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.