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Paper short abstract:

I will analyze examples of food commoning in fiction (a fantasy sci-fi novel and movie) and practice (an activist initiatives in Amsterdam) to show how food as a commons operates as a material-semiotic healer to the ills that have led to environmental degradation.

Paper long abstract:

Food’s capacity to keep bodies healthy is not only about feeding nutrients into individual metabolic cycles, it also involves communities of human and more-than-human eaters and the meanings derived from specific ways of eating together. As such, material-semiotic ways of eating together create different communities ( Haraway, 2007). In this paper, I will turn to examples of food commoning in fiction and practice to show how food as a commons operates as a material-semiotic healer to the ills that have led to environmental degradation.

In order to draw out the imagined healing power of food commons, I will turn to ecotopian fiction of the 1990s (Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing and Serreau’s The Beautiful Green) and show how spiritually-inclined, female-governed food commons are the means to healing sick bodies and social conflict. Yet, while relegated to the genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy, the food commons are materially grounded in historical examples of women who sought to heal their communities through land commoning (Federici, 2019). By analysing recent environmental activist initiatives in Amsterdam, I will show that the idea of food commons yields its healing power, precisely because it is a material-semiotic phenomenon, able to transcend the divides between fiction and practice, and capable of telling stories of alternative pasts, presents and futures. At a time when the urgency for system change is undeniable, yet the collective desire to change structures and habits marginal, food as a material-semiotic healer may serve as a new impulse for the transitions ahead.