View: session overviewtalk overview
The politics of integrating values, food, and farming
Agroecology: On the ground practices
08:30 | Promoting Women’s Livelihood Strategies through Improved Poultry Production in Rural Guatemala ABSTRACT. How do agroecological production practices effect rural women’s abilities to produce healthy chickens? Chickens are a key livelihood strategy for rural Guatemalan women, providing eggs and meat for their household’s food security and income through the sale of eggs, chicks, and adult birds. I argue that the implementation of agroecological practices designed to improve poultry production can positively affect women’s decision-making, time, and access to and control of resources. Using a women’s empowerment framework, I analyze the impacts of participation in Project CATIE-MAGA-NORUEGA’s improved poultry project on 33 women in San Martín Jilotepeque, Chimaltenango, Guatemala. I conducted participant observation, interviews, and focus group discussions with project participants and staff in 2016. Women’s participation in the project resulted in healthier birds. Healthier birds had more meat and laid better quality eggs. As a result, women could use the birds and eggs for household consumption or increase their sales in the market. The increased quality and quantity of birds and eggs contributed to reducing the effects of the agricultural gender gap in rural Guatemala. |
08:45 | Fostering Wholesale Farmers in Vermont: Management, Finance and Training ABSTRACT. Vermont has long been rooted in a strong agrarian past and holds a rich food history. It is a place where smaller scale models have provided a greater opportunity for active citizen participation, which in turn has impacted planning and policy development. By connecting members of a community and fostering the links between the people who grow food and those who consume it, local food systems can strengthen community resiliency, preserve the agrarian landscape, and increase economic viability through multiplier effects. For the past decade, direct to consumer sales have been a popular alternative to the conventional agro-industrialized model. However recent literature suggests that these markets have become oversaturated and require producers to spend an undesirable amount of time away from their farm. Research has shown that many Vermont producers are interested in scaling-up their production and increasing the proportion of their sales to wholesale accounts. Due to lack of infrastructure, inadequate access to capital, and limited logistical capacities, many growers are unable to overcome the barriers that prevent them from expanding their operations. Our research aims to investigate the practices of successful wholesale farmers, and to better understand the necessary technical assistance needed to expand their operations and facilitate their transition into these markets. This project will also examine lenders’ and technical assistance providers’ perceptions of viability of wholesale markets, and better understand what attributes contribute to a successful loan application. The findings of this research will be used to develop a “wholesale ready farmer” training program for Vermont producers – and create outreach opportunities and materials for agricultural lenders. |
09:00 | Goat browsing as an economically viable food-production approach to invasive brush management SPEAKER: Cherrie Nolden ABSTRACT. Invasive brush presents an ecosystem-friendly and low-cost food production opportunity for innovative people who enjoy managing animals. Brush is ideal goat food, and when rotationally browsed by goats for the three-prong purpose of brush management, goat milk and meat production, and farmer income, the problem can become a resilient food system solution. This study assessed the production aspects of 3 meat goats rotationally browsed over 3 years on 5 replicated blocks of brush-invaded oak savanna at a State-owned site in southwest Wisconsin. Weight gain among kids exceeded expectations, body condition remained good, and levels of gastrointestinal nematode parasites were considered acceptable for meat production and goat health. Goats selected a higher proportion of their diet as brush relative to previously published research, and different breeds and classes of goats performed differently in the brush. |
Alternative agriculture
08:30 | Situating Local Food within the Social Economy: A Relational Approach to Localization ABSTRACT. This paper introduces the literature on the social economy to the body of work on local food systems, in order to build a stronger understanding of the structures, practices, and politics of food system localization. Beginning with food system localization as a reactionary, scalar approach to address the shortcomings of global food provisioning, my emphasis here will be on the specific processes of localization that best align with the principles of social economy. My understanding of the social economy builds upon Karl Polanyi’s (1944) concept of the socially and politically embedded economy, and will be further developed using work by scholars such as J.K. Gibson-Graham, Nancy Fraser, and Gareth Dale. Drawing upon the concept of “embeddedness,” I aim to illustrate how localization with a mind to social economy may seek to re-embed food markets along three dimensions: within local values and social institutions; within the institutions of a broader, diversified local economy; and within a rooted territory or place. To illustrate how food system localization may better align with the principles of social economy, I will use this framework to analyze the work of Lowcountry Local First (LLF). LLF is a non-profit organization based in Charleston, South Carolina, which supports beginning food and farming businesses in the region, advocates on behalf of independently owned businesses at the municipal and state levels, and provides key services to new business-owners. In analyzing LLF’s mission and key programs, this paper will delineate some of the practices and politics of localization that represent aspects of the embedding process detailed above. Finally, this essay suggests that activists and scholars might address some of the limitations of food system localization by incorporating a social economy framework into their work. By limitations, I refer to factors that inhibit the transformative potential of food system localization, including failure to address socio-economic inequalities within and beyond the food system, the assimilation of local food into conventional supply chains, and the retrenchment of state support in areas that would most benefit local food systems. This paper will underscore the ways in which social economic principles may directly address some of these major challenges and limitations. |
08:45 | The (un)making of CSA people: the paradox of member retention in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in California SPEAKER: Ryan Galt ABSTRACT. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) faces substantial challenges in increasingly saturated and competitive markets that highlight their localness. Retention of members is crucial for the model to provide benefits to farmers; otherwise, excessive losses of members requires considerable recruitment efforts and undercuts farmer well-being. We conducted statewide research on CSAs in California, including surveys of 111 CSA farmers, 409 former members, and 1,149 current members in order to examine retention rates and former members’ reasons for leaving. We answer three questions: What explains differences in CSAs’ retention rates? Why do former members leave their CSAs? And, how do former and current members differ in their satisfaction with CSA? Examining the datasets together shows what we call the retention paradox: while it appears that former members’ primary reasons for leaving could be addressed by offering them share customization, from the farm-level data we find that offering share customization has no effect on CSAs’ retention rates (tested through both bivariate correlation and multiple regression). We offer three hypotheses to further examine the retention paradox, and argue for a deeper theorization of CSA people to understand the limitations of choice as a frame for member retention. We conclude with specific routes that CSAs can take, individually and collectively, to retain members and cultivate CSA people. |
09:00 | Local, local on the wall… Are CSAs the "greenest" of them all? ABSTRACT. It has often been taken for granted that local food is better for the environment, first because of reduced distance to market, and second because of a presumed commitment to sustainable farming on the part of farmers who sell direct to consumers. Recent research has called both these assumptions into question; indeed, the concepts of a "local trap," an "inverted quarantine," and "defensive localism" raise the possibility that the social movement for local food may be romantic at best, willfully blind to larger injustices in the food system at worst. Motivated by this tension between public perceptions and academic criticisms of local food, this paper seeks to draw attention to the tremendous diversity in how food is grown for and sold to local markets. More specifically, I ask: Are different market outlets for local food associated with differences in the adoption of sustainable farming practices by farmers? With this question in mind, this paper will report on the findings of an original, large-scale survey conducted with specialty crops growers (i.e. farmers of fruits and vegetables) in Michigan and Ohio. Respondents to the survey (n=approximately 880 farm operations) were asked detailed questions about what crops are grown, whether practices such as cover cropping, reduced tillage, and biological pest control are used, whether the farm satisfies "organic" criteria, how crops are sold, and the environmental views of farm owners. Preliminary findings shed light on a nuanced relationship between local food and sustainable farming. First, and not surprisingly, selling food mainly wholesale, and therefore not selling local food, is strongly associated with increased use of agricultural chemicals and synthetic fertilizers. Second, earning income from some of the most common outlets for local food, such as farmers markets, roadside stands, and direct-to-consumer resale by other farmers, is not associated with greater adoption of sustainable farming practices. However, community-supported agricultural cooperatives (CSAs)-and to a lesser extent having a farm-to-table relationship with local restaurants-clearly emerge as an income source that is strongly associated with sustainable farming. Further analysis of survey data suggests that more than one reason may exist for the unique environmental character of CSAs, including the environmental views of farm operators and a heightened sense of economic security due to the membership contract funding model. |
09:15 | Embracing the Neoliberal in the Local? A Practice-Based Theory for Building Equitable Agrifood Systems ABSTRACT. A new producer Cooperative presents an opportunity for local farmers: It's Local, community-based, cooperatively owned, back to the land, non-GMO, pasture-based, sustainable... And Neoliberal. This paper challenges sustainable agrifood regime-theories, and suggests a budding practice-based theory for building sustainable and equitable agrifood systems. This theory builds on a relational, reflexive model of decision-making, and critically examines the complexity of the "co-learning" concept in a relational organization. |
Food governance and justice
08:30 | The Ketchup Trail in Northwest New York in the Early 20th Century ABSTRACT. The industrialization of the American food system was accelerated by the rise of commercial canning and bottling, an activity that became safer and cheaper as microbial science, industrial technology and the commercial demands of the first world war intersected in the early decades of the 20th century. Several major food companies, including H.J. Heinz, Hunts, A&P, and Duffy Mott, took advantage of the opportunity to establish branch plants along the transportation corridor in western New York defined in successive eras by the Erie Canal, the New York Central Railroad, and New York State Thruway (I-90) to process the region’s farm and orchard products. H.J. Heinz, emphasizing the “purity” of their products to the wary home consumer, established at least three branch plants for ketchup and vinegar in the eight-county western region to better control agricultural conditions and then process products soon after harvest. This paper, focusing on H.J. Heinz and its competitors, analyzes archival and secondary data using GIS to investigate the canneries, vinegar works, and other food processing businesses as key nodes in the ecological, cultural, and economic relationships that make up the food system. Maps depicting the links among branch plants, farms, nurseries, and transit points together with qualitative data about labor and management practices shed light on a key moment in the industrialization of food. |
08:45 | The Agricultural, Food, and Human Values Implications of Cannabis at the End of Prohibition. SPEAKER: John Jemison ABSTRACT. Strains of cannabis (Cannabis sativa, cannabis indica) have been used for centuries to make fiber, food, and medicinal products. After the prohibition of alcohol, Harry Aslinger, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, spent a 32-year career demonizing cannabis. In 1970, Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act designating that specific substances be ascribed a category based on criteria; schedule 1 substances were designated those as being highly addictive, having no medicinal value, and being completely unsafe for use. Why cannabis was designated as Schedule 1 has been tied to Aslinger’s need to justify the existence of his department or to control the workforce. Whatever the reason, “Reefer Madness” and “Nixon’s war on drugs” effectively stigmatized cannabis use for decades while the black market trade flourished. Even non-psychoactive industrial hemp remains federally illegal and classified as Schedule 1. While the 2014 farm bill allowed land grant university (LGU) research with industrial hemp, the higher potential profit, high cannabidiol (CBD) cannabis for medicinal therapies remains limited and classified Schedule 1. The legalization of medicinal cannabis in California in 1996 started a process that has led to more than half of the US states following suit, with nine states legalizing recreational cannabis use as of Februrary 2018. Despite obvious positive therapeutical use (relief of nausea from chemotherapy, seizure control with high CBD oils, ease of post-traumatic stress disorder, and ocular pressure relief in glaucoma), all cannabis remains classified Schedule 1 federally, and federal funding for research is unavailable. It seems time to discuss the role of LGUs in cannabis education. Should students be taught the botany, fertility, and pest management of cannabis to supply the market? Should students understand that cannabis can control pain, and that this could be done well or ineffectively? Being a psychoactive substance, there is potential for abuse. The cannabis “stoner” stigma has the potential to fade, and production could be viewed as an effective economic opportunity awaiting agronomy students. The aging US population will demand pain treatment; how do we do this? Should we take the opportunity to teach our students how to possibly use cannabis in a healthy way, as a component of a healthy lifestyle, or do we continue to allow the specter of Harry Aslinger’s “reefer madness” control what is done at the land grant university. |
09:00 | Cottage Foods: A challenge for the governance of ‘local’ foods ABSTRACT. Consumer demands for local foods have expanded over the last decade. The popularity of locally-grown agricultural commodities has given rise to demand for value-added, locally-produced products. Cottage foods, non-potentially hazardous foods prepared in home kitchens, are regulated under state-level laws. These laws are intended to exempt the small-scale production and sale of low-risk foods from costly food safety regulations and to enable producers to sell food directly to the end consumer. Yet, they represent new territory for state policymakers, who must now grapple with the challenge of designing policies that are broadly effective while also being locally specific. Allowable product types, food safety training requirements, permitted sales venues, income limits, inspection requirements, and permit type all vary state-to-state. This research explores how lawmakers are tasked with identifying effective ways to regulate a localized food system while maintaining the safety of food products and protecting the consumer. How do they address a push for less government regulation, with claims that cottage foods laws violate the principles of food sovereignty and economic liberty of cottage foods producers? What happens to the producers who are caught in the crosshairs between food ethics and governance? Drawing on ethnographic interviews with producers, consumers, and experts in food safety, I highlight the unique state of the emerging cottage foods industry and provide insight into the current discussion between food freedom and bureaucratic restriction. |
09:15 | Caught between public health and proliferating science: Food consumption policy ABSTRACT. Many food scholars and advocates have called for a simplified public health message about food consumption and nutrition. Others (such as Scrinis) have pushed against the very notion of nutrition as a basis for approaching food choice. Yet governing institutions, such as the USDA, do and will continue to develop science-based nutritional advice. In this task, they face a central tension. Despite the public health charge to provide clear and simple, science-based advice to the public, nutritional science itself produces proliferation rather than clarity and simplicity. Not simply a corporate weapon to sow public confusion and new markets, proliferating markers, measures, and goals are useful to scientific knowledge-making and comport with the structure and reward systems of the field. In other words, more and better science cannot resolve this issue because science is itself the source of unruly complexity in nutritional advice. Unable to mount a critique of nutritional science, governance institutions are caught between science and clarity, and must muddle through by balancing the two. This talk explores how the USDA, in particular, negotiates the mandate to provide science-based nutritional advice. This exploration is not meant to displace the political critiques of governmental food advice, but suggests that there are less obvious structural issues at work in seemingly futile efforts to cobble together a meaningful public-health approach to food. |
Challenging boundaries through food
Foods in place and time
Identities of food and farming
Food systems research
Conflict and change: Knowledge and activism
08:30 | Wilderness Transformed: From Wasteland to Cornucopia to Eco-Desire ABSTRACT. From Lester Brown’s 1995 book, This paper analyzes the changing values of “wilderness” in the past 70 years as revealed in the transformation of Beidahuang from China’s largest concentration of freshwater wetlands to its largest complex of state farms. Driven by the “grain first” policy since the 1950s, Beidahuang wetlands in China’s northeastern frontier in Heilongjiang province were treated as “wastelands” to be reclaimed and cultivated. Tens of thousands of state-mobilized migrants, including veterans, rural and urban youths, political exiles and incarcerated criminals, were deployed to the frontier to build army farms and work farms, which evolved into today’s 113 state farms administered by the Beidahuang Group, with a total population of 1.67 million. However, the economic success of modern agriculture and human settlement has lead to more and more pronounced ecological consequences since the 1980s, with intensified soil degradation, lost habitat for endangered species, and increasingly frequent and severe floods and droughts, just to name a few. Ironically, “wilderness” has become a symbol to be capitalized in the age of rising environmental awareness of the public since the 1990s. “Wilderness” now invokes the pursuit of the pristine and organic––sought-out qualities for agricultural products in national and global markets. And yet, what is most intriguing is that, despite the fact that agricultural activities have drastically reduced the ecosystem services of wetlands, the Beidahuang Group has been designated by the state as both a model for modern agriculture and an exemplar for ecological conservation. This paper, therefore, will examine the state’s changing visions of Beidahuang wetlands and Beidahuang Group’s efforts in protecting wetlands while maintaining a continuous increase in grain yield in the past 15 years to reveal China’s strategies for mitigating environmental damages. |
08:45 | Fusarium is a Grace from God: Scientific, Divine, and Microbial Approaches to the “Bananapocalypse” ABSTRACT. New forms of scientific, divine, and microbial collaboration have arisen in the context of the Philippine banana industry’s battle against Fusarium Wilt Tropical Race 4. Also known as “Panama Disease,” Fusarium Wilt is a deadly soil-borne fungal disease affecting the banana industry on a global scale. Plant pathologists in the 21st century have declared the virulent strain to be “incurable” by synthetic or chemical means. This has attracted apocalyptic declarations from Western media touting the imminent death of the world’s favorite fruit. This paper presents one Philippine research team’s initiative to offer an unconventional solution to what many frame as an impending agricultural tragedy. Crop Vaccine (Bialexins) is a biological plant antibiotic that an increasing number of Filipino farmers have championed as the answer to the “bananapocalypse.” Its inventor developed the formula from a series of prophetic dreams in a departure not only from the paradigms of conventional soil science, but also from what is commonly understood as the scientific method. Banana farmers testify to Bialexin’s efficacy even as they fail to provide scientifically acceptable “proof” for their cause, employing instead localized understandings of soil ecologies and the irrefutable logic of the divine (“This is grace from God!”). This has compelled some plant scientists and industry management to dismiss the technology as either pseudoscience or a clever marketing scheme. In other cases, however, the resolve to find a cure in the absence of “scientific solutions” has opened up surprising opportunities for collaboration across the table: between multinational corporations and the pro-organic activists, agrichemical advocates and microbes, and humankind and God. These feats of “backyard science” call into question the foundations of modern plantation agriculture and its reductionist “N-P-K mentality.” They must be taken seriously both as technological innovations and as forms of microbiopolitics, to borrow Paxson’s important term. This paper asks what conceptual tools are available to academia to recognize and legitimize local agroecological methods, and to open up collaborative channels on wider scales. |
09:00 | Public distrust of science: Facts may be facts, but for many, perception is reality. ABSTRACT. Consumers continue to seek out foods perceived to be minimally processed, and maximally free of additives, colourants, and other elements perceived to carry risks. The desire for clean eating, whole foods, and organic are in some senses versions of GMO panic. However, the reasons why people fear food technologies are frequently not grounded in good scientific reasoning, but are instead motivated by misunderstanding or ignorance of the science, as well as a number of logical fallacies and psychological biases. These problems are exacerbated by a number of factors, including advocacy groups who care less for good science than for promoting their cause; "churnalism", where misleading press releases are given wide circulation; and how difficult it can be for members of the public to differentiate good scientific reasoning from bad. Perhaps most concerning is the fact that the "wisdom of the crowd", as expressed on social media and clickbait-driven websites, can drown out the views of subject experts, and allow for fearmongering and distrust of science to take precedence. This talk will discuss ways in which scientists and science communicators can help consumers understand the ways in which they might be prone to be misled, and to introduce concepts that will make them better able to evaluate scientific claims in order to make more informed decisions. |
