Taste, Waste and the New Materiality of Food

Bethaney Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429755194
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Biological Sciences

Anthropocentric thinking produces fractured ecological perspectives that can perpetuate destructive, wasteful behaviours. Learning to recognise the entangled nature of our everyday relationships with food can encourage ethical ecological thinking and lay the foundations for more sustainable lifestyles.

This book analyses ethnographic data gathered from participants in Alternative Food Networks from farmers' markets to community gardens, agricultural shows and food redistribution services. Drawing on theoretical insights from political ecology, eco-feminism, ecological humanities, human geography and critical food studies, the author demonstrates the sticky and enduring nature of anthropocentric discourses. Chapters in this book experiment with alternative grammars to support and amplify ecologically attuned practices of human and more-than-human togetherness. In times of increasing climate variability, this book calls for alternative ontologies and world-making practices centred on food which encourage agility and adaptability and are shown to be enacted through playful tinkering guided by an ethic of convivial dignity.

This innovative book offers a valuable insight into food networks and sustainability which will be useful core reading for courses focusing on critical food studies, food ecology and environmental studies.

1 Introduction

Introduction

Catastrophic visions of the future abound in scientific reports addressing climate change. Food is often a central focus of these dystopic predictions, with fears raised about our ongoing capacity to produce sufficient food in the wake of increasing climate variability and the accompanying vulnerabilities. This uncertainty bleeds into the present where extreme weather and its impacts—from lost crops to skyrocketing food prices—are increasingly experienced. Despite this, global responses are slow and unwieldy. Recognition of human induced climate change has led to calls to name this geological age the Anthropocene (Steffen, Crutzen & McNeill, 2007; Steffen, Grinevald, Crutzen & McNeill, 2011; Steffen et al., 2011), designating it as the first era in which humans rather than ‘natural’ forces have had the most significant impact on the planet. The debates about terminology are as lively as those concerned with just how our planetary futures may look. However we choose to name it, model it and represent it, the climate is changing and we humans—specifically those of us in the minority world—have been at the forefront of instigating these shifts. On a daily basis we will have to take steps to mitigate our ongoing impact and adapt to the changes already in train through shifts in what we eat as well as how and where we produce our food. This means that, for many of us, the future will have a different taste.

But, this is not a book about the science of climate change. Nor is it one that dwells on doomsday scenarios, though such dire imaginings are a haunting presence throughout. Instead, it is a book about how people engage with food in a time of climate variability and how particular configurations of human/more-than-human relations in the production, distribution, ingestion and wasting of food might help lay the foundations for more sustainable futures. These futures rely on reconceptualisations of anthropocentric forms of subjectivities and narratives, and so my primary concern in this text is ontological in nature. It is about how we can be and do in the world in ways that acknowledge and are responsive to our mutual entanglements. The centrality of food in our daily lives makes it a productive optic through which we can highlight both the destructive modes of being and doing that dominate the Anthropocene as well as the possibilities for enactment of more hopeful alternatives. The skills and capacities to do things differently are enlivened in this book through stories of everyday people and their relations with the more-than-human world that revolve around food, from gardens to garbage tips, from production to decomposition, from taste to waste. Drawing on these food stories we can sense alternative ways of being in—or more precisely becoming-with—the world that underpin less resource intensive lifestyles and which may provide glimpses of how humans and more-than-humans can live well together through attunement to mutual vulnerabilities, willingness to enter into risky encounters and via responsiveness to the affective force of our relational entanglements. While I stretch these stories beyond their geographical and temporal locations, they are very much grounded in particular places and their unique affordances.

