Geography of food

In the last decades, the relationship between food and nature has experienced two intertwined processes: the de-naturalization of agri-food industry, that apparently has ‘freed’ food from natural processes and the ri-naturalization, linked to the quality turn, that recently transformed agrifood systems and food consumption. This article focuses on the relationships between food and nature, basing on the analysis of the processes that are recently taking place in Valposchiavo (Switzerland), where local agri-food chains sustainability is the core of local development and territorial marketing strategies. The analysis uses the theoretical and methodological framework of food political ecology,
which helps to unveil and critically analyse the complexity and the political dimension of such processes.

Famine’s sensational headline potential can get in the way of thinking about the more general issues of malnutrition and food insecurity. Recent research on famine sees it as the extension of structural, long-term vulnerabilities in society rather than as the result of unpredictable ‘acts of God’.

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 l'île de La Réunion, un petit fruit rouge localement connu comme « goyavier » fait l'objet d'un engouement collectif qui en fait une véritable ressource patrimoniale pour le développement rural. Parallèlement, la création d'un parc national et son inscription dans la liste du patrimoine mondial de l'humanité de l'UNESCO, suscitent des tensions et donnent naissance à des conflits concernant les dimensions culturelle et environnementale du patrimoine. Le goyavier-fraise est en effet une espèce invasive dont la gestion est une condition incontournable pour garder le précieux label. Cette étude de cas témoigne que le patrimoine ne fait pas toujours consensus et que la définition de son statut ne va pas de soi. Sa mise en débat, accompagnée par des procédures de communication et d'éducation adaptées, deviennent alors nécessaires. Abstract In Reunion Island, a little red fruit locally known as " goyavier " arouse a collective interest which translates it into a patrimonial resource for rural development. At the same time, the institution of a national park and its registration on the UNESCO world heritage list are source of many tensions and conflicts involving both the cultural and environmental facets of the heritage. In facts, strawberry guava is an invasive species and its management is an essential condition in order to maintain the precious label. This case study shows that a consensus around heritage is not always easy to reach; even defining its status can't be taken for granted. So, we think it become necessary to engage a debate about it, coupled with adapted procedures of communication and education.

Modern industrial systems of food production cause a wide range of detrimental impacts to the environment, human health and society. Integrating community gardens into local food systems is one way to counteract some of those impacts. This research looks at the elements that community garden policies should contain in order to best promote community gardens and attain their benefits. Focusing on Sydney, the research evaluates and compares the quality of the community garden policies with the distribution of community gardens in local councils and across broader geographic regions. Councils or regions that might benefit from greater access to community gardens are identified and ways in which councils, and the Sydney Region as a whole, might improve their community garden policies are discussed.

Who can deny the significance of food? It has a central role in our health and pleasure as well as in our economy, politics and culture. Food in Society provides a social science perspective on food systems and demonstrates the rich variety of disciplinary and theoretical contexts of food studies. While hunger and malnutrition remain a reality in many countries, for some food has become an experience rather than a sustenance. This book addresses the different worldwide understandings of food through thematic chapters and a wide range of material including: description of the political economy of the food chain, from production to the point of sale; analysis of global issues of supply and demand; critical debate of environmental and health aspects of food, including GM food, the role of habits, taboos, age and gender in food consumption. Each chapter contains a guide to further reading and to websites of relevance to food. Extensively illustrated, this book is essential reading for students of food studies in the social sciences and humanities.

On 4 June 2017, Qatar was suddenly put under an embargo by its regional neighbors-an effort spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who cut off most of its existing land, sea, and air traffic routes. With no domestic agriculture to speak of, Qatar's external logistics networks are essential for maintaining its food supply. The country's 2.6 million residents, many of whom flooded the grocery stores, were understandably concerned about their ability to secure food when news about the embargo broke. Eventually, new food supply chains were established, primarily with the assistance of partners in Iran and Turkey. The ongoing rift between Qatar and its neighbors in the Arabian Peninsula, manifested only in part by this effort to undermine the country's material supply networks raises a number of questions about an old idea: that of food as a 'weapon'. This article puts this concept in historical and regional perspective in the Arabian Peninsula through the lens of critical geopolitics, tracing the securitizing discourses about food security and their intertwining with narratives about territorial sovereignty, nationalism, and essentialist understandings of geography to explain the causes and effects of the food embargo in the ongoing Qatar-Gulf rift.