09:15 | “The robots are coming, the row-bots are coming!” Can we depend on an automated agriculture to yield all that we need? SPEAKER: Keefe Keeley ABSTRACT. The robots are coming. Machines have largely supplanted human agricultural labor; computing increasingly replaces human cognition. The increasing colonization of agriculture as the province of these machines suggests a future where the diversity and complexity of natural systems outside of human control will be replaced by systems more amenable to uniformity, and hence manipulation. This trend – the ever-increasing application of modern technology to agriculture – exemplifies Heidegger’s notion of Gestell, or “enframing”: a human mode of interacting with the world as an abstract “standing-reserve”, perceived solely according to its value for efficient re-distribution and re-organization. The continual pressure to increase agricultural yield demonstrates the encompassing nature of this relationship, driving progressive refinements in the efficiency of nearly every aspect of food production, from crop development, to fertility management, to automated harvesting and processing. These developments progressively exclude a notion of nature “in and of itself” from entering into agricultural practice, and increasingly exclude humans as well, as a vanishingly few number of people linger in a form of agriculture predominated by the maximal utilization of the “standing-reserve.” Countervailing modes of agriculture (whether pre-existing indigenous practices, or the modern reactions of organics and biodynamics) temper the anthropocentrism of enframing by emphasizing humans’ roles as “members-not-manipulators” of the world. Such modes seem to be motivated not purely by a specific set of prescriptive standards, but rather an attraction towards an alternative manner of relating to the natural world. Realizing such an alternative remains a challenge within any context dominated by enframing. Reaffirming the role of people and wildness as a critical part of agriculture represents a possible antidote to the worldview of enframing, by (re-)establishing this “humans-as-members” identity. This reaffirmation may facilitate an experience of interdependence with, rather than manipulation of, human and natural communities, and offers an opportunity for what Levinas terms an “encounter with the Other.” Herein, a relational ethics opens the door to agriculture rooted in Aldo Leopold’s (and others’) conception of land as a “community to which we belong.” As the scale of human activity in the anthropocene exceeds planetary boundaries, a wider participation in the ethics of interdependence may help catalyze the collective action necessary to sustain the prospect of agriculture within these boundaries. |
Food and the university
08:30 | Food on Campus: From Agroecology, Food and Food Systems Education to the Campus Dining Service Brainstorming Strategies to Go from Success to Greater Success SPEAKER: Ellen Ritter ABSTRACT. College and university campuses are a prominent part of today’s “good food movement”. There’s a crescendo of academic and extra-curricular activity on campuses around agroecology and sustainable, healthful, ethical food systems; activism, and success, on behalf of “better” food service on campus is accelerating; wide-ranging food studies courses and programs are increasing in number. And there’s enormous room and need for further success. All session attendees are invited to briefly share models or programs they’d recommend for replication. We’ll begin describing three: A template exploring what it would look like if an institution’s administrative function as campus food service provider were linked to its academics. On a college campus think dining services inviting input from students studying foreign languages/cultures for ethnic food events; students in business, food systems, public health and sustainability courses researching a single ingredient: where it comes from, where else that ingredient might come from, its nutritional value, and art students designing a format for disseminating that information in dining halls and beyond. Even better, what if the college/university leadership chose to encourage transdisciplinary and experiential learning by recommending that food become a broad lateral theme across academic silos and administrative sectors—academics, campus life and campus operations. Hear about the exciting trajectory of UW-Madison’s Food Studies Network whose two coordinators are Art Department faculty. Taking as its foundational truth that food is “among the most transdisciplinary of themes” the Network is catalyzing increasingly broader collaborative work across the academic landscape and in the community. The pre-conference Sustainable Meal Hackathon is but one example. Learn (learn more, if you participated in the pre-conference Farm to Institution tour) about the path to a responsible and sustainable food system, and future goals, of UW Health, as well as challenges faced. UW Health continues to introduce delicious, healthier choices that are locally and sustainably sourced. UW Health provides food for all those eating on-site—patients, staff, visitors and students—and has seen substantially increased volume in its cafeteria and other outlets. In tandem UW Health is improving internal and external food and nutrition education. Bring your stories to share, hear others, and imagine what could be as we strategize about building toward greater success on individual campuses and as a movement. Our goal will be to leave the round table with plans to build bridges, to identify potential new collaborators and to strengthen our networks. And we’ll set timelines. |
08:30 | Oral history, regional food systems, and place-based marketing SPEAKER: Alice Julier ABSTRACT. “Food systems” and “sustainability” are often abstractions, hard to relate to people’s everyday lives. Narratives of food, agriculture, foodways, and community are a critical means of bringing those abstractions into ordinary practice. Oral histories work well when they are tied to the visual, the demonstrable, and the personal. The creation of a regional oral history archive focused on current and historic food and agricultural practices may be rooted in preservation but may also be a means to support and promote social and economic incentives for regional food systems. In the same way that agricultural tourism generates engagement with landscape, history, and labor, oral histories can provide material engagement and narratives that encourage regional consumption. This roundtable focuses on one such oral history project, the Western Pennsylvania Foodways Archive (WPFA), which aims to be a hub for information, resources, learning opportunities, and technical assistance on food systems problems. The archive is housed at the Center for Regional Agriculture, Food, and Transformation at Chatham University, with a mission to transform food and agriculture in the region, fostering more sustainable, equitable, transparent, and inclusive food communities. The oral histories work in tandem with the hands-on work of product development, entrepreneurial support, culinary tourism, and skills workshops. The WPFA has multiple goals: to collect and share oral histories, as well as contextual material such as interviews, recipes, images, and written text, to document past and current agriculture and food stories of the region; to provide a home for food, labor, and gender knowledge that may otherwise go undiscovered; and to make this knowledge accessible to the public, aligned with the principles of public history, by tying it to practical workshops and engaging pop-up dinners for the community, as well as sharing it through interactive web-based mediums. The roundtable will focus on the multiple and occasionally competing aims of such a project, discussing how to navigate the demands of oral history and food voice narratives with economic and community development projects, environmental issues, and the limits of market-based solutions to regional food systems. |
Roundtable
08:30 | Design and Food Studies: Teaching, Thinking, Doing SPEAKER: Sonia Massari ABSTRACT. We submit this project as an "organized panel session" - roundtable: What can Design bring to Food Studies, and vice versa? This session will reflect on methodological, theoretical, and practical issues arising from the interaction between Food Studies and Design, two very distinct fields which however can generate interesting and innovative synergies. Their interaction has the potential for reflecting and operating in original ways on urgent contemporary issues regarding food systems, from production to consumption. The participants, all of whom have experience teaching at the intersection of Design and Food Studies, will share their best practices, their pedagogy, and their research in a round table aimed at enhancing the transdisciplinary dialogue between the two fields. |
Legacies
Pyle Center, ATT Lounge
Agroecology: On the ground practices
10:30 | Using participatory photography to investigate indigenous technical knowledge of wild biodiversity and pest management among smallholder farmers in Northern Malawi SPEAKER: Stephanie Enloe ABSTRACT. Over the past five years, the Malawi Farmer to Farmer Agroecology project has engaged 6,000 smallholder farming households in participatory research around agroecological farming practices, food security, nutrition, and gender. In 2017, the project entered a new phase in which researchers and farmers are investigating how agroecological practice use has affected biodiversity at the farm and landscape scale. Central to this new research program is the objective to engage farmers to identify, test, and implement a suite of agroecological pest management strategies that simultaneously improve food security and support biodiversity. Numerous scholars have stressed the importance of integrating local priorities, knowledge, and beliefs into agricultural development projects, particularly when working with smallholder farmers in a post-colonial context. Few studies in Africa, however, have specifically focused on insects, birds and other biological organisms that make up wild agrobiodiversity. As part of a broader project to understand the impact of farm-level practices on wild biodiversity, our aim in this study was to gain insight into farmer knowledge and perceptions of crop pests, birds, beneficial invertebrates, and local management strategies. To achieve this goal, we interviewed 43 Malawian farmers in January 2018, using a participatory method called photovoice. The findings from these interviews will inform data collection and next steps in the participatory research design. In this paper, we discuss photovoice as a method to understand and assess indigenous technical knowledge regarding insects, birds and ecosystem services from wild biodiversity. While this method has been used in Africa to explore local perceptions of biodiversity and conservation within game reserves, it has not been used to explore smallholder farmer perceptions of wild biodiversity within agroecosystems. We find that when combined with semi-structured interviews and field observation, photovoice is an effective method to gain insight into farmers’ priorities regarding pest management, the diversity of local management strategies, and common knowledge gaps. Photographs gave insight into the ways in which farmers observed (or ignored) insects and birds that reflected broader understandings of their agroecosystems as well as some key gaps. Photovoice also can help overcome language barriers and different conceptual models for taxonomizing biodiversity when a researcher is working within a new cultural and linguistic context. We review the benefits and lessons learned from using photovoice within this research context, while highlighting initial findings shaping agroecological pest management research in northern Malawi. |
10:45 | Actions Towards the Preservation and Restoration of Biodiversity in Conventional Agriculture: Agrícola Santa Amalia, Guanajuato, México. SPEAKER: Roberto Aviña Carlín ABSTRACT. This presentation highlights efforts to preserve and restore biodiversity in conventional agriculture in “Agrícola Santa Amalia”, a farm in the State of Guanajuato, Mexico dedicated to the production of Food Safety and Fair Trade certified vegetables. Agriculture and environmental concerns took different paths, sometimes in opposite directions, to the point that agriculture became synonym of wellbeing and productivity, while ecology became a synonym of being against growth and development. Ecology was sometimes referred to the science of the: "No!" At Santa Amalia, agriculture and environmental concerns join their paths towards a comprehensive, holistic, multiple, balanced and sustainable path. About 20% of Santa Amalia’s land is devoted to restoration into a biological corridor, benefiting species such as the Monarch butterfly and many migratory birds. The main goals of the project include: i) To restore bordering areas with native vegetation to attract pollinators and building biological corridors; ii) To develop actions that could be replicated within the region and to foster public policy for agriculture in central Mexico; iii) To conduct research and systematize information to strengthen the transition to sustainable development; iv) To train and share results with different sectors of society. Actions taken in Santa Amalia include: i) Soil preservation and water saving techniques with incorporation of organic matter into the soil; ii) Trimming and sanitation; iii) Placement of drinking troughs for wild fauna protection and population control; iv) Joint actions with scientists of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, the National Laboratory for Biodiversity Genetics, University of Guanajuato; v) Negotiation of public policies to incorporate biodiversity into agricultural practices; vi) Flora restoration, mainly in the herbaceous, shrub and arboreal strata. Our results show that incorporating organic matter into the soil for twenty years has yielded substantial soil enrichment, water saving and agricultural production. Since 2016, 10,000 trees, shrubs and grasses were planted, and collaboration with research centers, universities and farmer's associations was established. Our conclusion is that preservation and biodiversity do not go against agricultural production, and that the growing demand for better quality produce grown sustainably fosters economic markets and better agricultural practices that incorporate food safety, and social and environmental responsibility. In addition, the creation of biological corridors and best agricultural practices contribute to the mitigation of weather change. |
11:00 | Social Exchange Theory and Agroecology in Mantiqueira Mountains: An Education Experience SPEAKER: Marta Fabiano Sambiase ABSTRACT. The objective of this paper is to present and to discuss an education experience in agroecology, the Nucleus of Studies in Agroecology of Mantiqueira (http://neamantiqueira.com.br/) from the perspective of Social Exchange Theory - SET (Emerson, 1976). Brazilian agribusiness is formed mainly for big organizations dedicated to commodity market monocultures. Brazil has around 203 million of inhabitants, and 15% lies in the rural area, with a tendency to fall (Agr_Brasil, 2014). Small and family farmers are responsible by 70% of the production of food consumed in this country. The Minas Gerais State, where this study is developed, the family farmers occupy area of 8,845,883 hectares. Small and family farmers, allocated in a radius of 80 km of Bocaina of Minas, environmental protection area in Mantiqueira Mountains, face hurdle of production due to diseases, lack of agricultural knowledge, little adaptation with environmental resources available in cultivation process, low social integration and economic difficulties for survival. New residents of the region, technicians in Agroecology, Marcelo and Bruno, joined Professor Itamar F. Souza from Federal University of Lavras (UFLA), to run an extension project, between the years 2015 to 2017, with the following goals: Boost the agroecology by providing change of perspective at the human being, where each one must realize the environment and relate themselves in a more integrated way. This work was done at the individual level and your awareness. In this phase 12 meetings were held, impacting around 420 people. The second objective was the involvement of UFLA in workshops and researches, contemplating the elaboration of a course in agroecology for the formation of students of the university. The SET was chosen to discuss this experience because it focuses attention on social behavior and interactions, followed by actions that generate reactions to the other. Based on the logic of stimulus, response and reinforcement, SET works with the concepts of reward and value. It was observed that the formation of groups to discuss the barriers of agriculture in the region and to know the possibilities of agroecology, was instrumental in stimulating social dialogue and illuminating the paths to follow. After completing this first training phase, the challenges are to maintain social interactions and its evolution towards the formation of a agroecological network of food supply. REFERENCES Agr_Brasil (2018). Perfil do Agronegócio Brasileiro. At http://www.reformaagraria.mg.gov.br/images/documentos/perfil_brasil_jan_2018[1].pdf, on 10th feb, 2018. Emerson, R.M (1976). Social exchange theory. Annual Review of Sociology, p. 335-362. |
11:15 | Impact of Commercial Agriculture Development Project Technology Use on the Socio-economic Life of Cocoa Farmers in Cross River State, Nigeria SPEAKER: Ifeoma Anugwa ABSTRACT. This study sought to assess the impact of farmers’ use of the cocoa production technology disseminated to them by the Commercial Agricultural Development Project (CADP) facilitators in Cross Rivers State, Nigeria. Multistage sampling procedure was used in selecting 120 cocoa farmers. Descriptive and t-statistics were used in analysing data. Focus group discussions, key informant interview and sample survey were employed in eliciting responses from the respondents. Results of the study indicated that the cocoa production technology mostly used by the farmers were superior improved hybrid seedling, pruning machines to prune the shrubs and mechanical weed cutlers machines to control weeds, among others which suggests a high level of usage of the improved production technologies by the farmers. The result of the processing segment shows that the primary processing practices adopted were; use of equipment such as; pots, baskets, improved fermentation boxes, etc.; and breaking of pods with blunt object to reduce damages to cocoa beans through indigenous knowledge; among others. The result of the marketing segment showed that the measures used were; market facilitation by CADP for easy access to markets; quality control measures; and use of moisture testing kits called “aqua boy” to detect excess moisture due to improper drying, among others. Also, the benefits derived from CADP by the farmers were; matching grants from CADP; technology demonstration and capacity building on grafting technology on older cocoa stem for rehabilitation of old cocoa farms; etc. There were significant changes in certain areas of the socio-economic lives of the participant farmers before and after the inception of the project, such as; average quantity of crop harvested by the participant farmers, etc. Perceived constraints to their use of the technology was insufficient information, difficulty in acquiring land, institutional bottlenecks, etc. The project should develop and strengthen their ICT systems to provide timely and reliable information to farmers to enable them adopt the entire technology package. |
Alternative Agriculture
10:30 | Digging in: entrenched responses to the role of livestock in climate change ABSTRACT. Since the release in 2006 of the UN Livestock’s Long Shadow report on the contribution of livestock to climate change, the old debate around eating meat has divided into three main narratives in the US. The vegetarian narrative is that reducing or eliminating meat consumption is the most important action an individual can take to reduce his or her carbon footprint. The mainstream agricultural narrative is that modern intensive techniques of raising livestock are so efficient that the impact of US meat is negligible. The alternative agricultural narrative is that grazed grasslands can sequester significant amounts of carbon, so grass-based meat production can actually have a net climate benefit. All three of these narratives have support in the scientific literature; all three have some basis in fact; all three are spread by advocacy groups that ignore important information that challenges their simplistic conclusions; and all three have tended to result in a pattern of blaming others for climate change rather than real efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This session will outline the assumptions and key omissions behind the three narratives and recommend an alternative narrative designed to encourage real reductions in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The factors influencing greenhouse gas emissions are many, and they interact in complex ways. Moreover, many details about net greenhouse gas exchange in soils are as yet poorly understood. As with the larger debate around whether climate change is truly caused by human action, this complexity and uncertainty allows distorted arguments to spread. At the same time, as with the larger debate around climate change, we do know enough to promote a nuanced and accurate but coherent message about the role of livestock in climate change and what that knowledge signifies for both farmers and consumers. In brief that message to farmers is if you raise livestock there are important things you can do to minimize your carbon footprint within your current farming system. Consumers can minimize all food waste, understand the climate change impact of various dietary choices, and recognize that greenhouse gas emissions are just one factor to consider in food decisions. |
10:45 | Climate change risk assessment, adaptation, and mitigation influences for Wisconsin dairy producers SPEAKER: Evan Murdock ABSTRACT. Dairy systems are responsible for a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions in the US but are also at risk from a changing climate. The USDA has invested heavily in research to identify where in the dairy production cycle greenhouse gases can be reduced, but also how producers can adapt to climate change. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used surveys and focus groups to explore the beliefs of Midwestern dairy farmers about climate change and risk, overall risks to their own operations, and their openness to adopting specific beneficial management practices which were identified by project collaborators for their opportunity to reduce emissions without compromising milk yield and profit to the farmer. Results show that most dairy farmers believe that the climate is changing but do not believe that its causes are anthropogenic. Farmers were found to be open to a broad range of new practices, given sufficient proof of clear benefits. Other risks were seen as greater challenges. The drivers for beneficial management practice adoption by the producer are not related to reducing their carbon footprint; rather they are motivation by familiar factors such as reduction in soil erosion, improved water quality, or improved soil health. |
11:00 | Political economy, hegemonic masculinity, and climate skepticism among organic dairy farmers ABSTRACT. Across the United States, dairy farmers staunchly loyal to input-intensive industrial agriculture reluctantly go organic as a business decision. However, once they make the transition and engage in day-to-day organic practices, they tend to undergo a true ideological conversion as well, what I call organification. Surprisingly, this conversion typically stops short of dislodging skepticism about human-caused climate change. Why do they rather swiftly understand the science of microbes, forage diversity, and soil carbon, and embrace a philosophy of “go to the farm not the pharmacy,” but not open up as well to the science of the greenhouse effect and the pressing importance of reining in GHG emissions? Based on interviews and participant observation on 60 organic dairy farms in Wisconsin and California, this research points to one important explanation: in the minds of dairy farmers, the price premium associated with the National Organic Program re-categorized organic dairy from feminine and hippie to shrewd and manly, allowing organic to be compatible with hegemonic masculinity. Climate change, however, still has no market legitimation that switches it from feminine to masculine. This research builds on literature documenting men’s avoidance of green behaviors in order to safeguard their gender identity (Brough et al. 2016) and literature investigating the “white male effect” (McCright and Dunlap 2013) more generally. I add an explicit focus on the role of political economy: how masculinity is embedded in the competitive capitalist market, and how the “free” market is embedded in dominant versions of masculinity. In addition to its theoretical significance, this research has a number of practical applications. For example, as an immediately available tool that augments a longer-term strategy of transforming both capitalist markets and dominant masculinities, this research underscores the importance of full-cost pricing for GHG emissions, both for directly curbing emissions and legitimating climate change in the eyes of stalwartly macho farmers. |
Food governance and justice
10:30 | Percolating gender transformative change through fair trade coffee cooperatives in the western highlands of Guatemala ABSTRACT. While women have been involved in the coffee production process in the past, shifts in global agriculture have led more women into formal roles in cash crop agriculture as cooperative members. Empowering women as productive cooperative members requires not only technical assistance and support, but creating an inclusive social and political environment. Gender transformative approaches involve the creation of an enabling social environment and more equitable inclusion in formal and informal institutions that support expanded choices for women and men that move beyond merely superficial gender integration. This paper triangulates multiple qualitative methods to explore the relational and structural aspects of gender transformative change in the context of a federation of Fairtrade organic coffee cooperatives in the western highlands of Guatemala. The goal of the paper is to inform programs and policies aimed at promoting gender equity in agriculture and more broadly. |