Food in the city: exploring ethico-political potentialities

The food stories in this book unfold in the specific context of the urban and suburban realm of Canberra, Australia’s capital city, but in them I hear echoes from elsewhere, highlighting the possibility of bigger, broader changes in minority world cities across the globe. Cities demand our attention in the Anthropocene. Fuelled by the resource-intensive machinations of industrialisation, they are now home to more than half the world’s population. Until recently, urban planning and development has paid little attention to food and even less to the qualities of urbanites’ relationships with the food system. Yet, food and cities are melded together in a variety of deep and shifting ways (Turner & Hope, 2015). Industrial agriculture has both shaped the development of cities, and been shaped itself, in ways that respond to the various forms that the urban explosion has taken. We see this particularly in the practices of food cultivation and transportation that have become so dominant in the modern urban context (Steel, 2009). These shifts, perhaps most obvious in the distancing of food production from cities, underpin a rural/urban divide commonly expressed as a nature/culture binary that permeates imaginings of the city in the minority world (Barthel & Isendahl, 2013; Jarosz, 2008; Pothukuchi, & Kaufman, 1999; Sonnino, 2009). The distancing of food growing from cities is said to contribute to a ‘denaturalisation of urban imaginaries’ (Blecha & Leitner, 2014, p. 87). City infrastructure and transportation routes, as Carolyn Steel notes, have ‘emancipated cities from geography’ (Steel, 2009, p. 38), removing the restrictions of the particular climatic and ecological conditions in which they are built by enabling food to flow across vast global distances. In so doing, discursive and practical renderings of the city as human-constructed or orchestrated spaces and places (‘built environments’) have tended to promote understandings of ecological conditions as passive, surmountable and, perhaps most disconcertingly, distinctly separate to the human lifeworld (Blecha & Leitner, 2014; Pincetl, 2007; Steel, 2009).

While representations of a human/nature divide dominate conceptualisations of cities, such understandings fail to attend to the everyday practices of some urban dwellers and the materiality of their ecological and food encounters. So, while we should indeed work to resist dominant anthropocentric understandings, we also need more generative approaches capable of attending to the complexity of urban relations and their productive political potential. To explore some of the specificities of how this can play out, I draw on Hinchcliffe and Whatmore’s (2006) notion of living cities, which they claim are brought to life as assemblages amongst human and nonhumans. Recognition of cities as ‘lively’ requires engagement in ‘a politics of conviviality that is serious about the heterogeneous company and messy business of living together’ with Hinchcliffe and Whatmore noting:

The notion of living cities fleshes out a sense of ecological co-fabrication in which the life patterns and rhythms of people and other city dwellers are entangled with and against the grain of expert designs and blueprints. This conceptual shift from built environments (as they are termed in conventional Town and Country Planning) to living cities is allied to a realignment of the politics of nature such that cities are appreciated as ‘ecological disturbance regimes rather than ecological sacrifice zones’ (Wolch, 1998) in which people are no longer considered inimical to nature, nor natures antithetical to cities.

(2006, p. 134)

It is through attunement and responsiveness to this very messiness of living in a space of ‘ecological co-fabrication’ (Hinchliffe & Whatmore, 2006, p. 134) that simplistic urban/rural, nature/culture divides break down enabling creative reconfigurations of human/more-than-human relations to become possible.

The inescapability of ‘eating’, and thus the necessity of engagement with the food system, provides sites ripe for exploration of how these forms of responsiveness can play out and throughout this book we will encounter examples of creative reconfigurations in urban food practices. These reconfigurations are, invariably, marked by openness to the multiplicity of assemblages in which the necessity of ‘togetherness’ comes to the fore. For some this is expressed through forms of attachment or connection incited by recognition that ‘[w]e are all just different collections of the same stuff—bacteria, heavy metals, atoms, matter-energy—not separate kinds of being susceptible to ranking’ (Gibson-Graham, 2011, p. 3). But, these are rarely harmonious, comfortable relations. For others, togetherness can also be marked by acknowledgement of shared alterity, sometimes manifesting in detachment, but always cognisant of mutual vulnerabilities often induced by acknowledgement of our necessary ‘togetherness’ in the world (Abrahamsson & Bertoni, 2014). Such forms of living together in urban sites offer hope—not in an unfounded optimistic sense, but in an attuned, responsive fashion that must be continuously worked on (Head, 2016)—for the development, or enhancement, of practices that challenge the hyper-separation of human exceptionalism that is the hallmark of anthropocentric thinking and so commonly represented as defining urban metropolises.

