social business model canvas workshop reshaped his framework. "I realized food businesses can either reinforce inequalities or challenge them," Imanuael reflected. "Who do you source from? Who can afford your products? Who benefits from the profits?"

His Foods Buku documented existing food enterprises in Bandung operating on food sovereignty principles: a cooperative café sourcing from smallholder farmers and paying fair prices, a catering service training and employing economically vulnerable women, a food delivery platform prioritizing independent vendors over corporate restaurants.

Imanuael left the training committed to building food enterprises that embody justice values. He's currently developing a business plan for a food cooperative that would aggregate small-scale producers, negotiate better prices, and sell affordable products to low-income consumers—creating value for both ends of the supply chain.

Marfuah and Heny Badriah: Women's Food Sovereignty

Marfuah and Heny Badriah, both from economically vulnerable backgrounds, brought intimate knowledge of household food security struggles to the training. Their Foods Buku photos documented the invisible labor of feeding families on tight budgets: comparing prices across markets, negotiating with vendors, preparing multiple meals from limited ingredients, stretching food to feed unexpected guests.

"Women handle food provisioning, but we don't control food systems," Marfuah observed. "We deal with the consequences of policies made by others—price inflation, market closures, subsidy cuts."

The rights-based advocacy module empowered both women to reframe their roles from passive coping to active claiming. "We're not just trying to survive the system," Heny said. "We're organizing to change it."

Both women have joined the Food Sovereignty Campaign, bringing firsthand knowledge of household food challenges to advocacy strategies. Their participation in policy hearings brings lived experience into spaces that often privilege technical expertise over embodied knowledge.

Common Themes: From Individual to Collective

Across these nine Food Books, common patterns emerge. Participants moved from:

• Fragmented awareness to systems thinking: Connecting food waste to climate, markets to policy, personal choices to structural forces
• Passive consumption to active agency: Seeing themselves as shapers of food systems, not just recipients
• Individual struggles to collective power: Recognizing shared challenges and organizing together
• Skills to action: Converting training content into concrete projects in their communities

The Foods Buku assignment itself was pedagogically significant. By asking participants to document and reflect, the training validated their experiences as knowledge. It positioned them as experts of their own realities, not just students absorbing information.

The Power of Story

These nine stories matter because food systems theory without human faces risks abstraction. Statistics about food insecurity or agricultural productivity don't capture the texture of daily life—the negotiations, adaptations, and quiet resistance that constitute food sovereignty from below.

Anindita's maggot farming initiatives, Windi's apartment building garden organizing, Azmi's traditional market documentation, Yunita's accessibility advocacy, Khirania's youth organizing, Rahma's climate-food connections, Imanuael's justice-centered entrepreneurship, and Marfuah and Heny's household-to-policy bridge—these are the building blocks of transformation.

Large-scale food system change happens through accumulation of small shifts: one person starting a garden, one community forming a cooperative, one advocate winning a policy concession. The FOODS training equipped nine people (and forty-one others) with the understanding, skills, and networks to make those shifts.

Their voices, documented in the Foods Buku collection, testify to education's transformative potential when it centers learners' experiences, validates their knowledge, and supports them to act.

The Foods Buku (Food Book) participant reflections were submitted as part of the Food System Diplomacy Training designed and delivered by CRPG for the PESPA Consortium (led by Article33, funded by Yayasan Humanis dan Inovasi Sosial) in February 2025. Participant names are shared with permission.