Paper short abstract:

Millets have become globally iconic of reparative and restorative approaches to food production and consumption. In Senegal, cooks and cultivators engage with millet to critique modern foodways, while acknowledging the complexities of "returning" to historical diets.

Paper long abstract:

Millets are increasingly imagined as a panacea for ecological, economic and public health challenges. Healing bodies, restoring landscapes, creating climate-safe agricultural solutions, and challenging the dominance of rice, wheat and maize: millets promise healthy and sustainable futures. This paper explores why millets have become globally iconic of efforts of reparative and restorative approaches to food production and consumption. Drawing on long term ethnographic research in Senegal, the paper traces the production, marketing, processing and preparation of millets across laboratories, households and marketplaces. I argue that daily encounters with millets stimulate critiques of modern foodways and consumption practices and enable encounters with an “traditional” past of healthy and appropriate eating. Reanimating the past, however, is not straightforward, and scientists, cooks and cultivators also experience ambivalence as they promote millets as the solution to interlocking economic, ecological and nutritional crises.

Paper short abstract:

Based on an ethnographic study in Chile, my paper will focus on the resistant and creative practices of a group of rural and indigenous Mapuche women. Organised in a network to defend food sovereignty, the garden is the starting point of their politicization

Paper long abstract:

I will first explain how the expansion of forest plantations in the region (Araucania) under study, has affected local ecosystems, but also the relationships (material and symbolic) that Mapuche communities have with their territories, in a continuum of colonial violence. I will show how these changes have had a particular impact on local food production and women experiences.

We will see then, how the Mapuche huerta (food garden), historically occupied by women, is a space of transmission in situ, emotional and highly aesthetic, in opposition to the monocultures carried by agricultural development policies. The huerta is the intimate space of Mapuche women, a place of reciprocal care of the territory-body . It also has an emancipatory potential, allowing, in certain cases, a relative economic and food autonomy. Above all, it provides women with their own place to make decisions.

I will finally present the forms of resistance that the "Trawun pu Zomo" network put in place to defend their territory and their link(s) to it. The trafkintü, a barter ceremony, places solidarity and kume mogen (Buen Vivir) at the heart of their exchanges. The trafkintü is also a space of care, mutual learning and politicization of their identity, through the revaluation of knowledge/practices related to food, and the reactivation of collective memories. The Mapuche huerta thus becomes political, moving from the intimate to an object of struggle and a strategy of unity and valorization of women, challenging the industrial agriculture system.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores narratives of "forgotten foods" in farming diversification in Jamaica. How discussions on climate resilience and food security can include the stories of the Taino and Maroon peoples whose ethnobotanical knowledge and perseverance enabled plant varieties' survival and maintenance.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we describe and interrogate the engagement strategies used for a recent ESRC-funded project, 'Teaching Climate Justice through Ancestral Plant Heritage in Jamaica' (June 2022 - Feb 2023). Activities for this project were organised through the lens of official narratives of 'forgotten foods', which were a starting point for encouraging participants to revalue and potentially redeploy (Coulthard 2014) Jamaican Taíno and Maroon foodways for climate just adaptation. The participants (N = 42) were mostly educators from Jamaica's National School Gardening Program, a state-sponsored initiative that has recently utilised discourses of forgotten foods from the Food and Agriculture Organisation to encourage 4-H Youth Clubs to plant neglected crop varieties such as corn, cassava, and purslane in school and community gardens. Yet, as we highlighted in the workshop, terms such as forgotten foods beg the question of the forgotten people whose knowledge and perseverance have enabled the maintenance and survival of neglected plant varieties in Jamaica since the era of slavery. Through activities such as Indigenous storytelling, Indigenous-led cooking and eating, 'world café' methodology (see: https://theworldcafe.com/key-concepts-resources/world-cafe-method/), and hands-on planting in the garden, the workshops encouraged participants to develop a place-based awareness of the importance of Jamaican Taíno and Maroon foodways for climate just futures. At the end of the paper, we provide an overview of 'lessons learned' that foregrounds the perspectives of our Indigenous partners and co-authors, the Jamaican Hummingbird Taíno and Maroon People, whose journey towards 'self-recognition' (ibid.) in Jamaica has only just begun.

Paper short abstract:

In the American Midwest, an emerging niche economy of cricket farming and consumption relies on assertions that insect consumption is a revival of a Biblical practice, while simultaneously gaining support through its promise to revive “the family farm,” a social formation feared to be going extinct.

Paper long abstract:

Around the world, there are longstanding traditions of insect consumption. People who have migrated to the United States have carried these traditions with them. But in the U.S. generally, insects are still more likely designated “pests” than “food.” Though crickets have been raised in this country as fishing bait since the 1940s, it is only in the past ten years that people have begun to farm them for human consumption. Today, crickets are being raised and promoted as an “alternative protein.” They are mentioned in the same hopeful breath as plant-based and cell-cultured meat, by people eager to create more sustainable food systems in the face of climate crisis. Based on ethnographic research working at a cricket farm in central Iowa, this paper examines the current emergence of a “third world” insect-based food system in the “heartland” of American industrial agriculture. It argues that the emergence of this niche economy relies on assertions that contemporary insect consumption is a revival of an ancient Western practice, while simultaneously gaining support through its promise to revive social formations – like “the family farm” – feared to be going extinct. The paper shows how peoples’ attempts to secure the future of food reveal their present anxieties, not only about ecological crisis, but about shifting demographics and modes of labor; changing relationships between north and south, urban and rural, and humans and animals; and the death of a figure at the core of American national mythology: the hardworking, resilient farmer.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I will analyze how Diné farmers' identities are complex, and that loving "your" territory doesn't make you an ecological activist. The food sovereignty movement on the Navajo Nation propose what can be analyzed as an ecosocialist project with roots in Diné precolonial values.

