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- Convenors:
-
Regina F. Bendix
(Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
Raul Matta (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Food
- Sessions:
- Monday 21 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
In an era faced with globally intertwined challenges, social actors seek solutions for feeding the world. We look at how actors deploy power and agency to imagine, shape, resist and counter narratives about correcting, opposing, altering, or returning to food production and consumption methods.
Long Abstract:
Food is both a necessary sustenance and a communicative system reaching from the interpersonal to the planetary level. In a world unevenly endowed with ecological and financial opportunities to grow/produce and/or purchase food, there are large differences in how food is worked with, positioned and deployed. Food supplies are entangled between traditional (and taboo-laden), scientifically researched, and industrially produced methods of gathering and growing, farming, hunting, and raising/slaughtering edibles. As the world is more interconnected and the earth's resources are getting depleted, there is rising argument about how to best feed a growing population while also addressing pollution, climate change, eco-system frailties, among many other factors. Political and social actors seek to find solutions for feeding the world population (including its domesticated animals) in the face of these challenges. Yet, generating solid bases for the quest for solutions is contested terrain from the domestic level to the level of national and global policy: battles of interests, knowledge and beliefs unfold to cajole, convince, direct, or force one another to embrace particular food production and consumption regimes. This panel provides a platform for research that looks at how actors deploy power and agency to imagine, shape, resist and counter narratives about correcting, altering, opposing or returning to longstanding food production methods. How do they engage in argument over clear-cutting and fertilizers? How do they lobby for alternate protein sources to meat? or, conversely, how do they push for synthetic foods, abandoning meal structures, avoiding packaging, or growing their own vegetables?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 21 June, 2021, -Lara Gruhn (University of Zurich)
Paper short abstract:
Telling others about one's own food practices as 'correct' and arguing why they are considered better than others plays an important role in ethical consumption. I explore the functions of doing so and which narratives and figures of knowledge are powerful in such speech acts.
Paper long abstract:
There is a joke one of my interview partners told me: «How do you know someone is a vegan? - Don't worry, they'll tell you.» This exaggerated representation symbolizes one of my findings in the field of ethical consumption. There is importance placed in conveying to others what one considers the right way of consuming. It's not enough to show it in action (shopping, eating, drinking etc.); it needs the act of speaking to generate attention and to connect the practice of knowing to doing. Talking about food ethics in everyday life is not only an interface between what one knows and what one does; it also reveals narrative patterns whether it is the story of chick culling or Nestlé stealing water, talking of the effective power of ethical food practices in the plural or arguing with the ecological footprint - all these motifs belong to a palette of standardized narratives that were told and retold during my fieldwork.
The presentation raises the general question how food ethics are communicated. It emphasizes (based on narrative interviews) the performative language use in everyday food ethics and asks how such dominant narratives and figures of knowledge work.
Alexandra Hammer (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
Paper short abstract:
Why are consumers not buying more organic food than they do and what does one have to do so they will? Examining discussion forums between bio-farmers and distributors, this paper looks at how these actors problematize the web of agricultural, political and economic constraints and consumer whim.
Paper long abstract:
Environmental and health concerns have drawn increasing attention to ecologically produced foods. Scientific insights and public pressures have brought forth both policies and incentives for farmers to produce within parameters avoiding the chemical enhancements that are part of conventional agriculture.
Adhering to the strictures allowing them to market their wares with bio labels is what qualifies these actors and their products as organic. But in carrying out their work, these actors face further challenges. Farmers and others in the organic food supply chain have to base their practices also on needs of plants and livestock while at the same time trying to act according to the temporalities and requirements of a market, in which they need to stay successful or at least “in business.”
The percentage of citizens favoring environmentally conscious, “greener” politics has grown considerably, yet when shopping, citizen consumers in Germany only choose about 7% foods labelled as biologically produced. During discussion forums, actors who produce and/or distribute organic food saw a primary means to address this gap in challenging existing narratives about sustainability, organic food, and those who are involved in producing it. However, they also reflected upon structural problems within the organic sector that cannot be addressed merely by “communicating better.”
This paper takes its point of departure from these discussion forums held with ecological farmers, representatives of organic certifiers, distributors and sellers. It examines their ways of problematizing the complex web of agricultural, political and economic constraints and consumer whim.
Cristina Romanelli (NOVA University Lisbon)
Paper short abstract:
Recent actions in public universities in France and Portugal promote the consumption of plant alternatives at the expense of animal proteins. This paper will focus on the implementation of food policies by intermediaries and on the role of students as target group and agents of change.
