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Paper short abstract

This paper explores what different notions of healthy food come to the fore when centring care and caring relations by looking at community-based initiatives in Amsterdam Southeast - and what this then means for interventions and inequities.

Paper long abstract

Dominant health paradigms increasingly frame healthy eating as an individual responsibility guided by standardized nutritional knowledge, often overlooking the social, material, and relational conditions that shape everyday food practices. Using the concept of care and care relations (cf Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) as an analytical lens to look at health differently, this paper explores how healthy food is understood and practiced within community initiatives. This was done through ethnographic research involving courses on cooking, wild-picking and gardening; symposia; interviews; and other neighbourhood events, within community initiatives in Amsterdam Southeast that deal with issues on poverty, crime, housing, labour, health, etc. on a daily basis. I have specifically worked with: an all-male support network for men with African roots; a local foodbank and community centre; and an initiative providing cooking and gardening courses.

The ideas and activities of these different communities, like cooking with urban wild-picked plants or putting sugar and soy sauce in food boxes, show a going together of different knowledges that revalue current epistemic hierarchies – leading to different notions and interventions on healthy food. It showed that thinking on and doing healthy food differently created space for other forms of health (i.e. mental, physical, communal, ecological), as well as making food accessible for a larger group of people, giving agency back to people in a vulnerable position and renegotiating power relations. Taking other notions of healthy food and communities that enact them seriously, could therefore create possibilities for sustainable interventions on healthy food.