Paper long abstract:

The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted in 2007 doesn't propose a definition of what "Indigenous" means. It leaves that decision to Indigenous nations and individuals, with the complexity of what "Diné" or "Inuit" or "Guarani", to name only a few, are.

Since 2016, I’ve been working with Diné farmers from the Navajo Nation, who are also environmental activists. In this talk, I will present the case of two Diné farmers who, after having spent their adult life outside of the reservation, came back and decided to be farmers, eventually becoming educators and food activists. One is a queer, self-described "old Diné hippie"; the other is from Black and Diné descent, father of six children, from a heterosexual monogamous relationship. Both are politicized but not from any political party, both "hating politics and politicians".

In this paper, I will highlight the complexity of the links between Diné identities and their delimited territory, Diné Bikeyah, family ties, and ecological behaviors. Indeed, loving "your" land and "your" territory doesn't make you ecologically responsible. Ecofascism has proven to us that they are two different things. How and what then, makes Diné food sovereignty an ecosocialist project ? Why are those two concepts necessary to explain food sovereignty on the Navajo Nation? Even more, how do they show us that Diné identities are complex and always adapting ? These are the questions I want to explore, questioning blood quantum as the only legal way to prove one's Diné identity.

Paper short abstract:

A community staggered when White supremacists joined farmers market. Better design can make a more just future for local food.

Paper long abstract:

During 50 years of their revival in the United States, farmers' markets have been embraced as recognizable, distributed alternatives to the dominant industrial food system, ones that "cultivate" a sense of community and accountability thought to be dormant (Robinson & Hartenfeld 2007). Farmers' markets have leveraged time-tested practices to respond robustly to crises as novel as 9/11 terrorist attacks, floods, and COVID pandemic food shortages. Simultaneously, they can privilege economic, social, and geographic populations, effectively undoing more lofty ideals. This paper relies on longitudinal ethnographic research to analyze the crisis precipitated in one community in the US Midwest when both these strengths and shortfalls combusted in the face of political and demographic challenge. The decades-long work of advocates, producers, and consumers to create a local food system was leveraged by self-identified "traditionalist" White supremacists who were, in turn, resisted by social justice activists. The fallout, several years on, has been a shattering of the local food community, the shuttering of some farms, and a reimagining of foods' relation to public/private entities. I use Nobelist Elinor Ostrom's institutional design principles for collective action to understand this local crisis and identify institutional characteristics that enable or inhibit individuals from directing and changing institutions. While I test Ostrom's theory for the emerging field of food commons, the implications may aid other anthropologists working on local food movements and smallholder farm networks as well as those interested in opaque private institutions and fragile public ones that may be subject to re-enclosure.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my empirical material from three food innovation field sites in Berlin, I will interrogate the particular relationalities that are reproduced, rearranged or rejected as different histories, traditions and continuities become employed to negotiate possible future livabilities.

Paper long abstract:

My current research follows situated food innovation in three field sites across Berlin – a sustainable restaurant, a cooking performance collective, and a fermentation lab. Within their respective niches, they aim at transforming urban food and eating practices as they mobilize particular foodstuffs, techniques, skills, epistemologies, and actors. In continuous exposure to ongoing and multiplying crises, food and eating practices here emerge as a meaningful site for intervention and transformation – in quite different ways.

Drawing on my empirical material, I will discuss the different imagined pasts, histories and (dis)continuities that are evoked in each site to carve out possible food and eating livabilities. In these ongoing negotiations, various kinds of futures become palpable. Contrasting the different histories (re)created in the field sites, I will thus critically interrogate how in each food innovation niche, more-than-human eating relationalities are reproduced, rearranged, or rejected: How do the sustainable restaurant’s explorative practices of upcycling, composting, and collaborating with local supply chains challenge prevalent structures and hierarchies that exclude entire communities from (sustainable) food consumption? How do the cooking performance collective’s disruptive mobilizations of histories of colonization and migration oppose increasing individualization and fragmentation in urban landscapes? How are fermentation techniques and traditions made accessible through modern (knowledge) infrastructures, and how do they reproduce a mainly cosmopolitan mobile class identity?

Bringing together my insights, I hope to contribute to the debate about food and farming revivalist practices that emerge with increasingly overlapping crises, and about possible future livabilities.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the evolution of a rural area in Southern Transylvania (Romania) which has become the site for a revival of the ethnic Saxon heritage in food and land management practices, with a focus on how eco-anxieties play into the revivalist processes.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores the evolution of the Transylvanian food-scape, focusing on a rural area in Southern Transylvania (Romania) which has become the site for a revival of the ethnic Saxon heritage in food and land management practices.

A heavily depopulated back-country in the ‘90s and early ‘00, due to the massive exodus of the local German (Saxon) population, rural Southern Transylvania has become a major attraction for international tourists in search of bucolic, ‘slow’ (yet upscale) touristic experiences, as well as a destination for local and international neo-rurals mobilised by ideologies of de-growth, downshifting and voluntary simplicity. The range of material and immaterial heritage that represent the focus of revival is broad, from produce and products (types of crops, animals, foraging resources and culinary recipes) to traditional ecological knowledge (local types of small-scale farming, crop rotation, husbandry) and its impact on local ecology and the shaping and management of cultural landscapes (wooded pastures, mosaic landscapes, biodiversity conservation).

I investigate how a complex network of entrepreneurs and NGOs shapes Saxon-ostalgia by producing discourse and practices rooted in an idealised ethnicised medieval past. Saxonness becomes a resource for authentication and added-value in a touristic, farming and conservationist context. Throughout the paper I explore the means and effects of the imaginative colonisation of the area, with a focus on how eco-anxieties play into the revivalist processes.