Carceral spaces—such as neighborhood zones of police surveillance and plantation prisons that exploit incarcerated labor—reflect and reproduce systems of oppression that are also present in the food system. The state regularly polices poverty instead of addressing how racial capitalism perpetuates the lack of access to basic needs like healthy food. Conversely, the food system relies on carceral practices to secure sdisciplined labor by weaponizing the possibility of deportation and wielding the threat of violence to maintain control over racialized undocumented workers. But there are also seeds of struggle for the abolition of penal logics and institutions by incarcerated people and their allies on the outside. These include efforts to transform eating and food work in prison, reimagine food justice as an anti-carceral social movement, and use resistance tactics like hunger strikes. In this special issue introduction, we address these connections and set the stage for all the articles by asking: What does carcerality offer to theorizing and understanding the food system, food cultures, and food relations? And, what does a critical look at food offer toward understanding—and eventually abolishing—carceral systems? We offer theoretical touch points that connect food justice work to long-standing prison abolition organizing while introducing the major themes and contributions of each article included in the issue. We end with a reflection on our aspirations for the future of food studies.

The entry begins with a definition of geography and with a description of what the discipline shares with the other social sciences and what makes it distinctive among them. Terminological clarifications are provided with regard to the relationship between human geography and physical geography, and between human geography and urban geography. After a brief history and overview of human geography’s engagement with social theory, the entry offers a discussion of the politicization of contemporary human geography and of how this phenomenon is reflected in theory building and concept development.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118430873.est0464

Packaged goods preserved in sugar or vinegar appeared on an industrial scale in Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, yet they are rarely accorded any significance in food histories or histories of the retail grocery trade. Their extended shelf life was a very welcome feature in an era before refrigeration; in this they resembled hams and cheeses but they had the additional advantage that they were often in hermetically sealed bottles and so could be carried to the other side of world without deterioration. Where the bottles bore a label they were also standard bearers of the brand revolution to come. Customers learned to trust the brands and the implicit quality guarantee they bore. In several ways, therefore, these goods prefigured the globalization of foodstuffs that is commonplace today.

Martin Doornbos and his colleagues have now published two articles in Food Policy on India’s dairy development scheme, Operation Flood (OF). These have arisen from a research project jointly sponsored by the Institute of Social Studies (The Hague) and the Indo-Dutch Programme on Alternatives in Development, and they summarize a series of working papers soon to be published in book form. While acknowledging the contribution made by the team of Dutch and Indian writers assembled for this project, I wish to dissent from their overall conclusions that OF is an expensive failure and, as a model development strategy, may even be counter-productive in consolidating ‘a distorted political economy’.

Researchers committed to food justice often enter communities and nonprofits with a desire to help. They often think there is a scarcity, such as food, that they want to understand and help to increase. At the same time, research obligations may lead to extracting "findings" without advancing food justice. Such actions may unintentionally work against food justice, especially the goal of dismantling structural inequalities and advancing social equity. This commentary chronicles the ongoing and incomplete process by which I have carried out food justice research and worked toward food justice. In short, reciprocal research requires working with, not for, organizations and communities. This entails ongoing acts of solidarity. One way to express this is through flexibility with research goals in order to tailor all or parts of one's project to answer questions that increase understanding of how to challenge structural inequalities and advance social equity. Relatedly, openness to how food justice activists and organizations confront the food movement and society more broadly to address whiteness, privilege, racial inequality, and notions of diversity can enrich critical social science. Of equal importance is sweat equity. Most food justice activists and organizations have few resources and cannot serve the whims of researchers. Therefore, providing labor is an important allied act. This increases the researchers' empathy with activists, organizations, and communities, and creates opportunities to build trust and dissolve social boundaries. To enter into a situation that deepens our knowledge of the food justice movement and advances food justice requires solidarity and sweat equity.

