Contribution short abstract:

Using scholarship on East European informal food practices, this paper uncovers the marginalization of voices from epistemic peripheries within Europe along the East-West axis. It argues that the East should be read as a place producing novel knowledge on alternative food sustainabilities.

Contribution long abstract:

Using scholarship on East European informal food practices as a case study, this paper proposes that the processes of the exclusion and marginalization of academic voices from epistemic peripheries by the epistemic centre are not necessarily confined to interactions between the Global North and South but can also be uncovered much ‘closer to home’ - within Europe and along the East-West axis. At the same time, the centrality of the food system in damaging planetary ecosystems demands diversification of thinking about the concept of sustainability including knowledge from spaces outside the epistemic core. Deploying J. K. Gibson-Graham’s (2008) concept of reading for difference the paper reframes East European informal food practices (growing, sharing, foraging) as everyday sustainability and highlights this scholarship’s contribution to the efforts to reimagine a more inclusive and sustainable global food system. Epistemologically, this agenda is inspired by the calls to ‘decentre the West’ and ‘put the European East back on the map of knowledge production’ (Müller 2018). To support this goal empirically, the paper opens with a string of headline figures demonstrating the extent, stability and - largely unintended but actual - sustainability of East European everyday food practices. The paper then considers the reasons for the marginalization of this knowledge in international debates before making a case for the need to reverse the trend proposing that the European East should be read as a place producing novel and internationally relevant knowledge on alternative food sustainabilities.