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Paper short abstract

What happens when food travels? Drawing on ethnographic research in Amsterdam Southeast, I explore how migration can unsettle what counts as food - and how edibility is made and remade through relations between people, plants, practices and places.

Paper long abstract

What makes something food? Dietary and nutritional approaches often begin with food as an established category: foods have particular properties, people have particular needs, and recommendations follow from matching the two. But what happens when what counts as food is itself unsettled?

Drawing on ethnographic research with community-based food initiatives in Amsterdam Southeast, this paper explores edibility as a situated and relational accomplishment. In earlier work, I used care and caring relations (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) to explore healthy food beyond nutritional properties, following what food makes possible in everyday relations. This led me to ask a more fundamental question: what makes something edible in the first place?

The question emerged through encounters with food knowledges and practices shaped by migration. As people, plants and food practices move across places, some knowledges and practices travel, while others change, fade or emerge anew. Rather than approaching this as a question of retaining or losing food knowledge, I ask how edibility is made and maintained through relations between people, plants, knowledges, practices, infrastructures and environments.

This raises both conceptual and methodological questions: how might we study an edibility that is no longer enacted but persists through memories, plants, knowledges and traces? And how might new forms of edibility be produced through encounters in new places?

By attending to the making and unmaking of edibility, I explore what this might reveal about the categories of food and health that dietary recommendations often take for granted.