This instrumental mixed methods case study examines how a critical food literacy curriculum, grounded in transformative learning theory and critical pedagogy, can support undergraduate students in engaging food systems issues through a social justice lens. 

The case study centers on FS 101: Introduction to Social Issues in the Food System, a course developed and taught by the researcher between 2022 and 2025 at a public land-grant university. Data sources include course artifacts in the form of assignments, reflections, and reflexive memos; course evaluations; and semi-structured interviews with former students. Drawing on transformative learning theory as well as critical and experiential pedagogies, the study uses thematic analysis to examine how experiential, dialogic, and place-based pedagogical design can encourage perspective shifts, deepen systems awareness, and foster reflexive engagement with themes of power, inequality, and agency. In addition to cognitive transformation processes, the study foregrounds how attending to the affective dimensions of learning through critical hope can support students as they navigate their responses to structural injustice. 

Findings from this case study provide an analysis of how transformative pedagogy helps students put theory into practice in food systems courses. Students describe expanded systems thinking, heightened awareness of structural inequities, and greater recognition of their own positionality within food systems. Importantly, many also articulate emerging forms of critical hope: a capacity to hold complexity and injustice alongside a sense of agency, responsibility, and possibility for collective change. By drawing analytic generalizations from this case, the study contributes to a pedagogical and theoretical framework for critical food literacy that integrates experiential design, transformative learning processes, and hope as a civic and affective dimension of social justice education.