To explore these big-picture urban challenges through the lens of the everyday, this book focuses on fine-grained analysis of the alternative food related practices in one city, Canberra. This micro-level focus helps us to reconsider dominant narratives and identify alternative practices that, while small in scale, may be ripe for amplification. It is here in the daily lives of city inhabitants and their food stories that the stirrings of new ways of doing, being and becoming together may well be sensed. Before we dive into these food stories, let me contextualise them within their geographical and ecological co-fabrications; let me introduce you to the city in which they live.

Encountering food in Canberra, Australia

Canberra, constructed in 1913, is an entirely planned city designed by the winner of an international competition, the American architect, Walter Burley Griffin in partnership with his wife, Marion Mahoney Griffin. The ‘bush capital’, as it is known, lies on the vast limestone plains of Ngunnawal country and is designed to open itself up to the natural environment, to be ‘of’ not just ‘in’ the landscape (Taylor, 2006). It is divided into four key town centres with a more-or-less central metropolitan area known as Civic. Between these town centres are swathes of bush land—scrubby, dry sclerophyll forest most notably inhabited by eucalyptus trees (known here as widow-makers for their propensity to unexpectedly drop their weighty limbs). The city is planned around the central parliamentary triangle composed of two mountains (hills by most other nations’ standards) and Parliament House. While the building that housed our first governments is now a museum, a larger parliamentary building is located directly to its rear, maintaining the planned symmetries as best as possible. New Parliament House, is built ‘into’ the soil, part of its sloping roof covered in lawn, a delight for visiting school children to roll down. Being able to walk on our House of Parliament is supposed to be a reminder that parliamentarians are delegates of us Australians, though, as I write this, rising concerns of terror threats have prompted a rethinking of this largely unfettered roof access. While the development of Canberra has continued to promote and support the ‘bush capital’ ideal, other components of the city’s planning have largely fallen to the wayside, notably the designers’ original interest in local food production.

In the city’s early days, local food (AGHS, 2006) production was viewed as critical to a thriving city. In fact, at the time, the Federal Government was keen for Canberra to become self-sufficient. To realise this, the fertile alluvial soils of Pialligo on the city’s outskirts were earmarked for commercial-scale vegetable production (Turner, Pearson & Dyball, 2012). Pialligo retains elements of its rural character today, though large-scale quantities of food are not produced here and the recently expanded airport is on its doorstep. Private householder backyards were also considered to play a key role in realising self-sufficiency. The ‘Garden City’ ideals of Ebenezer Howard permeated the subdivision practices employed from the inner city to the suburbs. Canberra house plots were to be large enough for homeowners to have backyard vegetable gardens, chickens and fruit trees (AGHS, 2006) as well as utility areas (sheds and clothes lines) and some lawn for recreation (typically, enough to bowl a cricket ball). However, today, commercial buildings are rooted in much of the city’s most fertile soils. The current planning focus on urban in-fill and the shrinking footprint of urban backyards in greenfield sites due to reduced block sizes and larger houses have significantly altered Canberrans’ potential encounters with food production and local food. There is no longer a local dairy, and while livestock is raised for meat there is no abattoir to process it. Food production has been gradually removed from the city (Turner & Hope, 2015; Turner, Pearson & Dyball, 2014). Canberra may be designed to be ‘of’ its natural environment, but the capacity of this landscape to produce food and nourish alternative conceptions of the city remains largely silenced (Turner & Hope, 2015).

