Paper short abstract:

We present the outcomes of an experimental research project carried out with first semester students aimed at visibilizing our individual and collective connections with Mexico City's food system and highlighting the opportunities for our actions to promote biosocial and ecological well-being.

Paper long abstract:

Our relationship with food needs a profound and lasting change directed towards a more just, sustainable, sovereign and secure system, one looking beyond consumer interests, capitalist logics of efficiency and revenue. Awareness of this need is no longer enough, we need to find ways and opportunities to act and foster change. In this panel we share the outcomes of a collaborative action-research project motivated by Mexico's problematic social fabric, intended to experiment with ways to start, guide, sustain and promote these changes. The project was carried out in collaboration with first semester students enrolled in the Nutrition Science bachelor degree at a private elite university in Mexico City.

Considering our limited, restricted and obstructed view of the food-system and the food-scape we belong to and eat from, we developed ethnographic and auto-ethnographic exercises aim at helping us to see our connections with the people who produce, distribute, process and prepare the food we eat, and to help us contrast our personal food-scape and food-system, with that of the university and of Mexico. These exercises included mapping out our food-scapes (e.g. our home, our fridges and the university), storytelling our food preferences, and tastings (e.g. salts, tomatoes, nuts, dried fruits, honeys). We believe these exercises helped us to become aware of these connections and contrasts, and they have given us options to enact small but profound changes in these systems.