Short Abstract

This panel focuses on quantification in burgeoning scholarship and policy interest in transforming food systems. We invite papers that explore diverse modalities of food quantification, their relationality, capacity to reveal, conceal, and highlight certain temporalities and kinds of valuation.

Description

This panel is concerned with the role of quantification in burgeoning scholarship and policy interest in transforming food systems. The operation of food systems and attempts at their transformations both generate and draw heavily on numbers. Such quantification can turn otherwise ambiguous categories, such as food waste or organic food, into apprehensible quantities, or it can even force categories to emerge in the service of quantification. Approaching and apprehending food via numbers has the potential to create epistemic shortcuts and opens up some possibilities for action while foreclosing others; practices that may be visible to some and invisible to others become widely disseminated and invite comparisons and judgements. Dominant discourses present numbers and associated forms of representations such as tables and graphs as neutral representations of the world out there independent of the people who created them.

Building upon critical scholarship, which approaches quantification as part of ecologies, we invite papers that analyse varied modalities of food quantification and their relationality. Figures may become part of number narratives, creating a sense of urgency, (in)dependence, or economic growth. Rather than understanding quantification only as a tool for revealing, we invite contributions that explore a capacity of quantification to silence, conceal, or deflect attention from sensitive issues or failures in transformation attempts. Given the informal nature of many food-related practices, such as self-provisioning, composting, or sharing, we draw attention to the food worlds that may be overlooked in numerical imaginaries. We ask which temporalities and kinds of valuation those number narratives highlight and which they suppress. We invite semiotic explorations of thresholds, policy targets, or zero-waste initiatives, which approach numbers as signs mobilizing different modes of reference. Finally, we open space for thinking about forms of visibilization of food systems that can serve as alternatives to quantification.

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