In recent years we have seen a global backlash against this sort of distancing of food from city centres with a veritable explosion of urban agricultural practices across the minority world, from community gardens to farmers’ markets. This is true also of the Canberra experience where the last 15 years have seen the introduction of two weekly farmers’ markets, the expansion of community gardens from three in the year 2000 to at least 17 in 2016, and the introduction of two farmers’ retail outlet shops. In later chapters, we will meet a range of everyday people—gardeners, farmers’ market shoppers, composters—and explore the ways in which they engage with these initiatives, and food more broadly, in a time of climate change. Theirs are stories permeated by sensorial engagements. The fieldwork was inevitably punctuated by the smells, tastes and textures of garden produce and compost. I never left a food-producing garden without either having been fed or gifted with armfuls of newly harvested goodies. In all the transcripts where I still have the recorder running, my protestations are evident—‘No, you have already given me so much of your time. I can’t possibly take this (as delicious as it looks). Surely you can use it?’ This never worked though. I left with armfuls of food for which I was very grateful. As one gardener said to me, after I had followed him around chatting as he watered his newly planted winter crops at dawn on a day threatening to push into the mid-30s, ‘Look, I think you can’t come to the garden without me giving you something.’ As I took hold of a bag full of the last of his summer crops of tomatoes and cucumbers, he smiled and said, ‘Yeah. Just be careful. Most of them are pretty grub free, but there might be the occasional one.’

In the following pages, I attempt to explore how the everyday actions of the gardeners, farmers’ market shoppers, agricultural show exhibitors and composters who participated in this research enact ways of being and doing in the world that differ from contemporary representations of profligate, unthinking, unfeeling consumers acting in accordance with a doctrine of human exceptionalism. Those who gave their time to this research are, with a few notable exceptions, people who do not identify as activists, many of them explicitly stating that they were not ‘greenies’ or ‘hippies’ (even when no questions were asked about their environmental politics). This identification, or lack-thereof, aligns closely with Head’s observations that living less resource intensive lifestyles does not need to be underpinned by a ‘green’ ethic (Head, 2016, pp. 167–173).

I do not attempt to coalesce these people into new subjectivities, but I dwell with their stories and practices and invite you to do likewise, to learn with them. I do see in their practices tensions between a hopeful future and one where they are overwhelmed by its very uncertainty. I see expressions and evidence of attachments and detachments to ‘big picture’ issues such as climate change through to micro-level concerns such as shifts in their soil conditions. Most overwhelmingly, I find in their everyday actions a form of ‘togetherness’ with the more-than-human world. This is not always harmonious and such forms of being or becoming-with can sometimes be silenced when more immediate concerns press on their minds and bodies. But, by and large, their engagements with food represent forms of attunement to our relational entanglements that are glimpsed in the quotidian experiences of the everyday; where they shop, how they prepare and consume their food and what becomes of the waste they generate.

Looking here at the minute detail of how we live inevitably elicits rousing calls of ‘this can’t be enough’. ‘What can such small-scale action do in the face of significant climatic changes and uncertainty?’ I do not intend to dismiss these concerns, nor deride them. I share the sentiments. I too want more. I think we can do more. Our governments, industry, and international organisations are failing us on a daily basis when they give up on opportunities to effect more sustainable changes to the ways our lives play out (particularly for those in the minority world). But, I also think that policy, quotas and taxes are not enough. The perpetuation of anthropocentric attitudes is a key barrier to more sustainable change. While little at the policy level seems to challenge these beliefs, the very notions of human exceptionalism and hyper-separation are regularly questioned in the lives of those we meet ‘on the ground’ in this book. These confrontations with the lack of our human control are not always welcomed by the participants and can be actively resisted, but it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. An appetiser: Eating, being and playing with convivial dignity
• 3. Introducing Taste
• 4. Growing a taste for togetherness
• 5. Taste in shopping
• 6. Taste in competition
• 7. Introducing waste
• 8. Waste in the home
• 9. Composting in the home
• 10. Ugly food and food waste redistribution
• 11. New grammars for the Anthropocene: Playful tinkering with convivial dignity
• Index