Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the rejection of sugar by coffee consumers in São Paulo, asking what this refusal means in light of Brazil’s nutrition transition, and how it might trouble the categories of absence/abundance as used in nutrition research and public health discourse.

Paper long abstract:

Coffee and sugar have been intimately linked in the political-economic history of Brazil and remain important today, with caloric coffee drinks one of the largest sources of beverage-based sugars in the Brazilian diet. This paper explores the rejection of sugar by coffee consumers in São Paulo as central to the process of becoming a high-end specialty coffee connoisseur. By exploring individual ‘conversion’ narratives together with public health and media discourse around sugar, I ask: who is in a position to refuse sugar at this time and why might they do so? What does this refusal to take sugar with coffee mean in light of Brazil’s recent social changes and nutrition transition? I unpack the absence/abundance binary prevalent in discussions about the double burden of malnutrition by treating these categories not as opposites, but as mutually constituting conditions. Finally, I offer reflections on the utility of the anthropology of food and nutrition for the design and implementation of practical and culturally-sensitive public health programmes.

Paper short abstract:

Carnism is a term used by vegan activists I encountered during fieldwork in Bristol, UK in 2017. It denotes the belief system that has mythologised the consumption of meat as normal, natural and necessary. This paper examines anthropology's role in privileging meat and how this needs questioning.

Paper long abstract:

In my work with vegan activists in Bristol UK, I came across the term carnism, coined by psychologist and vegan activist Melanie Joy. This denotes “the belief system that conditions us to eat certain animals” (Joy 2011: 30). She is working to bring the cultural system of carnism into the light, name it, so it can be challenged. She explains why using the term ‘meat-eater’ is not enough. She posits that people know what a vegan or vegetarian is and that it is assumed to represent an ethical orientation. ‘Meat-eater’, on the other hand, Joy says, “isolates the practice of consuming meat as though it were divorced from a person’s beliefs and values. But is eating meat truly a behaviour that exists independent of a belief system?” (Ibid: 29). Carnism, for Joy, is an invisible, violent ideology that has mythologised the consumption of meat as normal, natural and necessary (Ibid: 97).

In this paper I want to consider what she says as a possible critique of anthropology. Are anthropologists some of these myth makers? And if so, in what capacity? I examine different anthropological ethnographies to show the privileging of meat, not only in diverse cultural contexts but also in anthropological analyses of food systems (Fiddes 1991). Instead of looking only at how we eat meat, as is usually the case in anthropology, through assessment of taboos around certain meat and so on, just as we question why some people are vegetarian, so we must question why we eat meat.

Paper short abstract:

Food is at the heart of all cultural expressions. Cooking invites a tasting of identities as a unique form of knowledge production. However, through the processes of social change, food heritage is ‘fragile’ wealth. By adopting a sensory approach, food cultures can be preserved in ‘silo’ archives

Paper long abstract:

Food is a sensory manifestation of cultural heritage through flavours, colours, textures, ways of preparing and place. It expresses history, memory, (un)doing, and resilience. Foodways can tell a sensory story at the heart of all cultural expressions in its creative composition. More so, the act of cooking becomes a performance inviting a tasting expressing of these intrinsic identities as a unique form of knowledge production. However, processes of social change, and in particular colonisation, have disrupted the transmission and practice of intangible cultural heritage. As such, food heritage is ‘fragile’ wealth in its diversity, as it is ‘nonrenewable’ once lost. By adopting an explorative and sensory approach that is socially embedded it is possible to document identity as expressed through food. Through this, the recipes, memories and lived experiences of the performer can be preserved. The recipes and meals, as markers of identity and heritage, will become a treasured and valuable factor for empowering local and marginal communities and thereby enable vulnerable groups to participate fully in social and cultural life. By doing so, a recovery of this food knowledge may present itself again as a new form of imagery and taste (each attempt to recall the recipe may garner new experiences, creativity and flavours) as creating silo archives may nourish, save and document the memory, forms and practices of food.

Paper short abstract:

Food preservation techniques combat urban food wastage, enhance food security, and sustain cultural practices. We propose the integration of these methods into urban food pathways, as it advocates for sustainable food systems, that create products and generate income.