Eataly is not simply a supermarket that sells food: it sales a 'taste' of and a travel to an imaginary Italy by seducing its customers to spend time and money in order to see, smell, touch, hear, eat and nearly literally, incorporate the brand and its branded products and services. In this chapter, I offer an account of the coming into being of Eataly, a brand that with 25 about 30 malls (in Italy, Japan, Turkey, Brasil, the USA and United Arab Emirates). By taking further Jon Goss' notable metaphor of the 'magic of the mall', I specifically focus on showing how Eataly draws on specific geographies and geographical imaginations to establish itself as a brand recognised in Italy and overseas, and as a business venture that can be successfully replicated elsewhere. I highlight how Eataly does a very specific 'kind of magic' to its customers, as the brand and the mall attempt to persuade them to spend time within the walls of the mall to eat and do their shopping. I argue that this form of 'magic' draws on a visceral register of communication that is potentially successful as it 'speaks to the guts' of the visitors of the mall.

This is a book which addresses the “what,” “where,” “who,” “how,” and “why” questions about food. What is food and where does it come from? Who grows and makes food, and who eats it? Why do some people have more than enough whilst others go hungry? How is food made and what are its impacts on people and places? Questions about power, injustice, and inequality are always present when we start to map the geographies of food, but so are stories of hope, possibility, and new futures. Whilst we engage with many problems, we also discuss many exciting new possibilities, and try to reflect the politics of hope and optimism which infuse many grassroots movements which are trying to develop new and better ways of “doing food.” We try to examine the problems and possibilities of food in equal measure and we foreground the particular insights that geographical perspectives can yield, by concentrating on the spatial expressions of food’s production, transformation, and consumption.

‘More then Just Food’ is an important book for those interested in community organisation, community food networks, food justice and community-based collaborative research methodologies. A key strength is Broad’s story-telling approach, which is derived from his immersive research experiences. This enriches both the book’s readability and the depth of knowledge offered. Important themes are returned to over the chapters as our understandings of CSU and related organisations are layered up within different contexts. Some readers may find this approach results in some chapters not being clearly defined from others. However, the book not only contains a wealth of information about community food movements in South Los Angeles, it also tells the story of contemporary food economic and policy atmospheres generating the need for community based work. Whilst this gives much useful detail, a greater focus on decision making processes and examples where internal conflict is dealt with within CSU, would have been valuable for others working in this field.

Spain and Portugal, neighbours in the Iberian Peninsula, arguably represent polar opposites in terms of their approaches to innovation and tradition in gastronomy. This paper analyses the approaches in these two neighbouring countries, and examines the relationship between gastronomy as heritage and gastronomy as innovation. In particular it asks whether the more conservative approach to national gastronomy in Portugal may partly be seen as a reaction to threatened changes to gastronomic habits from EU legislation (Richards and Hjalager, 2002).The legislation to define and protect elements of national gastronomy emerged at a time when it seemed that EU controls might limit or eradicate the production of certain traditional foods – a situation also faced in other countries (Ren, 2010). In Spain, as Ravenscroft and van Westering (2002) have argued, the more flexible combination of intellectual property protection and regionalisation led to more creative approaches to gastronomy.