10:45 | Domestic Fair Trade: A Unique Framework for Increasing Fairness, Sustainability, and Collaboration in Agricultural Supply Chains ABSTRACT. When our current food system is rooted in so many detrimental practices—corporate control and monopolization, abundance of unhealthy food and unsustainable production practices, unfair pricing for farmers, low wages and dangerous conditions for food and farm workers—it can be difficult to believe that any other way of agricultural production is possible. The Domestic Fair Trade Association (DFTA) and its members demonstrate that there are alternatives to our current food system, and that these alternatives can truly become the norm. The DFTA is a national membership-based organization in the United States and Canada representing five sectors of the agricultural supply chain—farmers, farmworkers, retailers, intermediaries (processors, manufacturers, and distributors), and other NGOs. Whether its farmers against farmworkers or retailers against farmers, different sectors of the food system are often pitted against each other. The DFTA’s model demonstrates that sector isolation does not have to be the norm and that there is considerable value in working together toward the goal of improved agricultural production. How is cross-sector collaboration in agricultural production truly achieved and how is domestic fair trade currently used as a tool for creating agricultural supply chains that are centered on health, sustainability, and justice? The 16 domestic fair trade principles that govern the DFTA provide a unique framework for transforming agricultural production. This presentation will include a discussion of domestic fair trade principles, concrete examples of domestic fair trade in action, and findings from our soon-to-be released domestic fair trade report written in partnership with the Colorado State Center for Fair and Alternative Trade. |
11:00 | Who Connects the Links? Roles and Impacts of Value Chain Coordination in Place Based Development ABSTRACT. Values based supply chains (VBSCs) have been identified as a promising framework for the development of small and mid-scale producers, farms that represent the disappearing Agriculture of the Middle (AOTM). In the past decade, public and private partners have put concerted efforts towards value chain development as strategies for strengthening local and regional food systems. While early efforts focused on food hub development and support for hard infrastructure such as aggregation, packing and distribution facilities, more recently there has been a growing recognition of the importance of ‘soft’ or social infrastructure as a key component to successful development. This shift is based in the belief that individuals and organizations embedded within communities play a critical role in networking, matchmaking, and providing technical assistance and resources to current and prospective members of local and regional food value chains. This research is centered around the emergent USDA/Wallace FoodLINC Initiative (Leveraging Investments through Network Coordination), a federal and private partnership launched in 2016, offering funding and training for value chain coordinators (VCCs) in 14 pilot communities across the U.S. Using a mixed methods approach, integrating qualitative data and a novel use of Social Network Analysis, this research examines the roles, functions and impacts that VCCs have on value chain development in their respective communities. Additionally, this research engages the individuals and organizations performing VCC work, and explores to what extent value chain coordination may be on the path to becoming one of the newest formalized professions in the food system space, acknowledging challenges and possibilities therein. |
11:15 | Building resilience in the Coffee Supply Chain: Going Beyond Certification Systems to Improve Environmental and Social Outcomes SPEAKER: Chandler Meyer ABSTRACT. The panel will present findings from case studies of coffee cooperatives carrying out innovative projects to improve environmental sustainability and social justice in Nicaragua, Mexico, Honduras, and Ecuador. These studies feature interviews and fieldwork with workers and organizations at each stage of the coffee supply chain (e.g., farmers, roasters, microfinance institutions). These cooperatives’ strategies of economic and environmental diversification, incorporation of agroforestry principles, and new models of trade relationships will be compared and contrasted to strategies of existing certification systems in their ability to improve trade relationships and farm management practices. |
Challenging boundaries through food
10:30 | Gender and Genderization in Japanese Foodways ABSTRACT. Genderization in food and foodways has been widely discussed from diverse perspectives (e.g. Counihan 2012, Lupton 1996, Sobal 2005). For example, the association of steak with men and chocolate with women instantiates stereotypical indexing of given food items with a specific gender. Conceptual processes and reasons that give rise to genderization in cuisine often are deeply intertwined with the history and culture of which the cuisine is an important part. (Wilk & Hintulian 2005). In this light we may expect gender divisions to be manifested more distinctly in a historically patriarchal society that demonstrate other forms of stratification like gender indexing in language. These divisions have been interpreted to stem from gender roles and ideological expectations in the society. In another dimension, that of consumerism, gender indexing is effectively used as practical strategies in aiming at consumers’ perceptions of genderized artifacts with a strong sense of masculinity or femininity. Thus, the genderization in food and foodways may surface as a reflection of a deep-rooted gender ideology in the society, whether it be perceived favorably or adversely; but at the same time, the genderization can be an active means to foster gender identification. The conceptual goal of this paper is to survey ways in which two aspects of gender—gender as a social construct and gender as it connects to the femininity-masculinity opposition—can form intricate reciprocity in food and foodways. More specifically, the paper examines ways in which gender and the feminine-masculine dichotomy are shadowed in the Japanese context of food discourse, by focusing on the language used to describe and promote food and cookbooks. Central to our investigation are the language describing particular food items (e.g. coffee) and the rhetoric used to promote cookbooks for men, based on contemporary and historical textual and visual materials. One of the major findings from this survey is that intended genderization as is understood in the Japanese context often is not straightforwardly aligned with gender roles and ideology or the femininity-masculinity dichotomy in reality, leading to ambiguous interpretations. In this connection, I will demonstrate several ways in which genderization is meant to be a positive force for male-specific cookbooks and food items for marketing purposes, and yet the intensions can be contradicted by marketing rhetoric. |
10:45 | Bringing the Back of the House Forward: Gendered Labor Dynamics in the Professional Kitchen ABSTRACT. Cooking and labor come together in the culmination of the culinary stage known as the kitchen. The traditional gendered dynamics present within the Western kitchen is reflected in dietary preferences, cooking techniques, and, in the focus of this paper, division of labor. This paper examines the gendered dynamic of the service industry 'back of the house' laborers and analyzes the dichotomous relationship between men and women in the kitchen in professional settings. The atmosphere of masculinity present within the service industry and professional kitchens encapsulates issues of class, education, and education culminating in systems of social stratification being reflected in hiring practices, academic discourse, self-sorting and divisions of labor. This social climate flies in the face of 'traditional' American intra-household perceptions of food and meal preparation. Within this paper, I discuss the phenomena of young and middle-aged men settling into a pattern of transient occupation, drifting from kitchen to kitchen and working the 'back of the house'. The idea of kitchen 'humor' is placed in a critical lens as a culture of 'boys club' kitchens are examined within the context of gendered labor dynamics. Manifestations of kitchen machismo is reflected in the 'front and back' of the house relationships and a culture of blue versus white collar division of labor. The gulf between the kitchen in the home and professional kitchen represent, in many ways, the American workplace's patriarchal projection of normative identities onto the workforce. It is all too easy to conjure up an image of a red-faced Gordon Ramsey screaming expletives at white coated and stone-faced cooking show contestants. This image goes beyond network television and into real professional kitchens. This image is more than an abstract 'othering' of front of house versus back of house and is expressed through a high rate of drug and alcohol abuse. High job turnover and limited workplace rights are further consequences of these dynamics. These subtleties have social, cultural, and economic impacts on the well-being of laborers. The daily and nightly cycle of 'misaim plas', the culinary preparation of work stations, mirrors the personal regiment of routine present in many restaurant laborers. Drawing from extensive literature, as well autoethnographic methodology from my own experiences in kitchens; I take aim at examining these contradictions, feedbacks, and labor idiosyncrasies to craft a narrative that brings attention to issues of class, social mobility, and adverse gender normative practices. |
11:00 | Mind Over Mother: Gendered Logics of Cultural Production in American Fine Dining ABSTRACT. Drawing on interviews with 120 critically celebrated chefs in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area, in this paper I identify the gendered logics of food work in American fine dining. I then use these logics to delineate how chefs make sense of two products of their culinary labor—their cuisine and their managerial practices. I argue that contemporary American fine dining chefs come to understand their position and therefore, their power, prestige, and value in the field in relation to two gendered logics of food work. The first logic is that which is both institutionalized in the field and most consecrated by major critical actors—the masculine logic of cultural food work. Working within this logic, chefs operate as artistic geniuses who alone create cuisine that is distinctive, creative, technically amazing, and artistic, and the cooks who work beneath them seek to execute their autonomous visions through disciplined training and repetition. Other chefs understand themselves in relation to a feminine logic of natural food work. Chefs working within this logic enact a managerial style of care work focused on staff members’ personal growth and associations with home cooking. By articulating how the gendered logics of food work organize processes of cultural production, I bring the literature on boundaries in cultural sociology into conversation with the theory of gendered logics of organization to uncover how gendered logics affect processes of cultural production in American fine dining. |
11:15 | Reorganizing the Labor of Home Cooking through a Community of Practice Approach SPEAKER: Claire Barrett ABSTRACT. This 15-minute presentation highlights a community-based partnership involving both outreach and community-based participatory research (CBPR) between Slow Food UW-Madison (SFUW) and the UW-Madison Odyssey Project. Uniquely, this presentation will be co-led by the SFUW undergraduate interns who cultivated this partnership. The purpose of the SFUW/Odyssey Project partnership is to support food sovereignty by addressing barriers to individuals’ sense of food agency, while also addressing community-level barriers to alternative food systems. SFUW is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization run by UW-Madison undergraduate students who provide healthy snacks and culinary explorations throughout the South Madison community using a community of practice model. The UW-Madison Odyssey Project offers a free humanities class for adults in the South Madison community who face economic insecurity. Odyssey provides participants with free textbooks, childcare and youth programming (facilitated, in part, by SFUW), and a weekly dinner during the time that the class meets. On a weekly basis, SFUW interns both provide healthy snacks and engage in culinary explorations with these Odyssey Project adult participants and their children. The CBPR aspect of the partnership has explored the impact of the use of a crockpot as a culinary tool to address barriers to food sovereignty. While simultaneously increasing access to local food products produced through alternative food systems, this community of practice (CoP) partnership model is based upon the shared commitment of both Odyssey Project families and the SFUW undergraduate interns. Using mixed-methods, including surveys, interviews, and participatory photovoice, the study looks at the mechanisms by which food preferences and culinary skills are transmitted intergenerationally through individual learning, social learning, and cultural learning at the family and community scales. This presentation will summarize multiple lessons learned after two years of partnership and CBPR data collection. The presenters will highlight the importance - and challenge - of reflexivity in research design and emphasize why it matters. Presenters will also share the efficacy of slow cookers as a strategy for increasing food agency, particularly with respect to incorporating nutritious, seasonal foods into the diets of families living at or below the poverty level. |
Foods in place and time
Identities of food and farming
Food systems research
Conflict and change: Knowledge and activism
10:30 | The unraveling of GM for food security: the case of Bt brinjal in India ABSTRACT. GM crops are often invoked as necessary for food security – particularly to address hunger and development in the global south. This argument summons legacies of the Green Revolution. More specifically, advocates rely on a discourse of “science,” coupled with the productionist paradigm, to deliver what is a political economic project. In this paper I trace how this rhetoric – of GM crops as a tool of development and food security – played out in the widespread public discussions and debates in India. More specifically, I attend to how concerns around food security and “science” were articulated in the societal and media discussions around Bt brinjal -- a Bt eggplant designed for small-holder resource-poor farmers. The process of evaluation for Btbrinjal was precedent setting in its level of transparency. But, the process itself was contentious. A society wide debate occupied national media for many weeks: airing a wide-ranging discussion of food, agricultural, and agrarian issues. While these discussions were widely framed as going “off course” (i.e. going beyond testable “risks” of Btbrinjal), I suggest this discussion had the significant effect of highlighting the political economic context invoked (e.g. food security, development, agrarian poverty), and more, putting its underlying logics on display in an important moment. I read the discussion and competing claims to excavate the logics guiding the differing viewpoints -- including understandings about the nature of the technology on debate, the nature of the problems invoked (e.g. food security), the diagnosed cause, and the solution offered (of GM crops). I unpack the larger societal issues and demonstrate that the sprawling discussion served to illuminate the role that this approach to development and agriculture played in producing the very situations it promised to address. In this context, Bt brinjal was seen as questionable, and became largely irrelevant to its own claims. The promises and problems of development and food security it invoked are issues of political economy; they exceed strictly testable “scientific risk.” In this context, when framed as political economic issues, the problems became questions – questions of how to approach development, and how food security could be better ensured – that required more comprehensive considerations. That is, the wide-ranging societal discussions offered a lens that reframed the debate. Thus, the debates can be read as emphasizing the questions at stake: suggesting that to address these issues, the approach must attend to the nature of the problems it invokes. |
10:45 | “Depoliticizing” debates over biotech? The rise of the global science communication institute SPEAKER: Heidi Zimmerman ABSTRACT. Over the past decade, a handful of foundation-funded “science communication” institutes have cropped up at land-grand universities. Structured by a humanitarian impulse to “feed the world” through technological intervention, these institutes aim, as one website puts it, to “depoliticize” highly-charged debates over agricultural biotechnology (GMOs). Emphatically supportive of biotech as a key tool for more sustainable, socially just agriculture, the discourse issuing from these science communication institutes routinely dismisses concerns about GMOs as “anti-science.” While we reject the notion that “science” is an unmediated and apolitical portal to Truth, this paper is less interested in the politics of scientific truth than it is in what we can learn from the technical operations of science communication institutes. These technical dimensions range from sending representatives to international development conferences, training professional communicators from countries in the global South with ongoing legislative debates around biotech crops, disseminating education materials for schools, websites and a video series, as well as energetic presence on Twitter and Facebook. We argue that these "science communication" institutes are increasingly inserting themselves into the global governance of biotechnology in a manner that demands analysis of their political economy. This paper does just that by taking one of these institutes as a case study for understanding the phenomenon more broadly. We offer a political economy analysis of its multifaceted strategies for bringing “scientific truth” to a global public. |
11:00 | Financializing urban foodland SPEAKER: Valentine Cadieux ABSTRACT. Financialization of farmland is often considered from the perspective of land grabs: as a continued instrument for dispossession and alienation of land, from use values to instruments of capital. Sympathetic to this critique, but recognizing the value of understanding the functions of financial instruments, this investigation explores three scenarios of land financialization in the U.S. state of Minnesota in order to consider claims made about land through the lens of how farmland in urban areas is being reconstructed, appropriated, and used as the intersection of urbanization and agriculture is transformed in multiple ways. First, we examine the case of a farmland rent sharing trust proposed by the Georgist organization Common Ground USA – this proposal aims to redistribute equity in farmland between larger and smaller renters, and to reconstruct the value of farmland rental around the food production capacity of the land. The case study traces the development of a governance framework for aligning land assets with legitimate users, with particular attention to cultural differences in the construction of land-worthiness and the accrual of equity in the value of improving food-producing soils and landscape features. Second, we consider public parks as farmland, a scenario that has provoked considerable concern about the possibility of abusing public assets for private gain. The case study traces the development of farming zones in parks in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and the shifts in understanding urban land and food land this process has involved, concentrating particularly on the construction and representation of land-based assets, their values, and the performances and procedures required to legitimize use or governance of this land. Third, we ask similar questions about the financing and disposition of new land-based food enterprises through mechanisms of philanthropy and tax incentives, with particular attention to the criteria of worthy urban agriculture practices written into new policies in Minnesota in 2018. We consider these case studies in the context of the contemporary and historical imaginations of agricultural land, and the role that foodland plays in the political ecology of settler urbanization in the twenty-first century, comparing the qualities of land as an asset class vs. as a stewardship responsibility, as different financiers and landholders construct, represent, and produce value and management regimes. |
Roundtables: Food and the university
10:30 | Food Policy Councils and Academia: Reciprocal Relationships in Action SPEAKER: Mim Seidel ABSTRACT. Common knowledge suggests that the partnership between two people or organizations should be mutually beneficial. Collaboration promotes synergy by filling the gaps of each partner, whether it be through opportunity, knowledge, skills, resources, etc., to tackle mutually-held issues and/or accomplish goals. The development of this kind of relationship between communities and universities is of increasing interest to universities and community groups. That being said, historically relationships between “town” and “gown” have been tension-filled at best and, at worst, detrimental to the community. Often community and university partners face significant barriers relating to diverse motivations of individual partners and different desired outcomes. Jill will provide a conceptual model, along with some tips and considerations, for developing reciprocal relationships. The relationship between CLF and Baltimore City began in 2007 when the Center worked with the health department and the planning department to form the Baltimore City Food Policy Task Force. For the last seven years, Baltimore City government has supported a food policy director, 2 other planning positions, a healthy food access coordinator in the health department and an economic position focusing on food retail. CLF has partnered with the Food Policy Initiative through research and education, the latest output is the 2018 Food Environment Report. Anne will describe CLF’s contributions to Baltimore City and examine what it takes to create a successful partnership that meets most of both parties’ needs. Chatham University’s MA Food Studies Program emphasizes a holistic approach to food systems, from agriculture and food production to cuisines and consumption. Mim, whose courses include food access, community-based research and ‘sustainable consumption’, became active in the Pittsburgh Food Policy Council (PFPC) in 2015 and in 2017 was elected Steering Committee Chair. Mim will address the synergies between her PFPC work, research agenda and academic courses, including class projects generated by this relationship. Additionally, as the internhip coordinator, she will overview how internship opportunities have been supported and enhanced by her association with the PFPC. Graduate students in Chatham University’s MA Food Studies Program must complete a three credit internship. Sam will highlight his internship experience with the PFPC. which focused on researching and developing recommendations for greater engagement between the Council and local government authorities. Additionally, Sam assisted in the establishment of a Refugee and Immigrant Farming and Food Access Working Group and he will describe how this work benefited the Council as well as enriched his experience. |
Workshop
10:30 | Agroecology in action: Uses of wild plants and weeds in fruit and vegetable production in Michocán, Mexico SPEAKER: Fulvio Gioanetto ABSTRACT. Fulvio Gioanetto is an ethnobotanist internationally known in the field of agroecology, both as a lecturer and in sustainable production practices. Mara Blas Cacari is a Purépecha knowledge keeper of medicinal plants and the manager of the family business of producing natural inputs. My wife and I, along with our extended family, are small producers of corn and other traditional foodstuffs in Nurio, an autonomous P’urépecha community in Michoacán, Mexico. Since 2001, we have developed a practice of using weeds and wild plants to produce inputs for organic crop management. We use weeds as biodindicators (indicating the type of soil, and its evolving deficiencies), as a source of micro elements (manufacturing ecological foliar fertilizers), and as living mulch. From natural materials, we produce pesticides, for the control of fungi, nematodes, bacteria pathogens, and bio-hormones while also recognizing their medicinal, veterinary and, in some cases, food properties. Drawing on P’urépecha agroecological knowledge of classification, biodiversity, soil and land use, we have developed organic management practicess for various crops that have enhanced yields. This increased producitivity has allowed us to help improve the quality of life of our indigenous communities of the Purepecha plateau. Agroecology for us also means food sovereignty, or the right of every citizen to eat healthy and organic food at affordable prices as well as the development of markets and local economies. We present here our experiences with the biofactory (biofabrica) model in several bioregions in Michoacan, modular and small scale, where quality inputs are formulated and produced for organic and agroecological production. 1) An introduction to the Michoacán P’urépecha context, its geopolitics and how plants are understood within the cosmovision (presented in Spanish by P’urépecha herbalist Maria Blas Cacari, translated by Deborah Barndt); 2) An overview of agroecology as both a concept and a practice, framing the multiple uses of natural plants (weeds) for medicinal as well as production of natural inputs, challenging the use of industrial agrochemicals for both ecological and economic reasons; 3) An introduction to the family business of producing natural inputs with video illustrations of the process; 4) A practical workshop on the production of one natural herbicide as an example that could be applied in the Wisconsin context; 5) Questions and comments from the participants. After the presentations and illustrations of the process, we would like to invite participants to a hands-on exploration of natural plants in the area. |
Legacies
Lunch Break – “On your own lunch” at Library Mall food carts. Please enjoy your lunch outside the Pyle Center (no "carry – in’s” allowed).
