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Short abstract:

Global narratives about food transitions often flatten out and simplify the complexities and struggles of eating in the present. Focusing on the multiple meanings of millet in Dakar, Senegal, I ask how encounters with millets tastes, textures, meanings and uses, bring eating futures into focus.

Long abstract:

Global narratives about transitions towards a future in which eating is secure, sustainable, and rooted in local ecologies often flatten out and simplify the complexities and struggles of eating in the present. These narratives give people little sense of how a future food policy will meaningfully mitigate a food context characterized not by unwarranted or unsustainable abundance, but by loss and struggle. Beginning from the West African city of Dakar and drawing on long term ethnographic research with food insecure households, this paper explores how a precarious present provides interpretative lenses and templates for imagined future nourishment that deconstruct and undermine ongoing interventions to promote food security and sovereignty. I focus on the multiple meanings of millet: a grain that stands for official and institutionalised aspirations of “good” eating in the future, while also forming part of survival strategies in the present. Empirically I examine everyday encounters with millets’ tastes, textures, affordances and limitations. Conceptually I experiment with decentering descriptions of these encounters as primarily “critical”, exploring the other registers and repertoires through which millet is interpreted.