Increasingly, a range of 'things' (e.g. infrastructure, data, knowledge, bodies, etc.) are configured and/or reconfigured as assets, or capitalized property. Accumulation strategies have changed as a result of this assetization process, which characterizes a particular form of technoscientific capitalism. Rather than entrepreneurial strategies based on commodity production, technoscientific capitalism is increasingly underpinned by rentiership, or the appropriation of value through ownership rights (e.g. intellectual property), monopoly conditions, and regulatory or market devices and practices (e.g. investment dispute courts, exclusivity agreements, etc.). While rentiership and rent-seeking are often presented as negative phenomena (e.g. distorting markets, unearned income) in both neoclassical and Marxist literatures – and much in-between – it is my intention in this paper to unpack rentiership as an increasingly constitutive political-economic process underpinning technoscientific capitalism. Rather than being framed as a problematic 'side-effect' of capitalism, I argue that rentiership can help us to understand how different forms of value extraction are constituted by and come to constitute different forms of technoscience. This has significant analytical, political, and normative implications for understanding the relationship between science, innovation, and business (e.g. how do rentier rationales configure research agendas, how does innovation enable rentiership, what are the consequences for social equity, etc.).

Restaurants and their attendant practices are high-profile sites at which regional and national cuisines are experienced, experimented with, and negotiated. In particular, they are important settings for the consumption and production of national identity—a crucial space through which to understand the coalescing of the material and representational. This article focuses specifically on the production side of the pairing through an examination of restaurants that are part of a prominent culinary movement (alta cocina mexicana) in the Mexican border town of Tijuana. The central argument of the paper is that Tijuana's culinary scene is indicative of the reassertion of boundaries between Mexico and the USA through the intentional rejection of northern stereotypes of Mexican food. The emphasis on traditional Mexican cuisine, rather than an internationally hybrid cosmopolitan approach, suggests that chefs are adhering to a set of rules that reflect Mexicanness. Restaurants propagating alta cocina mexicana work to differentiate the border and act as social devices which both complicate conventional understandings of Mexican food and disrupt hegemonic discourses of the border as productive of hybridity.

Los restaurantes así como las prácticas vinculadas a ellos son sitios notables en que se vivencian, experimentan y negocian la cocina nacional y regional. En particular, ellos son escenarios importantes para el consumo y la producción de la identidad nacional – un espacio clave por medio del cual se puede comprender la fusión de lo material con lo representacional. Este artículo específicamente se centra en lo que atañe a la producción de tal fusión. Para ello explora los restaurantes que son parte del prominente movimiento de alta cocina mexicana en la ciudad mexicana fronteriza de Tijuana. Este artículo sostiene que la escena culinaria en Tijuana es indicativa de la reafirmación de los límites entre México y Estados Unidos mediante el intencional rechazo de los estereotipos norteños de la comida mexicana. El énfasis que se le otorga a la cocina tradicional mexicana en detrimento de la versión internacional, híbrida y cosmopolita, sugiere que los chefs adhieren a una serie de reglas que reflejan mexicanidad. Los restaurantes que propagan la alta cocina mexicana funcionan como diferenciadores de la frontera y actúan como mecanismos sociales que, a la vez que complejizan las acepciones convencionales de la comida mexicana, perturban los discursos hegemónicos que conciben a las fronteras como producto de la hibridez.

This new open access book develops a framework for advancing agroecology in transformations towards more just and sustainable food systems focusing on power, politics and governance. It explores the potential of agroecology as a sustainable and socially just alternative to today’s dominant food regime.

L’augmentation présumée de la consommation de viande en Inde, pays parfois décrit comme étant principalement végétarien, nourrit de nombreuses spéculations. Cette thèse vise à étudier les recompositions du statut de la viande en Inde, notamment dans l’Etat du Tamil Nadu, en accordant une attention particulière à la dimension spatiale de cet aliment. En Inde, la viande reste marginale : sa consommation est régulée par des logiques religieuses, morales, médicales ou économiques. Ses réseaux d’approvisionnement sont structurés par des
contraintes écologiques et techniques mais aussi sociales et symboliques. Les abattoirs sont des lieux de conflit quant aux usages et aux significations des produits carnés. La visibilité des boucheries dans l’espace public est fortement contrôlée. Ainsi, la viande, notamment celle de bœuf, devient un aliment politique, support de revendications identitaires. Mais l’urbanisation, l’industrialisation et la connexion à l’espace-Monde modifient progressivement le rapport des Indiens à la viande. La massification des circuits carnés ne peut être niée. Les
exportations de viande de buffle s’envolent. Au restaurant, la consommation de viande, notamment de poulet produit de façon intensive, devient pour la classe moyenne de Chennai une pratique statutaire. Pour autant, la transition alimentaire parfois prophétisée apparaît être une hypothèse erronée. La banalisation de la viande, circonscrite dans l’espace, va de pair avec une extrême différenciation des pratiques, en fonction des types de viandes, des individus, des contextes. En Inde, le rapport à la viande, véritable « substance biomorale », contribue à dessiner des géographies matérielles et idéelles, façonnant des territoires et des circuits, définissant des distances réelles ou symboliques entre les hommes et les animaux ou entre les groupes sociaux.