The Politics of integrating values, food, and farming
13:30 | Counting on Latino Labor in a small dairy-dependent state: Vermont dairy farmers perspective on working with a more diverse labor force ABSTRACT. In 2010 Vermont was a new Latino farmworker destination. Publicity around dairy farms hiring Latino labor pushed Vermont dairy’s agricultural labor shortage into public view, and raised awareness that Vermont’s traditional farm labor force was inadequate to meet the needs of Vermont dairy, the state’s largest agricultural sector. Little was known about these new migrant workers, nor about how Vermont farmers were managing Spanish-speaking foreign labor. Dairy farmers were surveyed in 2010 about their experience working with Latino labor. The survey found that most dairy farmers spoke no Spanish, and most Latino workers no English. Farmers were resorting to hand signals to train their Spanish-speaking workers. In spite of these and other obstacles, farmers were enthusiastic about their Latino workers, who they rated more highly on several metrics than domestic labor. In 2018 Vermont farmers continue to employ Latino farmworkers, and Spanish-speaking foreign labor is no longer new to the Vermont dairy industry. In the past decade Vermont’s dairy labor landscape has changed to meet the needs of these workers. A farmworkers advocacy group is prominently in the news seeking to protect and advance migrant farmworkers rights, argue for changes to state policy and organize Latino workers. Vermont has adopted several progressive policies, including Drivers Privilege Cards and Bias Free Policing policies. In addition, institutional developments like semi-annual Mexican mobile consulates and health care and education initiatives designed to meet the needs of Spanish-speaking farmworkers have developed to serve Latino migrants. At the same time migrant workers and their dairy farmer employers remain vulnerable. Vermont is a border state with active federal immigration enforcement. It remains one of the “whitest” states in the US, exposing Latino workers to racial profiling. And as the dairy sector comes to depend on Latino migrants, the possibility of losing these workers due to changes in US immigration enforcement adds stress to an already beleaguered Vermont dairy industry. This research asked Vermont dairy farmers how they were managing their diverse farmworker labor force, including both domestic and Latino farmworkers. Farmer shared opinions on worker recruitment, farm labor management, wages and compensation, as well as perceptions of labor quality. In addition, farmers responses illustrate how the dairy sector in Vermont has adjusted to this new labor force. These responses are compared to the research in 2010 to assess where Vermont dairy has made progress and where challenges lie for the largest sector of Vermont’s agricultural economy. |
13:45 | Dairy farm sustainability: the role of farm labour relations in shaping antibiotic use SPEAKER: Rebecca Schewe ABSTRACT. This study explores the connection between dairy farm labour conditions and environmental sustainability, specifically prudent antibiotic use. Concern about antibiotic resistance has led researchers and regulators to focus on potentially imprudent antibiotic use in livestock sectors and high rates of antibiotic use on dairy farms. US dairy farms increasingly rely on non-family labour, particularly immigrant labour, and diagnosis and antibiotic treatment is often the responsibility of these workers. In this study, using data from US dairy farms, we examine how labour conditions such as a lack of training, punitive management, and overtime work may contribute to the imprudent use of antibiotics. We argue that the dairy industry, regulators, and scholars must recognize the interconnections of labour equity and farm sustainability. *This presentation is part of the special session on Dairy Labor |
14:00 | Health and Migration Decisions: Immigrant Dairy Workers in the Upper Midwest, U.S. ABSTRACT. [Special Session: Dairy Labor] Due to an increase in immigrants in both rural and urban areas, Wisconsin has become known as a new immigrant destination. One industry in the state that has shifted from a white workforce to a predominantly immigrant workforce is dairy. In the late 1990s, Wisconsin farmers began hiring immigrants, the vast majority coming from Mexico, to do the difficult work of milking cows. Previous research on immigrant dairy workers in the Upper Midwest found that workplace policies, cost, transportation, and fear due to their undocumented status presented barriers to accessing health services. This paper uses a transnational gaze and theories of scale to ask how health concerns shape the migration plans of undocumented workers. I focus on a group of undocumented migrants from Veracruz, Mexico who worked on dairy farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Data come from a transnational qualitative study of 60 dairy workers conducted between 2010 and 2012, and follow-up interviews with a subset of workers in Mexico in 2017. Results suggest that while some workers overcame health-related barriers by obtaining support through local and transnational networks, others made the decision to return home. This research reveals the importance of a transnational perspective and the analytical value of scales when examining health concerns in new immigrant destinations that lack the institutional capacity to serve migrants. It also emphasizes the critical role that health can play in return migration decision-making. |
Agroecology: On the ground practices
13:30 | Conceiving exchanges between crop farmers and livestock keepers as an option for agroecology ABSTRACT. Integrating crops and livestock could be seen as an agroecological ideal for the agroecological transition of agricultural systems. The recoupling of crops and livestock would enable maintaining production levels while limiting environmental impacts on soil and biodiversity. Still, crop-livestock farms are largely declining over the world due to globalized markets, agricutural policy incentives and limited availability of workforce and skills for integrating crops and livestock. Exchanges of manure and crops among already specialised cash crop farmers and livestock farmers could thus be an agroecological option while overcoming these factors. This study aimed at reviewed three case-studies in which we designed reality-based agroecological scenarios of local integration between crops and livestock with collectives of farmers in South-Western France. All farmers involved in the co-conception process were seeking for more autonomy in inputs through the exchanges. The 30 crop farmers were in conservation agriculture and seeking fertilizer through manure exchange and crop diversification to feed the animals allowing the 39 livestock farmers to limit animal-feed inputs. We used a serious game called Dynamix (DYNAmics of MIXed systems) as a tool to support the participatory animation with each group of farmers with cards and pions. The evaluation of the scenarios is on a supply-demand balance model included in Dynamix and associated to a multi-criteria framework including economic, environmental and social dimensions at the individual farm and collective levels. Among the four alternative scenarios evaluated with each groups, the selected scenario considered i) the insertion of alfalfa and cereal-legume mixtures into crop rotations and ii) transfers of manure from livestock farmers to crop farmers. Overall gross margin increased while environmental aspects were improved. Still, work load and complexity increased, i.e. logistical and social issues such as knowledge development. The trade-offs between individual and collective performances appeared acceptable and resulted in greater autonomy at the collective level. The participatory process with the serious game Dynamix could be applied to other collectives of farmers to conceive agrocecological scenarios of integration between crops and livestock beyond farm level. The scenarios conceived could be as well a source of inspiration for policy makers to favour the reintegration between crops and livestock. |
13:45 | The Sustainability of Goat Farming: Interrogating the gaps between vision and practice ABSTRACT. In the past years, universities and government programs have encouraged goat farming and silvopasture among small-holding farmers in the rural South. Goats are promoted as beneficial for farmers with small acreages of diverse landscapes, especially farmers who have a mix of wooded and open landscapes. During my field research in Alabama between the years 2011 to 2013 I worked with a group of emerging African American goat farmers as they sought to build up their goat operations. These farmers attended workshops held by universities and community groups, applied for government grants to support their operations, and worked to forge a cooperative in order to support each other and potentially sell processed goat meat. Their interest in goat farming drew the attention and support from a number of organizations including university researchers, extension agents, and community organizations. These agricultural institutions surrounding the farmers repeatedly emphasized how goat farming might be an ideal enterprise not only from an environmental perspective, but also for small-holding and marginalized farmers seeking to make their land-holdings more profitable. Yet, despite the apparent sustainability of goats from an environmental and economic perspective, and despite the resources encouraging and supporting farmers, the political-economic factors surrounding goat farming remained a significant bottle-neck for the emerging cooperative. This group of farmers was interested in goat farming as a form of supplemental income, but often the vision and plan of outside institutions failed to understand the structural realities or actual goals of local farmers. Barriers existed between the presumed growing consumer demand for goats and the farmers’ production, and between the ideal combination of forestry and animals and farmers’ land use plans. Most significantly, farmers struggled to efficiently process their goats, and ultimately most resorted to selling their goats as whole animals at auctions which frequently resulted in a net loss for individual farmers. Drawing on my ethnographic research with this group of farmers, this paper highlights the significance of political, economic, and social structures in determining the outcomes of proposed sustainable or agroecological efforts. This paper aims to show how farmers navigate and negotiate with resources and obstacles, and how the supporting institutions sometimes fail to understand their actual needs or goals. Additionally, this research points to an important question often faced by small-holding farmers: What is the balance between following an ideal practice versus an economically viable practice? |
14:00 | Integrating Crop and Livestock Systems: Key to Improving Long-term Production ABSTRACT. In the 1700’s, primarily Irish immigrants settled in Aroostook County Maine to grow potatoes in the rich deep loam soils. The arrival of the railroad in the late 1800’s opened reliable markets and the industry grew. Growers produced potatoes one year in four or five to allow legume hay crops to fix sufficient N to produce potatoes. Livestock manure was an essential ingredient to maintain soil quality. After World War II, potato rotations were shortened to produce more potatoes, and nutrients were supplied with commercial fertilizers and pesticides were used to control pests. By the 1950’s, Maine produced more potatoes than any other state. Because potato production requires tillage-intensive management, organic matter and soil structure degrade if soils are not rested or organic amendments are not used. Unfortunately, livestock operations are primarily located in Central Maine while potato farms are located mostly in Northern Maine precluding much sharing of land or nutrients. An exception to this is the Dorman/Fogler (D/F) operation in Central Maine. In the early 1990’s, the 6th generation Dorman family produced 350 acres of chip potatoes and averaged 250 hundred weight per acre (cwt/ac) to annually fill a 90,000 cwt storage. The Fogler family managed a 250 cow dairy operation within 10 miles of the Dorman farm. By the late 1990’s, both farms struggled. In 2003, the Dorman family considered increasing production to increase income. At the same time, the Foglers decided to increase their herd from 250 to 500, and later to over 1000 milking animals. This required more land on which to spread manure. The D/F farm families began a unique relationship to share 840 acres of land between the two farms to benefit both families. With a hand-shake agreement, this land sharing has continued for 15 years. Recently, the Fogler family adopted no-till corn and alfalfa, and they cover crop all their acreage. The Dormans grow potatoes on roughly a third of the 840 acres each year to fill the potato storage. In 2003 the Dorman family income was $56,000 per year on 350 acres of production. Today, they only produce 250 acres of potatoes to fill the storage, and their average income has increased to over $202,000. Soil health has increased dramatically, and both farm families have prospered. It is a relationship worth exploring further. |
14:15 | Expanding Adoption of Adaptive Grazing through a Public-Private Partnership in Wisconsin SPEAKER: Rod Ofte ABSTRACT. Public lands and the agencies that manage them are integrated into the rural fabric of the upper Midwest. These agencies directly manage significant acreage in agricultural areas, including vulnerable acres that would make gains in soil health, water quality, habitat and GHG sequestration by appropriately integrating adaptive rotational grazing into land management. In Wisconsin alone, over 75,000 acres of grasslands are under DNR management. Beyond land management, these agencies interface with private land owners and managers, influencing their management decisions both directly and indirectly. The practices of private land owners and managers impact a significantly larger number of acres than public agencies, including a proportionally larger number of vulnerable agricultural acres. However, public lands are uniquely positioned to serve as high profile examples, which can help normalize adaptive grazing among a commodity crop dominated landscape. However, despite increasingly robust qualitative and quantitative data on the multiple benefits of adaptive grazing, many agencies are currently under-equipped to implement and optimize adaptive grazing on the acreage they manage. The Wallace Center, through its Pasture Project, is partnering with the Wisconsin DNR to pilot the use of regenerative grazing as a conservation management tool on multiple sites. The team has built a bottom-up public land grazing model that is currently piloting adaptive grazing leases on 3 WI-DNR sites in SW-WI and working with a University of Wisconsin research team to measure environmental impacts over multiple years. Further, early financial analysis of these sites demonstrates not only cost savings to the DNR but significant revenue generation as farmers increase their access to pasture. Six additional DNR sites will be added in 2018, bringing the total DNR land engaged in adaptive grazing to approximately 1,000 acres. Both environmental and economic impacts will continue to be assessed in 2018. The team will add 7-9 additional sites between 2018-2021, resulting in 16-18 pilot sites throughout the state and potentially over 2,000 acres of public land grazing. Planning has begun to build off the success of the DNR pilot projects to not only fully operationalize regenerative grazing as a WI-DNR tool on the public lands they manage and lease for crop production, but to also use the project results as a model for other public land managers in Wisconsin and surrounding states. This session focus on partnership development, data collection and results and discuss implications for WI state policy and efforts to build interest in other Midwest states. |
Alternative agriculture
13:30 | Toward an agroecology of safety: Limitations of and possibilities for ‘deepening’ the co-management of environmental and human health in produce agriculture ABSTRACT. In 2010, a coalition of agricultural stakeholders in the California central coast authored a report titled Safe and Sustainable, which outlined a strategy to ease reported tensions between environmental conservation and microbial food safety in fruit and vegetable agriculture. Their report advocated the concept of co-management: “an approach to minimize microbiological hazards associated with food production while simultaneously conserving soil, water, air, wildlife, and other natural resources.” Food safety regulators subsequently encouraged farmers to practice co-management, and farm advisors developed technical guidance and training modules on methods for controlling the spread of human pathogens while simultaneously protecting environmental quality and ecosystem services. This positive response to the Safe and Sustainable report seemingly heralded the end of what one scholar had termed the “war on nature” (Agriculture and Human Values 25(2): 177-18), waged in the name of stamping out human pathogens in agricultural landscapes. I argue that co-management, as currently interpreted, has instead taken fresh produce safety into a ‘cold war’ phase, in which overtly environmentally-damaging practices have been replaced by a more insidious, anti-agroecological stance. I base this argument on my analysis of two distinct co-management manuals and participant observation at two recent food safety workshops for farmers. Both manuals seek to educate farmers and raise awareness of co-management, but they differ markedly in their stance toward agroecological principles. Close comparison reveals a spectrum of interpretation that ranges from ‘shallow’ to ‘deep’ co-management. The first guidance situates safety as the primary objective for a productive and profitable food system; environmental tradeoffs are inevitable and ultimately acceptable. The second document instead situates safety as one among many goals for sustainable and healthy food systems; consistent with agroecological principles, environmental synergies are possible and strict tradeoffs are unacceptable. Both documents adopt an implicit theory of change oriented at shifting cultural norms by educating farmers. However, farmers face steep structural barriers that push them toward ‘shallow’, even in-name-only, co-management. These barriers include high economic and legal stakes associated with foodborne illness and ambiguous regulatory requirements that imply farms are never safe enough. As evidenced by my participant observation, the unassailability of these barriers is reinforced during food safety trainings, particularly with respect to instructions for managing animal “hazards” and non-crop vegetation. Farmers are encouraged at every turn to approach cultivation as an ongoing conflict between ecosystems and safety. To truly ‘deepen’ safety practices in produce agriculture, these structural barriers must be adequately addressed. |
13:45 | The Alternative Food Movement: Nonprofit Perspectives on Privilege and Progress ABSTRACT. Extensive debate exists regarding the best way to create a more just food system. Some individuals use neoliberal strategies, like farmers markets which fall under the green economy umbrella, to frame their goals for change. This form of activism is sometimes criticized as limiting because it works within neoliberal structures for incremental change instead of attempting to reconceptualize our current food system. A prominent secondary criticism is that the food movement is exclusionary in its focus towards white leadership and congratulatory white activism. While scholars have debated whether the whiteness critique is true, and whether neoliberalism is a helpful tactic for achieving progress in the alternative food movement, less scholarship exists using the testimony of nonprofit food advocates themselves. This paper attempts to add further nuance to the discussion of neoliberalism and whiteness in the food movement by using semi-structured interviews with staff from three different alternative food organizations in Atlanta, GA. Food advocates discuss their entry into the food movement, perspectives on solutions for creating an alternative food movement, and their attitudes about the politics surrounding the movement. These interviews illustrate why certain solutions are held up as worthy of pursuit within the food movement space. These rich discussions touched upon the creation of priorities and a reckoning with the white privilege that the food movement has often been accused of. Most interviewees agreed with the critique of racial exclusivity in the food movement. However, many expressed apprehension to addressing the problems in a public or organizationally institutionalized way due to the sensitivity of the subject, concerns regarding stakeholder reactions, worry about the effect on the organizational reputation, and general lack of personal knowledge to address the critique responsibly. Some organizations internally address these two critiques but lack an institutional framework to continue working toward progressive action. This study highlights how neoliberal and white-privilege based dialogue is linked to personal motivations for entry into the food movement and the ways in which those ideals are championed and institutionalized within each organization. Aside from elucidating how food movement actors rationalize their modes of activism and the level of inclusion they foster within their organization, the results of this study call for deeper and more transparent institutional collaboration in addressing these critiques systematically to build a transformational and socially progressive food movement. |
14:00 | Food Webs: Positions and Perspectives ABSTRACT. Human food systems are seen as having several types of structures, including food chains, food sectors, food channels, food cycles, and others. Food webs have not been examined as extensively as other types of human food system structures. Food webs can be defined as networks of individual entities (such as a home cook) and collective entities (such as a coalition of restaurant workers) within food systems. Food webs link these entities together to exchange materials, energy, and information. Entities are located at different positions within food webs, and each position offers a different perspective for viewing other entities as well as the food system as a whole (like commercial fishermen’s positions and perspectives differing from those of nutritionists). Structural power differences exist between differently positioned entities, with more powerful entities having different perspectives from less powerful entities. Entities positioned upstream in food chains (like food growers) have different perspectives than entities positioned downstream (like food shoppers). Considering pairs and sets of entities offers insights about how food web relationships are formed, operate, and change. Within collective food web entities, individuals and groups who hold more power have less complete perspectives about the entity than those who have less power (like commercial bakery owners not understanding the scope and complexity of everyday breadmaking as extensively as bakers). Most between-entity food web relationships engage those who hold more power in entities, while those who hold less power are largely confined within their entity and have little interaction with other food web entities (like food company managers considering sources of ingredients and places to market products while food assembly line workers focus on adequately processing particular foods). However, those who hold low power within food web entities share experiences and understandings about everyday food activities with other entities having low power in different positions in food webs (such as farmworkers sharing common perspectives with supermarket workers). Overall, conceptualizing food webs as structures within food systems offers unique insights that are potentially useful to consider in conjunction with other structures and processes in food systems. |