Paper long abstract:

Natural and traditional food preservation techniques play a crucial role in addressing urban food wastage and promoting food security by extending the shelf life of perishable items and effectively managing seasonal surpluses. Emphasising localised, low-cost solutions that engage communities, these techniques contribute to sustainability and cultural preservation. This paper examines the impact of these methods through a case study of The People's Pantry (TPP), a non-profit addressing food insecurity in Johannesburg’s inner city. The Surplus Food Processing Lab, part of TPP's initiatives, redirects surplus food to local community kitchens using preservation methods like pickling, fermentation, canning, and dehydration. Workshops, focus groups, and interviews explore key aspects such as energy efficiency, community participation, transference of knowledge, and income generation. Dehydration emerges as a crucial method, redirecting food and enhancing food security for community kitchens. The study identifies the potential of these preservation techniques in creating desirable products and generating income for TPP and the community, whilst limiting food waste. Proposing integration into urban food pathways and distribution systems, the paper advocates for reduced food waste and improve overall food security. This aligns with local practices, utilises natural processes, and contributes to sustainable urban food systems. In conclusion, the case study exemplifies the impact of natural and traditional preservation techniques, supporting a vision for a more just and sustainable food system in urban areas.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my research in three field sites of urban food innovation, I propose eating as more-than-human practice and tracing the complex socioecological relations “our” eating bodies are caught up in as productive mode of (re)doing food anthropology in the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

With my approach situated at the intersection of food anthropology, feminist STS and interdisciplinary discourse on sustainable (food) transformations, I want to contribute to the questions raised by this panel by reflecting on my empirical insights from three sites of urban food innovation by tracing how different actors engage in diverse modes of (un)doing (un)sustainable eating relations.

Instead of assuming food as a pre-existing and stable category in a functionalist way of thinking, my research departs from an understanding of eating as socially situated practice that decenters the human eating body and follows the multispecies entanglements of eating.

In times of capitalist overexploitation and destruction we are witnessing in the Anthropocene, eating emerges as important site for negotiating human-environment relations. As analytical lens, it constitutes a productive way of tracing relationality, agency and power beyond the traditional scope of our subdiscipline.

A perspective on food as exposure (Landecker) and of eating as socioecological relation takes its cues from recent insights from e.g. microbiome science and nutritional and environmental epigenetics. In line with ongoing attempts in anthropology that take seriously decolonial critique, this opens up new modes of challenging narratives such as those of individual autonomy and human agency of “our” multispecies bodies that in fact are intrinsically caught up in socioecological entanglements, and consequently allows to reconceptualize notions of “the human” as such. Therefore, a food anthropology that goes beyond food and towards more-than-human eating practices, I argue, carries theoretical and methodological potential for anthropology that should not be overlooked.

Paper short abstract:

What can sugar and sweetness tell us about the specificities, and limits, of the anthropology of food? Drawing on ethnographic research with families and primary schools in Scotland, I use sugar to explore the intersections between the anthropology of food, medical anthropology and kinship studies.

Paper long abstract:

What can sugar and sweetness tell us about the specificities, and limits, of the anthropology of food? In 1988, Sidney Mintz demonstrated that sugar production and consumption are political – sugar not only reveals, but has contributed to the formation of economic relations, imperial legacies, patterns of labour and gendered consumption in the UK. In 2018, 30 years after the publication of Sweetness and Power, I carried out ethnographic observations on the role of sugar consumption in children and adults’ lives at home and at school in Scotland, reflecting on how sugar has become both a public health object and a matter of kinship. In my doctoral research, I argued that sugar – as an ambiguous substance navigated by parents – revealed contemporary conceptions of kinship in Scotland, and that kinship relations in turn revealed the values attributed to sugar.

Food and kinship are among anthropology’s oldest objects of interest, receiving fresh impetus in the 1980s and 1990s after a period of decreased attention. While food anthropology has emerged and expanded in parallel with public concerns over the links between food consumption and obesity, diabetes and heart disease, kinship studies have been reinvigorated by public interest in assisted reproductive technologies. Attention to biomedicine has partly mediated the rise and interest in these two fields, with biological reductionism and naturalisation emerging as key anthropological critiques. I use sugar to explore the intersections between the anthropology of food, kinship studies and medical anthropology, and to reflect on the future of these intersections.