Paper long abstract:
Diets that increase the consumption of plant proteins have been receiving significant scientific and political support, especially after the publication of studies on the negative effects of certain animal products to human health and of animal food production to the environment. This context gave rise to new public policies in Europe, including the update of national dietary guidelines and specific actions to encourage the transformation of eating habits. These food "reforms" depend on the ways intermediaries appointed by public authorities - such as universities - interpret and implement policies; on the social positions and the life cycles of target populations; and on how the latter perceive issues related to food (Cardon, Depecker and Plessz, 2019).
This paper will focus on top-down and bottom-up actions in public universities in France and Portugal, where canteens offer a daily vegetarian option based on national regulations, and where autonomous initiatives propose vegan meals or exclude cow meat from menus. Student demand also seems to have risen, since the age group of 18-25 years is precisely the one which decreases or stops the consumption of meat in Europe (France AgriMer, 2019). Additionally, these individuals experience an identity, statutory and social transition during which they develop new sociability networks that can contribute to alter their eating habits. In this sense, the paper will also question how some students could be affected by these "reforms" or become themselves agents of change, by making individual demands or joining associations to promote plant-based options.
Gina Song Lopez (Lund Univeristy)
Paper short abstract:
Meat analogues have an established history in the Sinosphere due to vegetarian Buddhist practices. This paper discusses how this perception is being transformed by emerging advocacy networks advancing new plant-based meat substitutes as modern, animal-friendly, and climate-conscious alternatives.
Paper long abstract:
The Asian foodscape is going through significant changes. Rising incomes and a growing middle class have resulted in greater regional appetites and demand for meat. Conversely, the inception of the modern plant-based food movement is resulting in the gradual transformation of traditional perceptions of vegetarian and vegan diets. Abstinence from animal flesh and the employment of meat substitute products has an established culinary history in the region in connection to the practice of vegetarian Buddhism. Nevertheless, in spite of its prevalence within the Sino-cultural sphere, plant-based food did not enter mainstream food business considerations until recently. The meteoric rise of modern vegan dinning and plant-based food products in Asia is tightly connected to the advent of global discourses centered on climate-consciousness and animal ethics. However, rather than a simple expression of globalization, this region-specific flourishing of the plant-based food movement is the result of a complex network of advocacy actors engaged in the ideological and material translation of food. This paper will discuss the rise of the animal rights and ethical vegan food movements in the Sino-cultural sphere, primarily China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It will examine the role of these actors in reinterpreting vegan and vegetarian diets in the region. Thus, shedding light on the advocacy-business alliances that are currently driving sustainability food transformation in the Asian Anthropocene.
Sara Pozzi (University of Manchester) Amine Slim (National Gene Bank of Tunisia)
Paper short abstract:
Tunisia has recently re-discussed strategic orientations concerning cereal production, aiming to reach self-sufficiency in the coming years. This paper will delve into the strategies activated, discourses leveraged, and networks mobilised by actors pushing for inclusive agricultural policies.
Paper long abstract:
Interpreting biodiversity as a ‘network of connections’ (Aistara 2011), the paper explores the current attempt of different groups of social actors striving to shape the future of Tunisian agriculture.
Tunisia’s distinct ecological regions have historically been a crossroads for knowledge and savoirs, creating ripe grounds for genetic diversification. Since the late 1800’s farmers and shepherds’ biodiverse farming practices have been increasingly marginalized as ideologies of agricultural productivity and standardization were coopted as new imperatives. A subsequent 1999 law certified a list of tradable seeds of productive and commercial value that excluded traditional varieties, further cutting the chain of reciprocal relationships between land and people. Despite these interventions, smallholders have continued to reproduce and trade traditional varieties.
The paper will look specifically at how smallholders in times of late capitalism have strived to re-build trusted ‘chains of reciprocity’ that allow them to remain on the land, their choices pointing to what they contest or value while constructing dignified lives. Within this backdrop, the paper will further scrutinize a current attempt led by the National Gene Bank to draft a legal framework for marketing traditional varieties of seeds. Far from being only a catalogue-like collection of local landraces, the draft also aims for a rethinking of agricultural strategies acknowledging the farming population’s essential role in ensuring food sovereignty in the country. We will hence explore practices of sowing and writing as synchronic pushes toward re-establishing ecosystem reciprocity between different social actors involved, delving into the strategies activated, discourses leveraged, and contradictions emerging.