14:15 | Farmers and Foodies SPEAKER: Kathryn De Master ABSTRACT. As alternative food movements sweep the US in the name of sustainability, justice, and health—as well as wresting back control from corporations—people are encouraged to reconnect with our food origins, and to “know [our] farmers, [and] know our food” (USDA 2012). Many people appear to be heeding this call: farm-to-table restaurants abound, farmer’s markets are thriving and expanding, and community supported agriculture is growing at a rapid pace. However, the visions of re-localized food systems underpinning these initiatives can often emphasize a nostalgic agrarian rural imaginary that stands in stark contrast to contemporary rural agricultural realities. Too, as this idyllic vision is enacted, the images and perspectives of farmers may be paradoxically appropriated, underrepresented, or even misrepresented in food movement discourse in spite of early, concerted efforts to “bring the farmer back in” (e.g. see Kloppenburg 1991). Characterizations and images of farmers also draw upon antiquated visions of Jeffersonian sole proprietors that have little in common with today’s diverse rural producers. Thus is it perhaps not surprising that even as food writers, activists, scholars, and both government and market-based initiatives all emphasize face-to-face connections with farmers, the entrenched US rural-urban divide widens. Amidst the excitement generated by alternative food system initiatives, several questions have been left largely unexplored: What are farmers’ and ranchers’ experiences of participation and/or exclusion in the food movement? Moreover, does their participation in local food initiatives differ meaningfully from more conventional practices, in which rural producers serve consumer markets in powerful metropoles? To what extent is the rural-urban divide reconfigured or reconciled within local food systems initiatives? To explore these questions, we draw first upon content analysis of alternative food system events, conferences, symposia, and popular food blogs, in order to systematically examine ways that the perspectives of farmers and ranchers are represented in alternative food systems discourse. Second, through in-depth interviews with farmers and ranchers who serve farm-to-table restaurants, farmer’s markets, and community supported agriculture initiatives, we explore the perceptions and experiences farmers and ranchers have of the food movement. Finally, we triangulate this data with in-depth interviews with chefs, food writers, farmer’s market managers, and scholars. We conclude our analysis with recommendations that aim to bridge rural-urban divides within agriculture generally, and the local food movement specifically. |
Food governance and justice
13:30 | Do experiences with the local food system change purchasing and eating behavior? Evidence from Western North Carolina SPEAKER: Leah Mathews ABSTRACT. The many barriers to healthy eating include access to real food, challenging food environments, individual motivation to change, and lack of information about what to eat or how to prepare healthy food. One approach to behavior change, then, is to reduce barriers that stand in the way of more healthful approaches to eating. The rise of farmers markets and general awareness of local food systems suggests an opportunity to reduce some of these barriers by improving access to whole foods and information about how to prepare healthy food. In addition, exposure to information about food and willingness to think differently about what is on one’s plate may prime eaters to change behavior. However, it is challenging to document actual behavior change and health outcomes that may arise from these opportunities. We propose to close the gap between knowledge and action by connecting two activities that have been shown to positively impact health behaviors--experiential food education and shopping for local food at tailgate markets. We build on the theory of change that indicates that something that may be foreign or challenging, once experienced, will seem more accessible and feasible and thus more likely to lead to action. By surveying individuals who attend or participate in experiential food education efforts, we address the question: can increased knowledge about and experience with a local food system lead to more healthful food purchase and eating behaviors? Study participants were invited to participate in local food experiences such as tastings, cooking classes, food lectures and films, and attending a farmers market. Pre-and post-intervention responses were used to analyze self-reported health and economic behaviors in order to determine the extent to which participation in the activities led to behavior changes. We find positive change in overall eating, food preparation, and food purchasing behaviors from baseline to post-study. Our results suggest that a simple, low-cost intervention to engage adults in learning about and experiencing local food can lead to a change in shopping and eating behaviors. These findings add support to the notion that enhancements to the local food system can induce behavior change that will lead to improved health outcomes. |
13:45 | Farmer Perceptions of Local Food Branding and Its Value to Their Enterprise: The Case of the Appalachian GrownTM Marketing Program SPEAKER: Leah Mathews ABSTRACT. As consumer interest in local foods and other products has grown, so too has the necessity of a mechanism to differentiate these products from non-local items. Nonprofit, government, and producer groups have developed various labeling strategies, local food messaging, and region-specific branding that producers utilize in marketing materials and product labels; there are now so many local brands and competing claims that consumers may have a challenge identifying authentically local products. At the same time, local producers who choose away or scale up from direct-to-consumer sales to place their products in grocery stores and other retail outlets are finding an increased importance of local food branding for the promotion of their products. Thus it is essential to investigate the effectiveness of local food branding. The Appalachian GrownTM program is a local food marketing and branding campaign that is well-known in the southern Appalachian region. It was launched in 2006 by the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, a nonprofit organization that is well-trusted by both producers and consumers in the region. While previous research has focused on consumer familiarity with the Appalachian GrownTM label, in this follow-on work, we examine the supplier side of the market and investigate the impact of the Appalachian GrownTM program on farm enterprises that have adopted the Appalachian GrownTM brand for differentiating their product in markets. Specifically, our research asks: how do producers perceive the Appalachian GrownTM program? How much value, and in what form, has the program brought to their enterprise? In addition, we query producer willingness to pay for the program. Results of farmer surveys conducted in 2011 and 2015 indicate that most of the 200+ producers who responded find value in the Appalachian GrownTM program and would recommend program participation to others. Nearly two-thirds of responding producers indicated their participation in the Appalachian GrownTM program helped improve sales; the average reported sales increase attributed to the program was 27%. Contingent valuation was used to estimate producer willingness to pay for the program; median willingness to pay was estimated at $60 per year. These findings should be of interest to producers of local food and consumers who utilize local food brands to identify products, as well as those who create and manage local food campaigns. In particular, the perception and willingness of producers to contribute to brand operating costs is important to consider when identifying potential financing mechanisms for local food brands. |
Challenging boundaries through food
Foods in place and time
13:30 | Reimagining Restaurants For Women, Without Meat or Drink ABSTRACT. At the very beginning of the modern restaurant, as Rebecca Spang has shown, the French word “restaurant” meant restorative -- a bouillon-based preparation for suffering invalids. Meat was at the heart of the preparation, but in an unrecognizable form. By the early nineteenth century, restaurants had become spaces for hearty eating and drinking rather than to restore one’s health. In the United States, they were also generally opportunities for male sociability and networking, while being seen as dangerous for women. Vegetarianism and temperance were both important aspects of the long cultural shift which eventually led American restaurants to welcome women alongside men. This paper examines published sources from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, tracing changes in newspaper editorials, restaurant reviews, advertisements and travel guides as restaurants were reinvented to remove alcohol and promote lighter, meatless foods, seen as more appetizing for women. Strictly vegetarian restaurants were more common in England than in the United States, but at the turn of the twentieth century many American cities had a few such restaurants. Other restaurants found ways to appeal to vegetarians without cutting all meat from the menu, and vegetarians provided each other with advice on eating out even when traveling to cities without official vegetarian restaurants. Meanwhile, as the temperance movement swelled, many kinds of restaurants emerged which served no alcohol at all. The connection between rejecting meat and rejecting alcohol came from a renewed approach to eating for health but also from a new interest in ethical, prosocial ways of eating, appealing to both men and women. Before women could feel welcome, restaurants needed to help them feel safe and respected. In the early twentieth century a growing number of restaurants focused on ethical eating as a way to provide and communicate that security. It is interesting to speculate about what kinds of restaurants will serve marijuana edibles now that that long-lasting prohibition is ending. |
13:45 | Writing, Reading and Publishing Cookbooks: A Social History of the American Vegetarian Movement SPEAKER: Emilie Hardman ABSTRACT. Since it first took root in the United States in the early nineteenth century, vegetarianism has been simultaneously a set of personal dietary choices, a cluster of broad cultural meanings, and a social movement with organized advocacy efforts. We argue that one of the best ways to study this overlap of private beliefs and practices with public concerns is through cookbooks, which have served as a central means of disseminating both vegetarian philosophy and praxis. In this paper, we examine shifts in the content and form of vegetarian and vegan cookbooks and zines, the publishers of these cookbooks, and the social worlds from which these cookbooks emerge in order to trace continuity and divergence in the vegetarian movement. We draw on archival research, interviews with cookbook authors and publishers, bibliographic information, and textual and design analysis of cookbooks themselves to document changes from the 1830s, when the earliest American vegetarian cookbook was published, to the first decade of the twenty-first century. Included in this analysis are the food choices suggested in these cookbooks – ingredients, cooking styles, and techniques of preparation – which are variably grounded in religious, political, gastronomic, or health rationales, and which serve to connect readers to a lived experience of vegetarianism and sometimes, to associated social and political affiliations as well. In this way, we frame cookbooks as supremely social texts, even as they are deployed most commonly in private realms. Further, we suggest that the highly fluid traversing of the public-private boundary positions cookbooks to serve as especially effective carriers of social movement concepts and calls to action. As a stable medium that may be consulted in any time and any place, often traveling far from their own places of origin, print vegetarian cookbooks also play an important role as part of an abeyance structure that can keep various threads of movement ideology and action alive and entwined in the current lives of their readers. We highlight particular authors and books that set out new agendas, aesthetics, language, politics, and food choices, but also make observations about the importance of the vegetarian and vegan cookbook corpus as a whole and its generally unrecognized but crucial significance for the vegetarian movement. |
14:00 | Fake Meat, Real Change: Ella Eaton Kellogg and the Invention of Modern American Vegetarian Cuisine ABSTRACT. “Companies making plant-based alternatives to a variety of animal proteins are popping up everywhere,” explained The New York Times in a May 2016 profile of Beyond Meat, a faux-meat producing company whose products arrived on the shelves of health food conglomerate Whole Foods that very month. As Tom Rich--a vegetarian, corporate representative of Whole Foods explained--the Beyond Burger “tasted and felt and chewed like any other burger, and on some level, I just want to be able to eat the same way everyone else eats.” The Beyond Burger was not merely another frozen veggie burger to enter an already saturated market of grains, vegetables, and soy, it was meant to appear fresh, sold in a refrigerated case, and included the markings of a real hamburger, including a pinkish hue, the appearance of fat, and even “blood” made from beet juice. The burgers were also invented in a food science laboratory. The makers of Beyond Meat and Whole Foods shoppers might be surprised to find out that a similar desire helped change vegetarianism and the politics of the movement more than a century earlier. The location of experimentation was also similar, though relatively new at the time. Surrounded by a few dozen beakers and interconnected Pasteur pipettes, workers clad in lab coats manipulated microscopes to try to understand the most beneficial properties of new, faux meats. The landscape of the experimental kitchen at the Battle Creek Sanitarium could easily have been mistaken for a chemistry laboratory. But the materials developed in this lab were not science for the sake of science, but science for the sake of nutrition. And it took an enterprising woman, Ella Eaton Kellogg to harness the power of science to reinvent vegetarianism in America. Ella Kellogg’s work at the helm of the experimental kitchen transformed vegetarianism through the development of meat substitutes. This paper will explore Ella Kellogg’s oft-overlooked role in developing the first mass produced vegetarian, faux meat products in the United States. In fact, Ella Kellogg was more directly involved in this process than her more well-known husband, John Harvey. |
14:15 | Finding Rhetorical Common Ground: Hunting and Fishing’s Rhetorical Blending of Feminist, Vegan, and Vegetarian Messaging within Popular Culture ABSTRACT. The ideological and rhetorical divide between hunters and vegans in popular culture is expressed most often through extreme polarization. Rhetorical actors on both sides see the two groups as incompatible in terms of lifestyles and ethical constitutions. However, there are a growing number of hunters producing rhetoric that mimics the rhetoric of the vegan and vegetarian communities, particularly as it reflects a major concern of the ecological wellbeing of the natural environment. One can even go as far as to say hunters are embracing and utilizing a more feminist rhetoric messaging within popular culture, something often attributed to vegan communities. Therefore, this paper examines the rhetorical markers of hunters who are building bridges with the rhetoric of vegans and vegetarians, along with the future implications of a united rhetorical front between these groups. |
Identities of food and farming
13:30 | Integrating Food, Farming and Values: Farmer Perceptions on their Role in Sustaining Agriculture in Bucks County, Pennsylvania SPEAKER: Marion Rubin ABSTRACT. For more than a decade, food systems scholars have noted greater attention by consumers on where the food they consume is produced and by whom, and how its production impacts the environment. This has contributed to a growth in local food movements. It has also led to increasing interest in research and activism around new systems of food choice or what Richard Le Heron refers to as “Alternative Food Movements and Networks” or AFMN (2001:60). Le Heron notes, however, that even this growing interest by international food researchers is limited because macro-level studies on food and agriculture issues are always partial. There are few contexts that are actually researched in depth (Le Heron 2013:51). In this paper, we present an initial analysis of a micro-level study of Bucks County, Pennsylvania farmers and their links and perspectives on AFMNs. The local food movement in Bucks County has been led by a grass roots organization, The Bucks County Foodshed Alliance. Their sponsorship of farmers markets plus an increase in CSAs (community supported agriculture), cooperative food markets and even “agritainment” in the region over the past two decades demonstrates a renewed interest and attention to the local food system. What can this shift tell us about farmers’ values and their perspectives on food and farming? Through an extensive online survey, our research assessed farmer and/or operator motivations for their chosen methods of production, and the meanings attributed to how farmers produce and where they choose to market their products. We also examined farmer and operator perceptions on the future of agriculture in Bucks County, and assessed their level of interest and participation in value added farm produced products as a means to increase income and consumer choice and ability to support local farms. This research was guided by the question of how “alternative” is this renewed interest in local food systems in reality? Is it driven by market demand and the financial promise of niche products for struggling small farms or is it also driven by other considerations such as concern over the ecological impacts of industrial agricultural food systems and a desire to “relocalize” our food systems? |
13:45 | Farmers' compromises to develop autonomy through agroecological practices: revealing the lock-ins of the agrifood systems SPEAKER: Véronique Lucas ABSTRACT. Autonomy is a key principle of agroecology. First scientific works of Gliessman and Altieri have positioned autonomy from the markets and external forces as one of the goals of the agroecological prospect. Farmers' and peasants' organizations, firstly in Latin America, have adopted this goal to strengthen their action for the emancipation and the local self-governance of their members. Recently in France, new public policies seeking to develop agroecology include the objective of autonomy in its legal definition. The few existing studies examining farmers' ways to increase their autonomy show how they compromise this pursuit with other aims and concrete everyday realities. Among them, the lack of appropriate resources provided by the upstream operators and the difficulty to find commercial outlets for a diversity of products form crucial lock-ins. We propose to enrich the current analysis of the dominant agrifood systems' lock-ins through the examination of the concrete strategies and compromises of French farmers seeking to increase their autonomy. Indeed, in this country, the recent public policies focusing on agroecology have shed new light on a movement of farmer-led collective projects developing agroecological practices to increase autonomy, especially in relation to input sellers. To understand this phenomenon and its implications in the dominant agrifood systems, this paper presents the main results of a research-action program focusing on the development of agroecological practices by French farmers, who are member of machinery cooperatives (Cuma). These farmers seek to increase their autonomy by relying to a greater extent on local cooperation. Our work first aims at questioning the values that guide the farmers seeking to become more autonomous through cooperation and how they manage to do it. How and why do these farmers accept to become more interdependent with their peers to increase their autonomy in relation to markets? Secondly, we analyze how they compromise to enable their pursuit of autonomy. Which lock-ins and limits of the dominant agrifood systems do these compromises reveal? In the final discussion, we examine the possible ways to re-organize the local processes of territorial and community development to found new agroecological agrifood systems. |
14:00 | "We Feed the World": Industrial Discourses and Iowa's Agroecological Farms ABSTRACT. Iowa produces more corn, soybeans, and hogs than any other state in the US. Yet even within the heart of the Corn Belt, small-scale farms growing food for local markets are appearing. Iowa's sustainable agriculture pioneers have, until recently, primarily focused on shifting towards no-till production, herbicide reductions, or cover-crops within the context of commodity grain operations (Bell 2004). Small-scale, diversified farms using organic production methods, then, can represent a new vision for agroecology on the Corn Belt. Despite their different goals and orientations, many of these small-scale farmers interact frequently with the industrial agriculture system surrounding them. From landlord and familial relationships to loan applications, ostensibly distinct systems of agricultural production often overlap in individual farmers' lives and livelihoods (Janssen 2017). This paper addresses one particular pathway through which the values of industrial agriculture can influence the experiences of alternative farmers: the "we feed the world" narrative. Repeated by farmers and promoted by public institutions and private agribusinesses alike, "we feed the world" is a ubiquitous feature of Iowa's agricultural discourse. Its parallel, "you can't feed the world farming like that," is a common critique levied at alternative farmers by actors in the conventional system, often accompanied by negative judgements on the price of direct-marketed products or the intensity of non-mechanized labor. Building on Comito et al.'s (2013) argument that "we feed the world" mediates the tension between the mutually exclusive roles of "farmer as steward" and "farmer as businessman," the paper suggests that some actors within the industrial system also wield "we feed the world" to defend against real and perceived criticisms originating from alternative agriculture. Reflecting both Malthusian fears and the country's export-oriented agriculture policy, the notion that only scientific, industrial agriculture can ensure sufficient calories for the growing world population is more a discursive self-defense strategy than a factual assessment of organic yield potentials. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic research across Iowa, this paper analyzes the effects of the "we feed the world" narrative on beginning alternative farmer's status on Iowa's agricultural landscape. It also examines how this narrative intersects with beginning farmers' perceptions of their own work, and their responses thereto. |