Food offers a visceral entry point into the politics and processes of gentrification. Traditional explanations of gentrification-when a neighborhood experiences disinvestment and economic decline followed by "revitalization" and "redevelopment"-hinge on either political economy or cultural drivers. This article discusses the relationship between these two drivers to show how food gentrification is multifaceted and changes neighborhood class and ethnoracial demographics, foodscapes and foodways, and housing. First, poor communities in cities around the world can experience the deleterious effects of food driving gentrification, like when developers use urban agriculture to attract new residents and increase property values. Second, food itself is being gentrified, which for communities marginalized by their race or ethnicity means both the dispossession of culturally important foods that are made "cool" and become unaffordable and the upscaling of food retail that displaces former bars, cafes, restaurants, grocery stores, and gardens. The article concludes with a brief discussion of some social movement strategies and policy approaches that might prevent the harmful effects of food gentrification.

Increasingly, governments are experimenting with ways to provide public goods by involving the private sector in the planning, financing, building and operating of a range of services, facilities, infrastructure, etc. In the geographical literature on neoliberalism this entanglement of the state and markets has been loosely conceptualized as a process of marketization. This concept describes the insertion of markets or market forces into the state and public sector. In this paper we unpack this concept by highlighting the need to think about a range of marketization processes at play across a range of geographies.

Worldwide, circuits of meat provision and patterns of meat consumption are being reconfigured. In 2022, poultry will become the most consumed meat worldwide, supplanting pork. By exploring the case of India, this paper will show how the global triumph of broiler raises environmental concerns, affects farming practices, redefines the conceptions of edibility, palatability and wholesomeness, and mirrors the ways humans relate with the lives and bodies of farm animals.

In India, despite numerous restrictions on meat consumption, the demand for chicken is growing at an annual rate of 9%. For the past 30 years, the poultry industry has been intensified, specialized, integrated, economically and geographically concentrated and built upon the patterns of contract farming. This rationalization has contributed to the alleviation of the long-held impurity associated with chickens. Both the animals and their meat have been gradually turned into generic commodities. Chicken flesh is now enjoyed by many for its cheap price, culinary versatility, tenderness, leanness, whiteness and relatively bland taste. But this commodification also faces multi-fold resistances by consumers, butchers and activists, for gustatory, sanitary, economic, environmental, religious or ethical reasons.

Based on extensive fieldwork, this article highlights the material, economic and symbolic factors that lead chicken to global dominance. It shows how the changing structures of production fuel, and respond to, the increasing appetite for animal proteins, while questioning the ecological and ontological consequences of the growing spatial and cognitive dissociation of meat from flesh and of flesh from animals that chicken embodies.

"The historic setting of the global food economy, is associated with the system of international power that shapes the organization of work and the institutions involved at all stages of production, processing, distribution, marketing and food intake of the food system. The ordering of food flows is established under a set of political economic, ecological and cultural describing regimen or period of relative stability in the patterns of accumulation, exploitation and intervention resources. In world history since the nineteenth century British hegemony established a colonial regimen U.S. hegemony consolidated a regimen agricultural export in the latter developed the concept of food system. Since the 70's neoliberal policies defined conditions for the establishment of a corporate regimen, which increased the power of business. The guild system is characterized by a profound dependence on oil, the use of crops for biofuel production, financial speculation with food raw materials, the concentration of power in the retail distribution companies and vertically integrated agribusiness companies, issues that have been shaping since 2008 a food crisis.
"

