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Paper Short Abstract:

This presentation addresses how the generations born in Spain between the 40s and 50s of the past century perceive and experience the changes from a pre-modern food system, passing through a modern agribusiness model to the current trend of postmodern eco-sustainable responses to food modernity.

Paper Abstract:

Although food consumption practices in Spanish households are increasingly identified not only with the model of food modernity but also with the more fragmented practices of food postmodernity, in those households made up of people over 70 years-old, we can still observe the presence of food production and transformation practices, less influenced, apparently, by food modernity and postmodernity. We are talking about a generation born between the 1940s and 1950s, which has experienced enormous changes in the production, distribution, and food consumption system. In a post-war childhood, this generation has known the pre-industrial model, based on the family production of food for self-consumption and the small-scale exchange of scarce surpluses. A population that often emigrated in their youth to the main industrial capitals of the country, abandoning agricultural and livestock activity to integrate into the industrial and service sectors. Agricultural modernisation sped up in those years, and small family farms couldn't join the process. Agribusiness, industrial food processing, and extensive distribution chains have transformed Spain's food landscapes throughout a generation. In recent decades, when this cohort has reached retirement age, they have recovered activities that they knew from their childhood, such as gardens for self-consumption, at a time when food modernity, omnipresent, is being questioned for its social and environmental unsustainability and postmodern movements such as food sovereignty or agroecology are emerging.

This presentation aims to address how this cohort, which was born between the 40s and 50s of the last century, perceives these changes and to what extent they value and practice "traditional" agri-food knowledge, how they have integrated food modernity into their day-to-day lives, and to what extent they are familiar with and promote the concept of environmental sustainability or even participate in forms of activism for eco-sustainable food.