14:15 | Awareness and identity construction of conventional farmers - applying Luhmann's systems theory SPEAKER: Bernhard Freyer ABSTRACT. Deike Beecken, Bernhard Freyer, Valentin Fiala The focus of this study was on the tension that exists between action and attitude of conventional farmers towards ecologically sustainable management, as conventional farmers are now confronted with a twofold role of originator/sufferer from environmental problems resulting from their own intensification processes. Problem centered guided interviews were carried out at 10 small to medium sized northern german family farms with 15 individuals participating, who all had milk production as their major source of income. Farmers were asked about their self image, the subjective perception of nature, the evaluation of their own management practices and criticism by the community. An analysis of the communication process by means of analytical induction according to Florian Znaniecki served for the evaluation of the transcriptions. Furthermore, the study aimed to analyze the identity of conventional farmers using Niklas Luhmann's different-logic systems theory. The survey makes clear how the external image and the internal vision of conventional agriculture conflict with each other. Farmers are criticized by outside observers on the part of society, but they often do not regard their management as problematic. This external criticism does not seem to be reaching the system internally and therefore does not lead to a change of action towards ecologically sustainable management. The assumption made at the beginning of the study, stating that conventional farmers lack awareness of environmental sustainability and, for this reason, persist in their dual role, has been rejected in the course of the research process. On the contrary conventional farmers, regardless of their farm structure, have an awareness for environmental sustainability and recognize the problems of conventional farming. The increase in awareness is all the more pronounced, the more diversified the operational structure of a company is. Nevertheless, the consciousness does influence the identity and thus the behavior of the farm management practices. There is a clear demarcation from the surrounding agriculture on the part of the interviewees, but their own operations are mostly characterized as sustainable. The results obtained show the challenges facing future political regulations, which aim to support sustainable agriculture. |
Food systems research
13:30 | Creating the “Perfect Pantry”: The use of creative workshops and toolkits as platforms of empowerment for individuals experiencing food oppression in food assistance programs SPEAKER: Abigail Borron ABSTRACT. Serving as phase 2 of an arts-based approach to engaging food pantry clientele in an effort to formulate solutions in regard to designing a new food pantry model, this paper details the shift from a researcher-led approach to a co-constructed approach with clientele. This study explored the benefits of a participant-led, co-created, arts-based methodology as a strategy for enhanced communication and critical thinking skills with vulnerable populations at two food pantries. The research questions that led this study were: (1) How does an arts-based approach open up the discursive space around food insecurity? (2) What does arts-based research look like from a co-constructed approach? and (3) How does a co-constructed approach affect public viewing and solution building? Throughout the study, each participant shared lived experiences about food insecurity through a series of creative workshops that involved collage, found poetry, and exhibit brainstorming and design; they also shared through individual creative journaling in between workshops. During each session, participants would talk through their experiences, concerns, and ideas as they worked on and shared the meanings behind their creations with the other participants. Each group's collective work culminated into a public art exhibit representing their associated pantry. These exhibits served multiple purposes, representing a source of pride and an empowering platform for clients to share their vision of a better food assistance system; and to also remove stigma around food insecurity, while casting a wider net of communicative engagement within the community. The use of arts-based workshops resulted in clients' increased interest, emotional investment, and leadership in discussion topics as the workshop series progressed. One client took the initiative to exchange emails with the researcher and another client to discuss ideas outside of the meeting times. The use of journals proved to be a valuable source for expression and critical thinking, as well as a prompt for discussions based on creating new programs for the food pantry. Clients at one pantry ultimately chose to use the concept of a garden space at the pantry as their focal point, creating a wooden pallet garden from recycled materials and creating an action plan for implementing a garden space. The resulting exhibits also emphasized client ownership of issues and ideas, which led to the design of engagement programs at their local pantry based on their own discussion topics, with two of the most significant being a pantry garden space and client-specific support groups. |
13:45 | The Stabilizing Lives Project: Refiguring the Pantry Client SPEAKER: Hilda Kurtz ABSTRACT. Starting in fall of 2016, a metropolitan-based food bank in the southeastern United States initiated a three-year program, Stabilizing Lives, intended to focus on designing more holistic and concentrated services to partner agency clients to achieve food, housing, and financial security. In research collaboration with a land-grant university, this process was designed in two phases: (1) To help facilitate a participatory research process with staff, volunteers, and clients at five participating agencies to identify factors that promote food insecurity; and (2) to work in consultation with food pantry clientele to place the decision-making process and methods of social change into the hands of the clientele, emphasizing the capacity of participants to identify problems, emphasize and legitimize cultural meanings, and conceptualize and implement developed solutions. The overarching research question that directed this project was: Where should the food bank invest more resources to help support households’ move toward social and economic stability? Each participating agency (a total of five), through the direction of the food bank, organized a planning team that was comprised of food pantry staff (~2), volunteers (~3), and clientele (~3-5). Planning teams were intended to function as a collective and cross-representative voice of the associated agency. Research methods included a photovoice project and in-depth interviews with all participating clientele, and two focus groups with each planning team. Resulting data and subsequent analysis revealed that the current organization of emergency food distribution treats recipients as atomistic individuals, without recognizing or responding to their membership in family networks or their stage of the life course. Food pantry clientele, like anyone else, know themselves as members of families and social networks of care and obligation, and these connections strongly influence their food needs. They, like anyone else, encounter different nutritional and additional needs at different stages of the life course. In addition, food pantry clientele draw on a diverse set of social, cultural, and human capital resources to negotiate the trade-offs of living in poverty. They possess ingenuity, resourcefulness, knowledge, and experience that could be productively incorporated into re-envisioning the social safety net. Finally, results point toward a need to re-envision the current emergency food infrastructure model to more purposefully situate clientele, the food bank, and local agencies as equal partners in a re-making of the food pantry model. |
14:00 | Arts-Based Research in Food Security: A Dialogical Tool for Creating Open Communication in Social Change SPEAKER: Abigail Borron ABSTRACT. In 2016, a metropolitan-based food bank approached a southeastern land-grant university with a request to design a participatory research project that would inform the creation of more holistic and concentrated services to partner agency clients to achieve food, housing, and financial security. Focusing on a subset of the larger, collaborative research project, this paper examines the value of an arts-based research approach aimed to foster new avenues for dialogue creation and better understand held meanings and personal experiences related to food insecurity. The research questions that led this study were: (1) How does an arts-based approach open up the discursive space around food insecurity? (2) What does arts-based research look like from a researcher-led approach? and (3) How does a researcher-led approach affect public viewing and solution building? Following the completion of a photovoice project, in-depth interviews, and two focus group discussions with clients, staff, and volunteers at five participating partner agencies for the larger project, the researcher of this study used the collected data to design a public art exhibit. This art exhibit was displayed at a day-long interagency summit event that was held at the food bank, and attended by nearly 100 area stakeholders, including partner agency staff and volunteers, other non-profit leaders, legislators, and agency clientele. As part of the art exhibit, three developed pieces represented three primary themes that came out of the data: (1) Helping self and others - which was represented by "MILK," (2) Dealing with Health - which was represented by "Fresh," and (3) Complexities and uncertainties of life - which was represented by "Non-Food Items." Throughout the day, and during breaks, attendees were encouraged to complete a questionnaire that addressed viewer perceptions regarding the intended issue. Questionnaire responses revealed that viewers overwhelmingly enjoyed art as a narrative tool for client stories-while the exhibits served as key sources of dialog throughout the day. Through the questionnaire responses attendees also addressed that the lack of client-made art was a weakness in the show. Ultimately, the design process of the research-led exhibit provided invaluable critical reflexive insight for the researcher, challenging her to continually reassess personal perspective versus client perspective. Results from this project informed the second phase of research, which was to focus co-created art installations with clientele, as feedback from the survey from attendees, including clientele, indicated value in pursuing opportunities to share artwork designed and directly guided by food bank clients. |
Conflict and change: Knowledge and activism
Food and the university
13:30 | Agroecology and Interculturality ABSTRACT. With strong roots in Anthropology, the Food in Culture and Social Justice program at Oregon State University has had more of a focus on interculturality and de-colonization than many Sustainable Food Systems university programs. Interculturality is centered on cross-cultural dialogue and through this dialogue, we often discover that words with identical historical roots come to mean different things. Nowhere is this more clear than in an examination of agroecology in the US and agroecología in Latin America. In this paper, I emphasize the importance of exposing university students to agroecological movements in other places in the world as a path to de-colonizing the US classroom. A specific focus will be on an Intercultural Learning Community which takes place in Oregon and Ecuador. |
13:45 | Campus Farm, Inc.: Financing Agricultural Experiences in Higher Education SPEAKER: Amanda Green ABSTRACT. Campus farms have taken on a diversity of forms since their popularity grew in the 2000s (LaCharite 2015; Sayre and Clark 2011). A growing trend focuses campus farms on entrepreneurship and meeting the bottom line, whether the farm manager or student-entrepreneurs take on the responsibility of selling goods from the farm or faculty seek public-private partnerships to finance operations. We critically engage with this trend, focusing on both its advantages and disadvantages to the mission of institutions of higher education. Over the past year, we have conducted ethnographic fieldwork on our own campus farm at Davidson College, a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. We have also visited and spoken with several campus farm managers in the region with the primary goal of figuring out how these farms finance themselves. We explore the roles of foundation grants, academic research grants, farm sales through dining halls, CSAs, and farmers markets, student paid and unpaid labor, and community volunteers in making campus farms financially sustainable. We ask: how do sources of funding impact the missions of campus farms, including how they facilitate experiential education and critical thinking for students, build relationships and food security for the community, and produce food for local communities. What are the risks, what is lost and what is gained, as we shape campus farms into entrepreneurial projects? We find both advantages and disadvantages to this approach and make recommendations for best practices. |
14:00 | Invisible Hungry Students: Culturally sensitive approaches to encourage participation in identifying food insecure college students SPEAKER: Kristen Borre ABSTRACT. Food insecurity recently has been identified as a growing problem among college students, especially those who are first generation students (Dubick, Mathews, and Cady 2016). Universities are slow to identify the problem even though food insecurity impacts learning and academic success. Through campus wide surveys, student interviews, and participant observation at a campus food pantry, risk factors and coping strategies were identified for undergraduate and graduate students at a state university. Minority students participated in the campus food pantry weekly; however, they were underrepresented in the research survey to assess food insecurity and follow-up interviews. The study offered cash incentives for interviews and opportunities for 25 students to win bags of groceries of their choice for participation, but those incentives were not sufficient to obtain minority participation. The sample of 800 students was primarily composed of women, international students, and Euro-American students. We explore the reasons for lack of participation in the study by minorities and describe the use of culturally sensitive recruitment strategies to improve participation during Spring 2018. The results of this ongoing study will be used to demonstrate the problem of food insecurity among college students and its potential impact on their academic success and wellness. Final reports will be shared with the campus food pantry staff, faculty, university administrators, and community organizations that serve college students. The authors hope the study will encourage policies and programs to increase food security of at risk students. |
14:15 | Communiversity Gardens offer Fresh Perspective SPEAKER: Melissa Burlingame ABSTRACT. Starting as a way to grow food on campus, the Communiversity Gardens at Northern Illinois University (NIU) have grown to play a much larger role in transforming the culture of food and health for students, faculty, and staff. The NIU Communiversity Gardens broke ground in May of 2014 as a partnership between the university and the DeKalb County Community Gardens. Under the advisement of staff from the Institute for the Study of the Environment, sustainability, and Energy, and the Office of Student Engagement & Experiential Learning, 15 student interns have been mentored to serve the community through the Communiversity Gardens to date. Several of the student interns presented on their experiences at local and regional conferences. In addition more than 800 volunteers have donated more than 2800 hours to ensure that produce is grown, harvested, and made available to students and the community. During this same time, faculty and staff recognized the need to integrate engagement opportunities with the Communiversity Gardens into the curriculum. As a result, the interdisciplinary Certificate of Undergraduate Study in Sustainable Food Systems has been created and connects number of related courses offered in departments across several disciplines. Since the fall of 2016, 21 students have enrolled in the certificate program and widened their knowledge about the food, food systems, and food justice. Given the university’s geographic location and the fact that it does not offer a major in agricultural studies, the certificate is a popular choice for students interested in sustainable agriculture, horticulture, and nutrition. With the roll-out of the interdisciplinary certificate the new required course, Introduction to Sustainable Food Systems, began enrollment in the fall 2015. This general education course is offered to students across the university and introduces them to the broad array of topics surrounding food and, depending on the season, provides them with adequate time for hands-on experiences in the gardens or at the greenhouse. The students are often interested in ways to improve campus eating habits and this course offers ways for students to collaborate with the NIU Huskie Food Pantry to increase education on nutritional diversity and provide vegetable eating guides. Thanks to the growing faculty and student interest in food and food systems, NIU was able to add another general education course, Philosophy of Food, offered through the Philosophy department. |
13:30 | Working with the senses SPEAKER: Emily Yates-Doerr ABSTRACT. “How does the labor of sensing work?” From embodied instruments such as tongues and taste receptors to sensory prosthetics like blood pressure monitors and pain-response scales, sensory facilities are constantly working. Yet accounting instruments such as timecards and surveys—themselves the heart of economic metrics that decide what is and is not work—routinely erase the waged and unwaged labor of “the sensorium,” as well as its economic and moral values. In a double-move, these instruments also produce the sensorium as something that must be labored upon. How do these sensorial absent-presences come to shape the practices of taste science, nutritional epidemiology, supplementation, artisanal craft production, and agricultural justice? How is sensorial labor valued--and how might it be valued otherwise? This experimental roundtable brings together food studies, critical nutrition, and science and technology studies to unpack the work of sensing. Through interactive conversation with each other and the audience, we explore the human and cyborg techniques used to transform sensing into knowledge and related goods, asking what, and who, bears the burden when things produced through these processes don’t “work.” We consider the messy, dynamic lives of sensory labor-atories -- scientific or otherwise -- and in the process call for an expansion of Critical Food Politics to inquire what futures are made possible by working, or more delightfully, playing, with the senses. |
Roundtables (SAFN sponsored)
13:30 | Meet the Grantmakers: Opportunities for funding in Food and Agriculture for the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences SPEAKER: Ariela Zycherman ABSTRACT. This roundtable discussion will highlight opportunities for students, faculty, and community organizations to apply for funding from federal and non-governmental sources. The session will provide an overview of the agencies and organizations and their funding opportunities. These include research, extension, education, and community development support for practitioners, faculty, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students. We will showcase investment areas that can support the theoretical and methodological contributions of the arts, social sciences, and humanities. We will discuss broader funding trends in food, agriculture, nutrition, health, and community development, including interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and disciplinary specific pathways. In addition, we will review grantsmanship, including timelines for submission, and offer tips and advice for conceiving of and submitting competitive proposals. Roundtable Participants: Douglas Constance- Southern SARE, Sam Houston State University Wesley Dean, USDA-National Institute of Food and Agriculture Clare Hinrichs- Northeast SARE, Pennsylvania State University Sunil Iyengar- National Endowment for the Arts Ariela Zycherman, USDA-National Institute of Food and Agriculture |
Pyle Center, ATT Lounge
The Politics of integrating values, food, and farming
15:30 | Domestic Fair Trade and Policy Efforts to Enhance Earnings of Agricultural Laborers: Lessons from a Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems Multi-Disciplinary Research Initiative SPEAKER: Bradford Barham ABSTRACT. The panel will present findings from the core projects of our two year USDA grant on Domestic Fair Trade and Agricultural Labor. This panel features a review and synthesis of six case studies related to Organic Valley logistics; Milk with Dignity campaign; Good Food Purchasing Policies; Wisconsin CSA farms; Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship; and $15/hr minimum wage campaigns. These case studies focus on strategies, such as coalition-building, supply chain negotiation, certification, and public policy, to explore the extent to which they were successful at improving labor practices and returns and to identify challenges to moving them forward. It will also feature an empirical analysis of American Community Survey data from 2014 and 2015 of wage patterns of farm workers, along with food and janitorial workers, to identify whether there are notable patterns of wage discrimination or lower earnings in agriculture or for specific demographic groups. The panelists will compare and contrast the evidence from these different research efforts and discuss future market-led and government policy paths related to improving labor practices and earnings for agricultural labor, including family farm operators. |
