Food Geography

This paper sets out to understand the Monga vulnerability in Rangpur region of northwest Bangladesh from the perspective
of affected households. The local term ‘Monga’ means a famine-like situation and it has caught public interest recently.
Based on empirical evidence from five villages in the Rangpur region using different qualitative methods, the findings
highlight that the Monga predisposes the households to multi-sphere experiences of hunger and poverty. It is not just one
consequence of income poverty; rather, the social and livelihood mechanisms of poor households are dysfunctional,
multiply rooted in their entitlements, capabilities, their ways of living, and the negotiations they have with the complex
network of institutions that affect households both singly and synergistically.

A history of the twentieth century is a history of hunger. Although modernity brought with it improved technical and logistical means of eliminating famine, nevertheless the century saw the greatest number of famine deaths in history. Famine-related mortality—not all from starvation—has been variously estimated, but a total of seventy-five million seems very likely. There has been some improvement. As Devereux points out, famines have now been absent from Europe for sixty years, from East Asia for fifty years (discounting the unique circumstances of North Korea), and from South East Asia in the thirty years since the horrors of Pol Pot’s
regime in Cambodia.3It is Africa where the problem has continued to be most troublesome in a post-colonial era of conflict and poor governance. Yet at the time of writing, among the fabulous wealth that has been created worldwide, there are still 857 million people chronically hungry—about one in seven, and rising.

This paper argues that the time has come for a new approach
to food exchange. Using the literatures of geography and sociology,
it points out that the social constructionism that is being
used increasingly in food studies is inadequate. Its privileging
of human agency has led to an underestimation of the important
of the materiality of foodstuffs. Three dimensions are
proposed for a dematerialisation of research on food exchange
histories.

There has never been a greater level of interest in the geography of food than at present. Although food represents a declining part of the monetary value of our household budgets, we are nevertheless giving it greater attention for reasons of health, cultural significance and pure enjoyment. There is endless scope here for the geographer and I will take the opportunity of this short article to touch on four of the areas that I am presently researching.

Qualification strategies in processes of regional restructuring. The reinvention of the wine region South Tyrol in a globalized wine market.

Kurzfassung: Wissenschaftliche Studien zum quality turn im Weinbau haben vor allem die Restrukturierungsprozesse in Regionen der "Neuen Welt" des Weinbaus analysiert, während kaum Arbeiten zu europäischen Weinregionen vorliegen. Vor diesem Hintergrund nimmt der Beitrag die Südtiroler Weinwirtschaft aus einer pragmatisch-prozessorientierten Perspektive in den Blick und geht der Frage nach, wie es den Weinproduzenten in Südtirol gelungen ist, einen quality turn einzuleiten und sich erfolgreich in einem globalisierten Markt zu positionieren. Ziel ist es dabei, einen Beitrag zu einem differenzierteren Verständnis von global-lokalen Aushandlungsprozessen in der Weinwirtschaft zu leisten. Ein pragmatisch-prozessorientierter Blick macht sichtbar, wie unterschiedliche Qualifizierungsstrategien im Rahmen regionaler Restrukturierungsprozesse interpretiert und kontextualisiert werden und ermöglicht so neue Einsichten in die Dynamiken regionalen Wandels. Der Aufsatz zeigt, wie es Südtirol im Unterschied zur Neuen Welt gelungen ist, sich auch ohne Kapitalzuflüsse von außen und ohne tiefgreifende Veränderungen in der Agrarstruktur als Weinregion in einem globalisierten Markt neu zu erfinden. Abstract: Research on the quality turn in wine production has primarily focused on New World wine regions while the restructuring processes in European wine regions have received little attention. Against this background, the paper analyzes the dynamic processes of change in the South Tyrolean wine industry from a pragmatic, process-oriented perspective. The question of how South Tyrolean wine producers were able to induce qualification processes and position themselves in a globalized wine market stands in the center of the discussion. By pursuing this question, our goal is to contribute to a more differentiated picture of global-local interrelations in the wine industry. From a pragmatic, process-oriented perspective it can be shown how different strategies of qualification are regionally interpreted and contextualized. Therefore, this perspective offers new insights into the dynamics of regional change. We show how South Tyrol, in contrast to wine regions in the New World, was able to reinvent itself in a globalized market without external capital influx and without profound changes in the agrarian structure.

I was recently reading a market research report on the foods people eat in the different regions of Britain. As you know, in this country we don't have the variety of 'typical' foods that they have in Italy and France, where there are hundreds of local cheeses and wines, many methods of preparing meat, and a mouthwatering array of traditional recipes that have specific place connections. But there are regional variations in consumer preference in Britain and they have never been satisfactorily explained. Why is it, for instance, that the North East of England is least interested in experimenting with exotic cuisines? London is a miniature version of the world's kitchens, with ethnic restaurants from more than a hundred countries. Yet the citizens of Newcastle, Durham and Sunderland are less likely to have tried a Chinese, Indian, Thai, TexMex meal in the last twelve months than people in any other region.

Horse meat in our beef burgers? How could this be in a nation that disdains eating equine flesh? We leave that to the French don't we? What I want to suggest is that food is not always what it says on the tin and that this is our fault. The horse meat scandal of 2013 shows that we have allowed the nation's food system to become degraded and that it is high time we did something about it.