[Open access article @ https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1683] How are Black food geographies, both geographies of emotional slow violence and resilience? Dominant directions in health-related food research emphasize how Black food choices cause (slow) death from diabetes, hypertension, and other medical conditions. Emphasis on individual behaviors can overlook how a felt sense of the food landscape matters (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes Conroy 2016). Through the frame of slow violence and racial trauma, I consider racial surveillance in the context of Black food geographies. Biomedical studies note the attritional effects of racial trauma on overall wellbeing, while other research and media continue to document racial profiling in food spaces. For this exploratory piece, I bear witness to testimonies of racial surveillance and food geographies using GIF-making, healing arts, and autoethnography. Testimonies drawn from interviews, media, and my personal experiences underscore how surveillance and its effects are very much visible and felt for African-American and Afro-Latinx testifiers as they navigate “food while Black.” Beyond countering the “invisibility” of slow violence (Nixon 2011), I explore affective and arts-based approaches to (re)presenting and feeling through Black food geographies. Building on Black geographies, I engage with Black life (not only death) by considering testifiers’ strategies for personal and collective resilience (White 2018).

Cities are a locus for struggles over the ability for historically marginalized groups to feed themselves. These stratified spaces represent a distinct expression of the conventional agrifood system: the undernutrition/malnutrition paradox. By investigating the food politics of two organizations – Food Not Bombs in Orlando, FL and People’s Grocery in West Oakland, CA – this article advances scholarship on how activists are working to heal and prevent further individual and social metabolic rifts tied to urban food systems. Particularly regarding food access, strategies to resist and transform the conditions producing experiential and cognitive alienation and the commodification of land and labor often emerge from interstitial spaces. Yet, radical food politics is embedded within ongoing processes of neoliberalization that complicate and oftentimes blunt their transformative potential. In short, this article investigates the potential for and challenges faced by ‘actually existing radical projects’ working to lessen/end hunger and diet related health problems.

In recent years urban agriculture has gained the
attention of policy-makers, social organizers, and
academics alike. This new wave of work and
attention focuses on projects that ameliorate issues
ranging from food insecurity to urban blight, and
environmental degradation to the subversion of
industrial food production. These projects consist
of a variation of community gardens, educational
programs, demonstration farms, and
entrepreneurial production farms (I will identify all
of these under the umbrella of urban agriculture
(UA)). However, by simply studying the social
impact of UA, researchers fail to consider who the
active agent is in social change; this results in little
acknowledgement of a movement that is
predominately white, hegemonic, and exclusive. As
a movement, UA is largely championed by a
middle-class white populace as part of the
alternative food movement, rather than being
understood as having historical roots in
predominately black and/or Latino neighborhoods.
As a result, urban agriculture generally creates
white spaces in otherwise black or Latino places. In
this paper I will argue for a new research direction
that considers UA from a critical race theory
framework and that will allow researchers to
examine how urban agriculture might create white
“spaces” and white “ethics” in predominately black
and Latino neighborhoods. Understanding UA
from a critical race theory framework will be useful
in helping the UA movement talk about food
sovereignty rather than food insecurity in urban
communities.

Se destaca la importancia de la soberania nacional como aspecto fundamental de la soberania nacional, muy ligado a la seguridad nacional y a la garantia de los derechos de los ciudadanos. Y se desmonta la consideracion exclusiva de los alimentos como un bien privado, tan propia del sistema capitalista industrial, para proponer su consideracion como bien publico multidimensional (necesidad, derecho, cultura y comercio) y que debe ser gobernado de manera diferente, no exclusivamente por leyes de mercado. El Estado podria proporcionar alimentos gratis para todos, lo alimentario ha de tener su propio tratado internacional fuera de la OMC y hay que prohibir la especulacion financiera con un bien esencial.