Agroecology: On the ground practices
Alternative Agriculture
15:30 | How do value systems around food ultimately shape landscapes?: 50 years of the Chez Panisse network SPEAKER: Sasha Pesci ABSTRACT. Alternatives to the globalized industrial food system have been gaining momentum in the U.S. since the 1970s, with the slow and local food movements. While scholarship has widely covered the potential and faults of direct agricultural markets and local food systems, focusing on farms, farmers markets, and CSAs (Feenstra 1997; Anderson and Cook 2000; Hinrichs 2000; Born and Purcell 2006; Feagan 2007), few studies explore the impact of restaurants in alternative food networks (Starr et al. 2003). This research traces the impact of over 50 years of intentionally local sourcing to uncover the magnitude of farm-to-restaurant enterprises. With the leadership of acclaimed chef Alice Waters, Chez Panisse, established in Berkeley, CA in 1971, pioneered a wide network of food businesses and farms that are supporting local food procurement. Their open kitchen approach encourages close ties between chefs and customers, and between chefs and farmers (Chebrough et al. 2014). Since its establishment, the restaurant’s menus have been based on regional, seasonal ingredients that have sometimes been fertilized with food waste from the restaurant (Kim 2013), also fostering a closed and seasonal food cycle. By analyzing historical data on the network of staff alumni and their spin-off businesses, and related farms that supply these businesses, we map the expansion of social ties and related acreages impacted by this local food movement over time. Through qualitative analysis with in-person interviews, we explore the magnitude and the impact that the network has had on the ways in which people have been growing and consuming food in the region, and gain an understanding of how the values of the movement have flowed throughout the network. This research informs the sociology of economic markets and social movements more broadly. We employ the theory of embeddedness (Hinrichs 2000) with geosocial network analysis to understand the interplay between social movement diffusion, geography and demographic characteristics of network actors. Embeddedness refers to the idea that the market and economic behavior are mediated by social relations, which are often reflected in the close social ties that take place in direct agricultural markets (Hinrichs 2000). With this research, we extend the theory of embeddedness to unearth the role of social networks in alternative food markets, and show how the Chez Panisse network has cultivated a national movement with a palate for agroecological, sustainable, localized, and overall caring forms of food production and consumption that shape landscapes of production. |
15:45 | “Poverty wages are not fresh, local, or sustainable”: Exposing the contradictions of sustainability-branded capitalism and building worker power in the farm-to-table foodservice and retail industries ABSTRACT. Tourists from all over the world flock to Portland, Oregon to consume artisanal delicacies and dine in hip farm-to-table (FTT) restaurants. FTT diners ‘vote with their forks’ to achieve environmental sustainability and champion local farmers and award-winning chefs, both predominantly white and male. Yet, racialized and gendered hands, bodies, and minds perform the majority of FTT labor, and many of those who work in FTT experience the same poverty wages, erratic scheduling, discrimination, and other exploitative labor practices that plague the foodservice industry at large. In short, those working in the ‘sustainable’ food economy are struggling to sustain themselves. Through empirical research conducted in partnership with workers and organizers, I investigate labor exploitation, worker organizing, and sustainability discourse in restaurants and grocery stores that prepare, serve, and distribute local and organic food in Portland. I extend conversations about the social relations of local, fair trade, and organic agriculture (Born & Purcell, 2006; Brown & Getz, 2008; DuPuis & Goodman, 2005; Guthman, 2011, 2014; Jaffee, 2007), further down the food chain to examine the exploitative, racist, and patriarchal labor relations of the FTT foodservice and retail industries. Drawing on 45 in-depth interviews, two years of participant observation, and qualitative content analysis of company advertisements and organizing materials, I demonstrate how values-based discourse masks exploitative labor practices that make it difficult for workers to meet their basic needs, and I investigate how workers are pushing back against sustainability-branded capitalism. I position social reproduction – the work and care necessary to fulfill human needs and reproduce the next generation (Luxton and Bezanson, 2006) – as an important terrain of political struggle for low-wage workers, and highlight the unique opportunities that the FTT foodservice and retail industries offer workers who are organizing for better jobs and lives. I offer insight into how workers are forging more just conceptions of sustainability and how FTT and other alternative food advocates can support these efforts. |
16:00 | Field Notes from the Dining Beat: How Restaurants and Food Critics Sold American Diners on Farm-to-Table Orthodoxy SPEAKER: John Kessler ABSTRACT. In 2000, about the only thing that was labeled “farm-to-table” was salmonella. The expression, which ultimately went from cutting-edge to cliché in under a decade, was then used exclusively by food scientists discussing the risks associated with raw or undercooked-shell eggs. Within a few years, though, every American who ate in a restaurant had learned to associate “farm-to-table” with happiness and health: The prototypical farm-to-table meal was a grilled chop from a well-cared-for pig, lightly salted and served alongside heirloom applesauce and greens grown by that nice guy from the community contra dance. Farm-to-table was pitched as the opposite of Big Ag, and was undeniably successful in prompting some consumers to think more critically about their food sources. But now that the movement has come and gone, it’s worth asking whether it in fact delivered on its promise to improve American food, and the working conditions of the people responsible for producing it. Did the drumbeat of support for local food result in better farming practices and more sustainable agricultural economies? Or did the hype surrounding farm-to-table drown out its potential, harming small-scale farmers and eaters alike? Because the farm-to-table movement was so closely entwined with dining culture, we propose to report on how the philosophy played out in restaurants, and tackle the above questions from a restaurant-goers’ perspective. We also hope to explore how honesty, skill and professionalism fared in the farm-to-table era, which created a new class of culinary hero. All three of us worked as food critics during farm-to-table’s heyday, so had thousands of chances to examine these matters by the light of an Edison bulb: John Kessler was the dining critic at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for 18 years; Hanna Raskin served as a critic in Asheville, Dallas and Seattle before joining Charleston’s Post and Courier as its critic; The Tampa Bay Times’ Laura Reiley, in addition to reviewing restaurants, wrote the Pulitzer Prize-nominated ‘Farm to Fable’ series, scrutinizing sourcing claims at restaurants and farmers markets. We propose to open our presentation with a very short overview of the trend and its measurable effects, along with a survey of the movement’s milestones. This introduction will be followed by a less structured discussion, giving audience members an opportunity to participate in this important conversation about the ways in which current thinking about food and farming reaches the public – and what happens next. |
16:15 | Pressing from the Top Down or Emerging from the Grassroots: Who and What is the Farm to Institution System Transforming? SPEAKER: Mark Haggerty ABSTRACT. Sustainability is becoming an increasingly important characteristic in the realm of food systems as worldwide agriculture begins to approach the limits of the natural world. Farm to Institution (F2I) supply chains represent an alternative agrifood system which possess great potential to aid in an overarching food system transformation from a conventional supply chain to a more local and sustainable food procurement network. By linking local food producers with large institutional purchasers such as universities and hospitals, F2I programs hold the capacity to feed a local community while also promoting social, economic, and environmental sustainability. However straightforward it may seem, countless challenges have been encountered by those who have begun to explore such markets. The purpose of this session is to illustrate such challenges and discuss the benefits and opportunities that are also evident in F2I supply chains. Working with influence from our community partner Maine Farm to Institution (MEFTI), we provide a comprehensive analysis of studies and reports previously done in the New England region (U.S.A.) in order to illustrate a concise understanding of the current conditions in the regional F2I market. We also present qualitative data analysis results from a pilot study of interviews done with supply chain actors in Maine (n=5) to cross validate with our literature review findings. While our research suggests that at present there are still numerous obstacles being faced by supply chain actors in New England F2I markets, it also indicates a promising amount of potential benefits and opportunities. With understanding of both the challenges and opportunities as perceived by supply chain stakeholders, as well as their impression of the linkage between F2I and sustainability, we can begin to assess how viable Farm to Institution may be as a sustainable alternative to conventional food systems. |
Food governance and justice
15:30 | Universal Free School Meals Programs in Vermont Show Multi-domain Benefits SPEAKER: Josiah Taylor ABSTRACT. 14% of Vermont children live in a household that is food insecure, meaning that children in these homes experience hunger or reduced food consumption due to a lack of family financial resources. School meals for low-income children provide an avenue to combat the impact of poverty and food insecurity on child development and roughly 43% of Vermont youth receive free or reduced price meals in school. For eligible districts recently available federally funded universal free school meals programs provide all children meals regardless of income. The following paper draws on analysis from 2017 research that surveyed staff at 57 K-12 schools in Vermont which have implemented universal free meals programs. This project partners closely with Hunger Free Vermont to examine the influence of universal free school meals on multiple domains of child development to further strengthen Vermont school food and policy initiatives aimed at reducing hunger and improving childhood development, especially for Vermont’s most vulnerable children. The specific research questions guiding this project include: 1. How has the implementation of universal free school meals influenced the school climate? 2. How has the implementation of universal free school meals influenced student academics and student behavior within each school? 3. What are the implications of implementation of universal free school meals on school finances and school food programs? The data is derived from an online survey sent to 240 school principals, assistant principals, school nurses, food service workers, business managers, and special and para- educators. Of 240 invited to the survey, 116 participated. Participants responded to the survey from February 24 – May 15, 2017. The survey used an online platform, with 26 questions including basic demographics, utilizing both a 5-point likert scale as well as open-ended response formats. Results consistently showed positive impacts for schools in Vermont that implement universal free meals programs. Respondents confirmed that universal meals programs correlate with increased readiness to learn, reduced food-insecurity, better school meal program finances, and improved social climate in participating schools. This study offers unique data and analysis relevant to policy makers and other researchers as it represents one of the first and only statewide studies of K-12 universal school meal programs in the United States. |
15:45 | A Participant Action Research project toward rural food justice in the Adirondack North Country, NY ABSTRACT. In this presentation, Dr. Abatemarco will describe preliminary findings from a Participant Action |
16:00 | Diverging Food Sovereignty Frames in Maine: Understandings for collective mobilization across global contexts SPEAKER: Shannon Brenner ABSTRACT. Food sovereignty has emerged as an innovative and diverse movement that calls for the integration of agroecological practices and social values to strengthen the resilience of community food systems. By emphasizing both food as a human right and the democratic participation of those producing and consuming the food, food sovereignty aims to ensure economic viability for small farmers, environmental justice for local ecosystems, and food that nourishes both the culture and health of communities. One of the originators of the movement in the global South, Via Campesina, positions itself as a voice for landless people, peasants, and indigenous peoples and frames food sovereignty in direct opposition to neo-liberal policies that promote the power of corporations, inequitable trade, and systematic injustice. The food sovereignty concept has recently been adopted by food system activists in the global North, and many believe it is important to understand how the term is being transposed into this geography. Previous work suggests that opposition to neo-liberalism and promotion of social justice are being weakened in the context of the global North. This presentation aims to explore how food sovereignty is framed in the context of the state of Maine to contribute to this understanding. Recent legislation in this state has paved the way for municipalities to declare themselves food sovereign, which would exempt local producers from state regulation. Investigation of discourse from news sources as well as activists on the ground reveals diverse understandings of the food sovereignty concept in Maine. The most prominent themes involve a desire to promote individual choice and food freely sold in local markets, as well as a libertarian-like opposition to regulation. These themes contrast with weaker, but still present concerns for local producers, local food resiliency, community health and food access, as well as anti-corporate sentiment, all of which align more with the principles of food sovereignty in the global South. Ultimately, this case study supports the idea that understandings of food sovereignty may differ across global contexts, as well as within regions. Implications of these differences contained within a food sovereignty frame need to be further explored to determine their collective action potential and whether they can be bridged without compromising the underlying goals and ideals of the food sovereignty movement. |
16:15 | Critical Disability Studies Lessons for Food Policy Councils: A Prince Georges County, MD “Food Equity” Case Study ABSTRACT. Located outside Washington, DC, Prince George’s is one of the wealthiest majority African-American counties, and one of the highest-income counties overall, in the US. Yet its 9.2% poverty rate, while lower than that of DC, is the highest of all Maryland and Virginia counties surrounding the city. Prince George’s contends with significant disparities in income levels, food insecurity, and health measures. The highest rates of diet-related illnesses occur in its most urban areas and inside the Capital Beltway, “food swamps” where gas station and convenience stores, carry-outs, fast food, and other restaurants prevail over grocery stores offering fresh foods. Where persistent disparities in health and well-being occur along race/ethnicity, class, and gender lines, Critical Disability Studies offers tools for understanding and responding to inequities in ways that have great potential to advance food justice. I will explore these possibilities using Prince George’s County (where I reside) and its Food Equity Council (on which I serve) as a case study. The Prince George’s County, MD, Food Equity Council (or FEC) predicates its very existence on the pursuit of food equity. Critical disability insights suggest that disability issues pervade the equity concerns that the Council is pursuing. Arising from 1970s activism by disabled people, the interdisciplinary field of critical disability studies contests “the mainstream view of disability as deficit or pathology” while advocating for “both accommodation and equality for disabled people in all areas of life” (Reaume 2014). The field also critiques a charity model of disability “for providing badly needed services without engaging the underlying causes of social exclusion” (Reaume 2014). Stated simply, the field highlights disability as part of the human condition rather than exception to it (Wendell 1996). This expansive notion of disability highlights a broad and complex range of concerns, such as the structural factors underlying diet-related chronic illnesses. In a qualitative study of food access in upstate New York which did not sample for disability or health status, the remarkable “unanticipated finding emerged that nearly one-half of all participants…had a variety of health conditions and disabilities that limited food access and, in turn, healthy, affordable food” (Webber, Sobal, Dollahite, 2007). Disability understandings of access--and the many types of barriers to participation in society—can offer food equity efforts new, more inclusive ways of conceptualizing and addressing food access. |
Challenging boundaries through food
15:30 | Cereal Citizens: Making Bread and Shaping the Moroccan Food System ABSTRACT. The Moroccan economy has liberalised rapidly over the last three decades. Agriculture – still the country’s most important employment sector – increasingly shifts from small-scale, often subsistence, farming to large-scale farming, often for export. Coupled with population growth, this caused a rural exodus and ever-increasing urbanisation. At the same time, the Moroccan government continues to regulate the production, distribution and consumption of wheat – still the unchallenged staple of Moroccan (food) culture – to ensure national food security. To do so, it both supervises the import of cheap wheat from abroad and subsidises domestic wheat production, despite its high costs. The resulting food system is marked by these conflicting policies and, in light of the recent global food price rises, increasingly exposed to uncertainty and risk. In this contribution, which is based on long-term ethnographic research in and around Marrakech and Beni Mellal, I seek to disentangle these processes by adopting the rather unusual perspective of urban domestic breadmakers, especially those who are recently urbanised and poor. To identify what they consider good wheat for making flour and bread, including considerations of cost, they rely on their rural origins and bodily knowledge of regional agriculture and ecology. Their agro-ecological knowledge and emphasis on controlling as much of the process of making flour and bread themselves are also reflected in urban food space: weekly markets that supply regionally sourced grains are ubiquitous and even newly built neighbourhoods in the fast growing urban peripheries boast a small mill where locals can grind their grains and a public wood-fired oven that testifies to the continuing importance of homemade bread’s distinct tastes and textures. Drawing on the centrality of bread as the unchallenged staple of Moroccan (food) culture, I propose the notion of ‘cereal citizens’ to conceptualise how in making homemade bread recently urbanised poor Moroccans contribute to shaping the Moroccan food system. I will demonstrate how this laborious preparation of bread not only reflects the government's contradictory agricultural policies, but also how especially women’s bodily practices are a crucial feature of the political economy of food. Their breadmaking constitutes not only the basis of daily sustenance and social life; it also creates core cultural values that slot into the government’s agricultural policies. Finally, these practices also point towards an uncertain future for both recently urbanised poor Moroccans and the Moroccan food system. |
15:45 | Farm to Chopsticks: Culinary Infrastructure of Duck in the Toronto Chinese Community SPEAKER: Katerina Konstantopoulos ABSTRACT. In 1954 King Cole Ducks started operation as a family-run farm in rural Ontario to fill a unique market niche: providing fresh ducks to Toronto’s rapidly growing Chinese community. Through specializing in the production of this less-common, semi-aquatic fowl, King Cole engaged in intergenerational, intercultural, and interethnic conversations. The relationship between King Cole and Toronto’s extensive Chinese community provides a fascinating farm to chopsticks journey. As the duck moves from a white family farm in Ontario to elegant Chinese restaurant tables, King Cole, Chinese Torontonian Chinese restaurateurs and distributors, and consumers engage in dynamic discussions of cultural incorporation, preservation, and cooperation. From both Chinese and non-Chinese perspectives, our research uses oral histories from the multiple agents involved in duck production and consumption, and local archival resources to retrace duck’s journey within Toronto’s intercultural culinary infrastructures. King Cole’s opening comes after a very important year for the Chinese Toronto community: 1947 the end of Canada’s Chinese exclusion act. With the end of exclusion, the Toronto Chinese community stabilized and grew with later waves of immigration from Hong Kong that came later in the twentieth century due to increasing uncertainty with the rise of a communist China. These new ethnically Chinese Torontonians brought with them a historical Chinese appetite for duck that has been developing since the Han dynasty, as archeological evidence has shown. To feed this diasporic desire for a taste of home, Chinese Torontonians would need to the cooperate with their new neighbors, which in this case was King Cole. For the non-Chinese Torontonian consumer, President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1972, and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s in 1973, made Peking duck emblematic of Chinese cuisine within North America. Coupled with images of the Cantonese roast ducks hanging in windows in Chinatown, duck emerged as a dish that captured the exoticism and elegance that characterized the rejuvenation of Chinese cuisine after North Americans had grew tired and too comfortable with the once exciting Cantonese fare. With multiple palates to please and a single farm distributor, our research retraces the tremendous farm to chopstick journey of duck through and outside of Toronto’s Chinese culinary infrastructure. Along the way our research engages in questions of meaning, taste, and terroir from an intercultural perspective that considers the multiple backgrounds and nostalgias attached to this iconic culinary item. |
