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- Convenors:
-
Meltem Turkoz
(Boğaziçi University)
António Medeiros (ISCTE University Institute of Lisbon, CEI-IUL)
- Stream:
- Food
- Location:
- A220
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the moral, aesthetic and philosophical axises around which food utopias are invoked and performed. Alan Warde's insight that "the structural anxieties about our age are made manifest in discourses about food" invites us to explore the dystopian underbellies of food utopias.
Long Abstract:
This panel aims to bring together papers that explore the moral, aesthetic and philosophical axises around which food utopias are invoked, practiced and performed. Alan Warde's insight that "the structural anxieties about our age are made manifest in discourses about food" invites us to explore the dystopian underbellies of food utopias. Whether they appeal to authenticity, peace, safety, equality, or plenty, food utopias inherently imply their physical, moral or aesthetic dystopian inverse: of industrial process, adulteration or contamination, distasteful palates, and of unshared bounty. In a cross-cultural parable about the difference between paradise and hell, people sit around a great pot of delicious food, holding spoons too long and large to feed themselves, only to be able to eat when they feed each other. Food-related responses to the industrial food complex, neoliberal globalization and militarization invoke the reciprocity and interconnectedness implied in this parable. The imaginary of un-alienated labor informs the marketing of otherwise industrially prepared foods. In the discourse of purity in extra virgin olive, of authenticity in heirloom fruits and vegetables, food imaginaries in film or literature, the spectacle of hospitality in tourism, or the practice of gift economies in social movements, actors highlight various stages of production, consumption and preparation. We hope to explore the following questions, among others: How are food utopias acquired or cultivated and manifested in daily life? What aspects of food production, exchange, or consumption do these practices and performances reify and make visible—and across which temporal, geographic and spatial boundaries?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Stephanie Ketterer Hobbis (Wageningen University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines a disconnect between local and foreign food worlds, the nature of imported food utopias, their rejection of local counterparts and a subsequent creation of, and participation in, equally imported food dystopias in contemporary Solomon Islands.
Paper long abstract:
Over 80 percent of Solomon Islanders are subsistence farmers. The majority of foodstuffs produced are organic and free-range, fertilizers and animal feed are simply unavailable or too expensive. They are also fresh and local. Any produce, given the humidity and lack of access to refrigeration, is harvested and eaten or sold on the same, and at least within the first two days. Local cuisines are essentially authentic, deeply ingrained in local customs and the particularities of any given place, and they are slow. Many are prepared in a motu, a type of stone oven that cooks potatoes, fish, meats and vegetables over hours and often over night. Nonetheless, Solomon Islands' foodstuffs and foodways are shun by foreign visitors, temporary and even permanent immigrants. Expats and tourists alike aspire and create a parallel utopian food universe with organic apples from New Zealand, gluten-free pastries and salad bars drawing from equally imported ingredients. Greens are everywhere; yet, local cabbage is rarely found on any (foreign) plate. Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in the urban (and expat-filled) Honiara and the rural Lau Lagoon (Malaita), the goal of this paper is to unravel (1) this seeming disconnect: two food worlds wherein one fits the utopian criteria of the other without ever being able to be satisfying enough; and (2) its consequences: imported food utopias that, in a context of significant economic disparity and capacity, appear to create the very dystopia they detest, industrial food production linked to global commodity chains.
Gerda Jonasz (Central European University)
Paper short abstract:
The strong dialectical presence and surprising socio-economic viability of the alternative agro-entrepreneurial initiatives that emerged over the last decade on the periurban fields of Valencia, Spain reshaped the representation of these fields and the future metropolitan imaginaries of the area.
Paper long abstract:
My study investigated how a few dozen small-scale agro-entrepreneurial initiatives managed to revive the periurban fields of the Metropolitan Area of Valencia through their. This study aimed to understand how the alternative economic space created by these initiatives reshaped the contemporary representation of the fields they set out to cultivate. This study fits into the school of critical urban theory, which "emphasizes the politically and ideologically mediated, socially contested … character of urban space - that is, its continual (re)construction as a site, medium and outcome of historically specific relations of social power" (Brenner 2009: 198). A representational approach to landscape understands that it is a venue where systems of cultural, political and economic power can manifest through both material and dialectical construction (Rose, 2002; Wylie, 2007). Through the lenses of critical urban theory, this research meant to explore how the selected agro-entrepreneurial initiatives mobilized the available sympathizing social networks for their support and to what extent they wished and managed to engage their clientele in the redefinition of the Huerta's contemporary representation. It focused on how the emergence of the alternative agro-entrepreneurial initiatives could be perceived as a critique towards predominant power relations, inequality and injustice that might characterize the fields they operate within. A qualitative, exploratory case study research was conducted under a constructivist grounded theory methodology.
Alexander Schwinghammer (Bauhaus University Weimar)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic research on people’s kitchens in German cities, this paper explores the particular performative construction of sociality, identity claims and the agendas underlying the provision of food connected to the political project of the people's kitchen.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is an ethnographic inquiry into public provisions of food operating under the labels of Volxküche, Küfa (kitchen for all), or VoKü in Germany.
The phenomenon known as people's kitchens may be described as places, where are person may get a meal - often vegetarian or vegan - for an affordable price or just a small donation. Similarly to its predecessor, the soup kitchen, it is the intention that everybody should be able to purchase a warm meal and consume it in the company fellow eaters. Most likely a child of the 1980s, the people's kitchen started as secular and often distinctly political projects. Consquently, their habitat seems to be left wing and alternative spheres as they are usually based in collective and/or self-managed engagements (information stores or autonomous centres). While offering hunger relief is an important aspect of a people's kitchen, the gathering and the construction of community is often perceived as standing in the centre of it. Paying heed to its initial beginnings a people's kitchen may create the utopian place of sociality enabling political discourse and the collective experience of having a shared meal. As the idea spread to more mundane places, raises the question how images, concepts and actual practices connected to people's kitchens did change.
Drawing on ethnographic data from people's kitchens in German cities, this paper explores the performative construction of sociality, identity claims and the agendas underlying the provision of food connected to the political project of the people's kitchen.
Meltem Turkoz (Boğaziçi University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on life-story interviews with members of selected food activist groups in Istanbul, exploring the dynamics between utopias of food-sharing and production and their mediation in daily practice.
Paper long abstract:
Food-based activism in Istanbul has diversified, adapting global initiatives to address a range of local social and economic justice issues. This paper draws on life-story interviews with members of selected food activist groups and explores the dynamics between utopias of food-sharing and production, and the ways these are mediated in daily practice. Urban groups in Istanbul such as Migrant Kitchen and Komşu Cafe Collective, or Food not Bombs, perform horizontality over stratification, gift practices over market exchange, frugality over waste, and raise awareness of migrant and refugee groups. Another cateogry of food activism involves what I will call "meal events," such as the Yeryüzü Sofraları (Earth Tables), Street-long Iftar meals at Ramadan, launched by the Anticapitalist Muslims to critique what they perceive are the wasteful meal events organized by those with wealth and power. Each group invokes and makes visible particular food practices, labor processes and social relationships. In their emphasis on the "community dimensions" and labor of food production, group members invoke traditional pasts, social justice, and moral economies, while critiquing conspicuous consumption, mystified food systems and unjust political systems.