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Paper short abstract:

Investigating organic business failiures forces us to reconceptualize the term conventionalization to include actors and processes beyond the market that limit organic farmers' autonomies of practice and push them toward conventionalization, as well as responses that may help reinvent food futures.

Paper long abstract:

Conventionalization of organic agriculture results in small organic businesses beginning to resemble conventional ones they once sought to counter, and is largely a function of the success of organic food as a growing market sector. To understand the many ways organic ideals may be abandoned in favor of conventional practices, however, it is also instructive to look at the causes and consequences of organic market failures, particularly in regional peripheries where markets may not work as prescribed.

The BAOP coffee cooperative in Costa Rica and the Pienzeme milk cooperative in Latvia both sought to take control of the entire supply chain and sell value-added organic products locally before export, creating sovereign organic spaces in the face of uncertainties brought about by systems of free trade, as a type of "exception to neoliberalism" (Ong 2006). In both cases, funding mechanisms purportedly aimed at developing organic cooperatives simultaneously facilitated and limited development, creating a glass ceiling. These tensions combined to instigate competition between cooperatives and their own farmers, rather than larger agro-businesses, creating a neoliberal patchwork of what Aihwa Ong (2006) calls "graduated" or "variegated sovereignties" both within the nation-state and at the transnational level.

Investigating failures of organic businesses forces us to reconceptualize the term conventionalization to include a wider spectrum of actors and processes beyond the market that limit organic farmers' autonomies of practice and push them toward conventionalization, as well as the responses to such failures that may help to reinvent food futures beyond conventionalization.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the uncertainties out of which come a Protected Geographic Indication (PGI) for extra virgin olive oil from Sicily, Italy, and the certainties about food production, value, and meaning that the PGI imagines both locally and on the global market.

Paper long abstract:

In 2016, the EU approved an application from Italy for a PGI designation for extra-virgin olive oil from Sicily, Italy's largest and southernmost region. Geographic indications (GIs) herald the assumedly unique food culture of a particular territorially-defined place, staking the legal claim that only certain people in those places hold the cultural and environmental knowledge necessary to produce that food. In a context rife with uncertainty over the viability of agricultural landscapes given economic pressure, ecological stresses caused by climate change, and migratory flows of people out of the countryside, GIs seek to fix in time and in space what makes certain food products meaningful, and in so doing to push these food products onto a global market—but whether the local meanings of GI foods translate abroad depends on a host of factors, and if this successful translation can bring economic wellbeing and agricultural sustainability at home remains to be seen. By legally defining and protecting a very specific version of a local food product, GIs assert a particular narrative of the past and imagine a future wherein culinary particularism and the free market have saved all of the food traditions worth saving. This paper interrogates the uncertainties of the context out of which the PGI for Sicilian olive oil was born, and whose pasts and futures are deemed worth saving via the PGI's enactment.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper demonstrates how consumer preferences and valuation of homemade products such as jars of pickles, jams and yogurt are inseparable from distrust in the post-socialist state and food manufacturers, and discourses of European integrity, market morality and economic development.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I am trying to elucidate how the implementation of EU food safety regulations have influenced state policies and consumers' perceptions of homemade food, and how these are reflected in practices and discourses surrounding homemade food.

As homemade jars of yogurt, jams and pickled vegetables are becoming increasingly harder to find, "homemade" has enhanced its value. However, local tastes and food traditions are threatened by controversial state policies, supra-national regulatory regimes and social transformations that lead to detachment from self-provisioning activities. The growing polarization between villagers and urban-based policy makers provokes distrust and indignation in many people, evident in their scornful comments about "the happy hens and cows of Europe". Now dairy products must be produced with milk from certified farms, while shortages are to be compensated by imported skim milk powder.

Through an empirical focus on yogurt, I ask how is inequality experienced in post-socialist Bulgaria; what defines the "goodness" of homemade food, and what does it suggest about people's attitudes towards the national state, the EU and the market? I argue that the significance of homemade food in present-day Bulgaria is closely related to increasing awareness of social and geopolitical inequalities, distrust in state and supranational authorities, and discourses of food quality, safety, and economic development.

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Paper short abstract:

Ethnographic film-based research on the Iberian pig in Extremadura has been inspired by art and thoughts on human/animal relationships. But human influences on the state of the world in general may radically change these perceptions, and the future of Pata Negra.

Paper long abstract:

As part of an ethnographic film-based study of the Iberian pig's cultural significance, linked to research within the realm of the anthropology of food, doing fieldwork mainly in and around the village of Fuente de Cantos in Extremadura (Spain), we realised this was the birthplace of the Spanish painter, Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664). His famous painting of a lamb, Agnus Dei, gave us a striking image of how to represent animals, and initially became a source of inspiration for some of our shooting. Pardoning the pun it opened several cans of worms regarding how animals in general are represented, and an almost paradoxical discourse surrounding the Iberian pig. On the one hand the pig is almost reified as the source of perhaps the most exquisite ham in the world, Pata Negra, on the other hand we soon came to learn that the status of the pig otherwise, as in many other cultures, was way down the ladder of greatness and glory, the top rung of which, in this part of the world, is undoubtedly taken by the horse. This presentation will argue why this is the case, using examples from the current research project and comparing them with cases from other parts of the world. How are image-based representations closely linked to specific cultural classifications of animals? And how will these perceptions and relationships be affected by e.g. climate change and other human influences on the world and environment.