16:00 | The agri-culinary ecology of spice growing and kitchen craft: Macau and it’s Goan cooks ABSTRACT. A culinary rather than a botanical term, the word ‘spice’ is used to describe a biological mismatch of flowers, berries, fruits, stigmas, seeds, roots and bark that alter colour, flavour, and add medicinal properties to foods. The imprecision links kitchens in a complicated line to agricultural plans and debates around climate resilience - a total trajectory between production and consumption (Appadurai,1986) and an agri-culinary ecology of growing and cooking worlds. Macau, a special administrative region in south China, where its small, longstanding Goan community claim a special place in Lusophone foodways, provides the context for the exploration of this imprecision and the tensions it produces in discourses of continuity and change. This is particularly clear in the practices of cooking and feasting in this multi-faith community, it’s various food prohibitions, and the challenge over time in capturing the particular savoury sour notes of its iconic dishes. Such tensions have increased in a city independent from China until 2049 under the terms of its handover by Portugal, yet one that continues its centuries-long almost total dependence on its powerful neighbour for its meat, vegetables, rice and water. In the decade since the Food and Agriculture Organisation promoted the growing of spices as climate smart smallholder agriculture, China has emerged as a major spice producer, processor and exporter. It is now the largest spice supplier to the EU, where precisely formulated ready-mixes and ready meals drive demand, and where debates about heavily processed foods have intensified. This has parsed China’s spice world with global discourses of health and food provenance. On first view, Macau seems less vocal than its neighbour Hong Kong over concerns about the food it imports from China. Yet it is in the acts of choosing spices, where they come from, what work they do, and of wrapping spice mixes around meats and vegetables and rice where Goan cooks prepare for church feasts and food festivals that demonstrate the extent to which imprecision of spice, and between sameness and change is vitalising. Doing what they should and what they want sits imperfectly with orally transmitted recipes, contested Goan recipe books, a suitcase trade in processed condiments, and materials bought in traditional Chinese pharmacies and grocery stores. These acts engage and question the ecology of growing and cooking, immigrant bodies, belonging and the food of China. |
16:15 | Tasting Balut: Culinary Nationalism and the Consumption of Fertilized Duck Eggs in the United States ABSTRACT. Balut, fertilized duck eggs, is a popular street food in Southeast Asia, including the Philippines. Using data from fieldwork in the U.S., this paper will examine the consumption of balut in the Filipino diaspora. In the United States, balut consumption by those of Filipino heritage fall along the lines of culinary nationalism. A closer look at how balut has become an overt display food in public spaces such as festivals can reveal the rise of Filipino nationalist sentiments amidst the backdrop of protests against balut’s portrayal in mainstream Western media. This, coupled with the fact that Filipino Americans are now the second biggest Asian group in the United States, has pushed balut to the forefront as arguably the most identifiable food from Filipino culture, competing for attention with long-term crowd-pleasers adobo (meat cooked in vinegar), pansit (noodles) and lumpia (egg rolls). This paper will be on the consumption of fertilized duck eggs as an outgrowth of culinary nationalism for Filipino Americans and for other reasons shared by non-Filipinos. It looks at what is being communicated in the consumption of balut, whether in small groups or in large competitive eating contests in festivals. I argue such events can be seen as a localized genre that can be interpreted as a resistance to the exoticization of this Filipino food. In that sense, it can be seen as a “countercuisine” which ends up garnering one culinary capital in the mainstream. |
Foods in place and time
Identities of food and farming
15:30 | Standing on Our Forbearers Shoulders We Come Together to Discuss Race and Food SPEAKER: Scott Alves Barton ABSTRACT. Thinking ahead, 2019 will be the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Doris Witt’s Black hunger food and the politics of U.S. identity, the thirtieth anniversary of Jessica B. Harris’s Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa’s Gifts to New World Cooking, the fortieth for Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the fiftieth for Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, and the 400th anniversary of the colonial enslavement of West Africans in the U.S. In light of these paradigm-shifting milestones, we will honor the aforementioned authors who moved the dialogue forward. Taking stock of the current state of the field from a critical perspective is necessary. Concurrently we honor and call our ancestors, as well as the nameless black and brown cooks, dishwashers, mammies, farmers, and laborers who helped provision, harvest, prepare, serve, or teach us how to produce the food for our tables. This multi-disciplinary roundtable proposes to utilize critical scholarship of race, gender/feminism, cultural studies, and queer theory to assess and discuss the circulation of food within hierarchies of power, race, and the political stakes inherent and often ignored when discussing production, consumption, and commensality. We might ask what does food become when we consider race and, conversely, how might we view race differently through food practices? What difference does race make in the fields where food is grown, the places where it is sold, or the manner in which it is consumed? The country has become polarized around issues of race, white supremacy, oppression of women, and partisan politics; currently deemed as tribal and biased. By engaging a cross-section of scholars from the Humanities and Social Sciences we aim to explore how the humanities enters food studies or food studies enters the humanities when the subject is centered on race, gender, and justice. |
Food systems research
15:30 | Rural Food Systems: Research Trajectories that Evaluate Social, Ecological and Economic Impacts SPEAKER: David Conner ABSTRACT. Food systems and their relationship to rural economic development are often overlooked in the literature, as early analysis often focused on urban and peri-urban food systems (Jablonski et al 2017). While there has been renewed interest in the impact of urban food systems on rural wealth creation (Schmit et al. 2017), and policy development for food systems in rural areas (Whittaker, Clark & Raja, in review), (unintentional) urban bias in food system analyses might obscure pathways for rural development. In this session, we propose to identify the questions that have been raised by our recent research in order to develop new research trajectories that focus on understanding how food system activities operate in rural areas and evaluation of their social, ecological and economic impacts. In order to do this, we must understand how food circulates in rural areas in both formal and informal channels; the impacts of agricultural and food system activities on rural wealth creation; and the processes of governance that support policy development for rural food systems. Presenters in this session will give 5-7 minute lightning talks that address indicators for rural wealth creation, identification of channels of local food circulation, and development of governance mechanisms in rural food systems. The rest of the session will be devoted to discussion of the key questions raised and potential new trajectories of research for understanding rural food systems. Moderator: Jill Clark, Ohio State University. Lightning Talks: •Mary Hendrickson, University of Missouri – "Localism and Rural Food Systems – Exploring How Food Moves in Rural Communities" • David Conner, University of Vermont – "Lessons learned from the Northeast" •Aiden Irish, Ohio State University – "Collaborative Governance and Policy Development in Rural Food Systems” |
Conflict and change: Knowledge and activism (SAFN sponsored)
15:30 | Tipping Ideology: Comparative Rhetorical Critique of the National Restaurant Association and Restaurant Opportunites Center United ABSTRACT. NOTE: Panel Title "Minimum wage, Migration, #Metoo, and Media: Restaurants at the Center of Social Change" Using a comparative ideological rhetorical critique, this paper seeks to highlight the distinct methods of persuasion employed by those debating the issue of restaurant worker wages and the tipping system. In recent years, a debate has begun to emerge regarding restaurant worker wages to assess if the current system needs reform. I will analyze two lobbying organizations, the National Restaurant Association and Restaurant Opportunities Center United, for the presented and suggested elements of their argument in order to assess the underlying ideologies present in each. It is my assertion that the ideological tensions in the approach to the subject of tipping prevent true dialogue between parties and instead create parallel narratives that conflict with one another. Understanding the rhetorical nature of the construction of the sides of the debate will point toward a more complete understanding of the data, arguments, and players involved in framing the issue of restaurant worker wages. |
15:45 | When Southern Means African and Her Tips Mean $15/Hour: The Wages of Restaurant Equity SPEAKER: Chloe Landrieu-Murphy ABSTRACT. Why do restaurants--particularly those now popular for featuring "high-end Southern cuisine"--serve an "indispensable role" in "American" culture? How does this indispensable role serve as a "black mirror" for the historical legacy of the plantation in US culture and agriculture? As we (student and teacher) join you (presenters and audience) to explore the restorative role of public eating houses, our mouths will become organs of both expression and ingestion. What will we taste when we taste chef Edouardo Jordan's "Hoppin' Johns black-eyed peas" from Seattle's acclaimed Junebaby (as take-out)? When we participate in a $799 billion restaurant industry employing the nation's second-largest private sector workforce, for what are we paying and to whom? When eating at Seattle's most celebrated, culturally attentive, and sustainably-oriented restaurants, whose labor values are being redistributed and whose cultural values are being expressed when the tip goes from the front of the house to the back … as a $15 an hour minimum wage? Although talk of organic growing practices, sustainability, and farm-to-table culinary breeding networks that link seed breeders, growers, chefs and eaters have become widespread in conversations surrounding food justice movements, discussions regarding the gendered and racialized elements of restaurant work often lead to (and from) indigestion--even when contained by "scare quotes." In this session we'll consider the organoleptic, affective, and profoundly subjective characteristics, yet always already public act, of ingestion as an expression of the wages of "eating out." |
16:00 | Ethics, Justice, Taste: Restaurant Critics and Social Movements ABSTRACT. In October 2017, Brett Anderson published a long investigative article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune revealing the existence of an extensive culture of sexual harassment at restaurants run by celebrity chef John Besh. This was a watershed moment, not only because it led to the resignation of Besh from the leadership of his restaurant empire and not only because it helped trigger a deeper debate about the working conditions faced by women across the industry. One key aspect of this report was the author himself. Anderson’s main role at the newspaper was as restaurant critic, a position usually associated more with taste-making than with investigative journalism. Anderson’s report raised sharp questions about the conduct of management and workers in restaurants, but it also raised questions about the proper role of restaurant critics. What, as New Yorker gastronomy writer and critic Helen Rosner later asked, is the moral responsibility of restaurant critics in the age of #metoo? Restaurants have long been central to social change, providing sites for challenges to class, gender, and racial hierarchies over much of the 20th century. Restaurant critics have played a key role in shaping the way people think about restaurants, sometimes in collaboration with owners and chefs, but often in the face of considerable resistance from the industry. Most debates around the ethics of restaurant criticism have focused on the ability of the critics to fairly evaluate restaurants. But there have also long been more subtle efforts by some critics to use their platform to offer commentary that went beyond food, service, and atmosphere. There is not a clear consensus among critics about their obligations in reporting and commenting on social issues beyond matters of taste in restaurants. This paper draws on the history of restaurant criticism in New Orleans—interviews with critics as well as a close reading of the archives—to examine the ways restaurant writers have chosen to address the relationship between restaurants and social movements. It asks how critics have chosen (or not) to assert their own moral authority when confronted with questions of social justice in the restaurant industry. |
16:15 | Deregulating Yet Policing: Latinx Labor and Resistance in New Orleans Restaurant Jobs ABSTRACT. New Orleans's post-Katrina restaurant boom saw an increase of around 600 restaurants since 2005, further feeding the city's swelling tourism economy. This growth in restaurants led to a surge in restaurant workers, many of whom are Central American and Mexican immigrants that came to the metropolitan area to rebuild after the disaster. For many Latinx workers, the demand, flexibility, and deregulation of the service industry-documentation status rarely impacts hiring practices-is precisely what attracts them to restaurant jobs; nonetheless, laissez-faire policies also mean that hours worked and wages earned go under-regulated as well, representing a central tension within neoliberal economies. Moreover, newly created service industry jobs in a deregulated sector combined with an anti-immigrant federal administration present degrees of precarity in the labor force that disproportionately target immigrant workers. Drawing from a 2010 ROC-NOLA restaurant industry report along with six years of ethnographic work with Latinx food workers in New Orleans, I draw attention to the growing insecurity of restaurant jobs. Having analyzed the stories of Latinx restaurant workers and key actors in restaurant/business organizations, my findings are threefold. First, I show the increased reliance on Latinx workers in restaurant industry, illustrating how these jobs, which are oftentimes subcontracted, blur lines between formal and informal economies. Second, I examine how restaurants have been targeted by Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) raids throughout the first year of the Trump administration. New Orleans saw a 54% increase in ICE arrests in 2017. Third, I explore the role of restaurants as sites of resistance to support immigrant workers and, alternatively, better grasp the potential of organizations like Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of New Orleans, Louisiana Restaurant Association, and ROC-Gulf Coast to protect immigrant workers. |
16:30 | #BalanceTonPorc: Gender inequality in the French kitchen ABSTRACT. The #MeToo movement has made waves in the restaurant industry in the United States but it has had a tougher time gaining traction in France, despite the long history of gender inequality in professional kitchens. In addition to blatant sexism, discrimination and pay inequity, women are extremely underrepresented at the top ranks of the culinary professions. Only one woman currently holds the coveted three-Michelin star designation for her restaurant and the prestigious Meilleur Ouvrier de France (MOF) en Cuisine title has only been awarded to two women since it began in 1924. This paper will look at the systemic issues surrounding women’s underrepresentation at the top ranks of French cuisine. It consider the gender bias inherent in culinary training and apprenticeship and the ways in which the professional kitchen creates a power dynamic that impedes women’s success and creates opportunities for abuse and harassment. Women’s silence will be considered in light of this close-knit community—few are willing to speak out for fear of imperiling their advancement in culinary professions. Finally, this research considers how French women have worked around the dominant system of exclusion and discrimination to define new spaces for female creativity and success in the culinary arts. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Lyon, France, the voices of women from different generations brings to life the everyday struggles of being f |
Education
15:30 | Sustainable Development Goals – Is there an organic farming position? SPEAKER: Bernhard Freyer ABSTRACT. In this workshop, we • Critically assess the relevance of the SDGs for the future development of organic agriculture; • Reflect on the relationship between SDG and the organic movement; • Refer to the Principles of Organic Agriculture as guides for achieving the SDG targets through organic practices; • Discuss the extent to which organic agriculture can contribute to fulfilling the SDGs; • Reflect on the current limitations of organic agriculture and how to develop organic to better contribute to the SDGs. The organizers will formulate critical statements to serve as entry points for group discussions organized around the World Cafe approach. The output will be summarized and participants will be invited to contribute to a special issue or common article based on the workshop discussions and findings. This workshop is targeted towards researchers, teachers, advisors, etc. and/or practitioners of organic agriculture. |
Roundtables
15:30 | #FoodStudies Workshop: Social Media for Scholarship, Networking, and the Community SPEAKER: Katherine Hysmith ABSTRACT. This workshop panel will discuss the increasingly important role of social media in academia and the breadth of how food studies scholars and practitioners use various platforms including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and academic and portfolio blogs to promote the discipline, our scholarship, our organizations, to network with other scholars and community members and engage with those in the public food sector. Each panelist will share their unique perspectives on using social media in our scholarship, for networking, and working with the food community. In addition to a discussion of the theoretical justification of social media, this panel will also include practical tips (community engagement, social media strategies, hashtags, and more) for anyone wanting to dive into or further expand their presence on social media. Since this is a workshop-style panel, we hope to provide attendees with some new digital tools and approaches for their own social media practice through guided group activities. Before the panel, we will post a short syllabus of objectives and prerequisite actions to help utilize every minute of our short workshop. Following along on social media--Instagram stories, Twitter, or your platform of choice--is encouraged. Hashtag TBD. |
Roundtable
15:30 | Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and in Food Systems: A Roundtable SPEAKER: Neva Hassanein ABSTRACT. In this dynamic roundtable, panelists and audience-participants will develop a framework for understanding and enhancing the role of biodiversity in order to build more resilient farms and ranches. Panelists will provide examples of so-called “wild farms,” as well as new tools and resources useful to both scholars and practitioners. Presentations from leaders of the Wild Farm Alliance (WFA), Baumgartner and Connor, will share their biodiversity continuum that lays out a progression of activities to restore and enhance agroecosystems, and how to adapt ideas to particular places and circumstances. Also, a new guide from WFA helps organic farmers and certifiers achieve compliance with and take advantage of biodiversity conservation and resource protection standards. Dana Jackson will present an advanced preview of a forthcoming book by her longtime colleague at the Land Stewardship Project, Brian DeVore, called Wildly Successful Farming: Sustainability and the New Agricultural Land Ethic (University of Wisconsin Press, anticipated October 2018). Hassanein will share some Montana examples of reconnecting regional food systems with agroecosystems, and of thinking about agricultural biodiversity at the landscape scale. We will leave plenty of time to engage the audience and hear from you about new advances in the theory and practice of rewilding agricultural ecosystems. Rountable Conveners: Jo Ann Baumgartner, Director, Wild Farm Alliance Shelly Connor, Assistant Director, Wild Farm Alliance Neva Hassanein, Professor of Environmental Studies, University of Montana Dana Jackson, Author, Sustainability Advocate, and Retired Senior Program Associate, Land Stewardship Project |
Legacies
15:30 | Communicating Navajo Nation Food Sovereignty SPEAKER: Franklin Sage ABSTRACT. “Food provides a way to strengthen Diné peoples’ connections to each other, all living things and Mother Earth, and fosters sovereignty for the Navajo Nation….” This panel, moderated by Dr. Patty Loew and featuring Dr. Franklin Sage, Director of the Diné College Policy Institute and two graduate students from the Medill School of Journalism, explores a community-based, multimedia approach to communicating how the Diné are rebuilding a self-sufficient food system to improve nutrition and health on the largest Indian reservation in the country. In February 2018, a group of fourteen graduate students in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University spent a week in the American Southwest, talking with community members and focusing, not only on food insecurity, as most mainstream reports do, but on strength-based approaches the Navajo are using to reclaim traditional foods and reassert tribal sovereignty. With the help of the Diné College Policy Institute, students Kristine Sherred and Cailin Crowe explored land use reform, food challenges, and a 2014 “junk food tax.” Dr. Sage explains the role his institute played in the current Navajo Nation Food Policy. Journalists Sherred and Crowe describe how they approached their stories and what they found. |