Paper short abstract:

Emerging from reflections on the methodological approach embraced during fieldwork investigations in rural Tunisia, the paper addresses how maintaining food as an unfolding process, powerful to delineate social change, remains a pillar on which food anthropology as a sub-discipline still stands.

Paper long abstract:

This paper demonstrates that upholding food as an unfolding process, making of it the ethnographic locus of analysis, remains a central methodological avenue sketching the contours of food anthropology as a sub-discipline. The material presented emerges from reflections surrounding the methodological approach I embraced during the months of fieldwork investigations observing and participating in the multiple social lives of food in Tunisia. I seek to show how surveying the different social spaces in which food (cereals) made its appearance and became relevant to people’s lives reveals much about people and the relations between them and the world, adding to the body of literature highlighting the potency of food as a window to investigate social change. Further the paper details how the approach allowed the analysis to engage with some of the most prominent anthropological debates, contributing to the many works attentive to the ethical breadth of human life. Showing the complexity of people’s everyday ethical navigations around their food affairs, the material unfolds how the analysis was built around the observation of everyday food as a locus of both material and existential quests in my informants’ lives. In other words, led by observing people’s struggles around producing, processing, trading and consuming food, I discuss the process through which in the analysis the inherent relations between food as a means of social reproduction and people’s claims for better inclusion in their society emerged, bringing to light much of my informants’ ideas about a life worth living in post-revolutionary Tunisia.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses ways in which the traditional ethnographic approach can be modified and adapted when researching local digital foodscapes.

Paper long abstract:

Using a local digital alternative food network as a case study, in this paper I will discuss how the traditional ethnographic approach can be modified and adapted when investigating digital food phenomena and practices. The Facebook group “Small-scale Food Producers in Serbia” was founded in late 2019 and today has more than 140,000 members with the aim of connecting small-scale food producers from villages with urban consumers. An important feature of this Facebook community is that it is not only a digital marketplace for local, artisanal food but also an affective cultural space that can bring about the emergence of ethical subjectivity and political potential. In this presentation, I will elaborate on the challenges, dilemmas, and advantages of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in digital foodscapes characterized by multimodal communication. Applying an anthropological approach to the study of digital food and practices is not simply a qualitative content analysis of user-generated digital media texts. Ethnographic research means a comprehensive empirical study of a phenomenon in context – on the one hand, a thick description of the digital platform focusing on the personal experiences of group members (producers and consumers), their behavior, and symbolic interaction; and on the other hand, the broader social, economic, and political context of post-socialist Serbia.

Paper short abstract:

I examine the possibility of an anthropology of food beyond the human through ethnographic engagement with indigenous socio-cosmologies premised on a 'logic of substance'.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I examine the possibility of an anthropology of food beyond the human through ethnographic engagement with indigenous socio-cosmologies. In the indigenous Pech village of Moradel, Honduras, bodies and subjectivities are neither genetically predetermined, nor stable, but the result of deliberate acts of feeding and commensality in a highly transformational world. By exploring food not only as a semiotic device, but as a central element of a sensory ecology it is possible to envision new avenues for an anthropology of food attuned to the Anthropocene.

Paper short abstract:

Building on a fieldwork experience with fermenters in Barcelona, this paper reflects on a paradigm of anthropological analysis that can be incorporated into the theoretical baggage of food anthropology that is able to engage with the wider anthropological and societal debate: posthumanism.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to reflect on a mode of anthropological analysis that addresses the future challenges of the discipline that are related to climate and environmental debates. This communication will describe an ethnographic work on various initiatives and groups in Barcelona that use cooking as a political practice to address the ecological challenges of the anthropocene and to stand in opposition to the food industry and to capitalism. These heterogeneous groups and initiatives, spaning from community activism to artistic practices, work specifically with vegetable fermentation with the main objective of creating communities between human and non-human beings (microorganisms) and fostering networks of mutual support and communal life in urban environments. This communication will describe the work of these collectives with vegetable fermentation and analyze the posthumanist and multispecies discursive strategies they themselves use to explain and give meaning to their praxis. This paper aims to address how this posthumanist framework emerges as a relational theoretical co-construction between the anthropologist, her interlocutors and various other social actors. In this sense, this paper will reflect on how this posthumanist multispecies approach can be fruitful to address current food anthropology issues. This presentation is based on an ongoing fieldwork carried out in Barcelona in 2023 and 2024.