Food for Degrowth

Perspectives and Practices

Anitra Nelson, Ferne Edwards, Anitra Nelson, Ferne Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000287356
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This collection breaks new ground by investigating applications of degrowth in a range of geographic, practical and theoretical contexts along the food chain. Degrowth challenges growth and advocates for everyday practices that limit socio-metabolic energy and material flows within planetary constraints. As such, the editors intend to map possibilities for food for degrowth to become established as a field of study.

International contributors offer a range of examples and possibilities to develop more sustainable, localised, resilient and healthy food systems using degrowth principles of sufficiency, frugal abundance, security, autonomy and conviviality. Chapters are clustered in parts that critically examine food for degrowth in spheres of the household, collectives, networks, and narratives of broader activism and discourses. Themes include broadening and deepening concepts of care in food provisioning and social contexts; critically applying appropriate technologies; appreciating and integrating indigenous perspectives; challenging notions of 'waste', 'circular economies' and commodification; and addressing the ever-present impacts of market logic framed by growth.

This book will be of greatest interest to students and scholars of critical food studies, sustainability studies, urban political ecology, geography, environmental studies such as environmental sociology, anthropology, ethnography, ecological economics and urban design and planning.

1 Food for degrowth

Anitra Nelson and Ferne Edwards

Food is a basic need for human survival. Beyond material sustenance, food has significant economic, social and cultural dimensions. Food sufficiency, food security and food sovereignty have become critical concerns in the twenty-first century. Moreover, food provisioning is a key space for contemporary efforts to transform practices to achieve global environmental sustainability. Indeed, ‘degrowth’ has emerged as a major approach within a suite of movements aiming to achieve sustainable livelihoods, sustainable systems of production and consumption and a sustainable society more generally.

Degrowth as a concept, approach and practice challenges both economic growth and excessive resource consumption to advocate for practices that limit socio-metabolic energy and material flows with respect to planetary limits. This collection offers a representative sample of food for degrowth topics, research areas and themes. It is not comprehensive in terms of the multiple directions and expressions of food for degrowth but we are confident that it offers both newcomers and those knowledgeable and experienced in degrowth new perspectives and ideas that are, moreover, presented in an orderly fashion.

The curation of the collection follows a distinctively practical, political and regenerative degrowth logic that is in sharp contrast to the just-in-time supply chain of the agrifood sector characterised by capitalist logic, production for trade, market dynamics, profits and state regulations. In this mainstream system, most quality food is relatively unaffordable while many fast and cheap foods lack nutrition and even pose health threats in terms of chemical additives in processing. Indeed, much commercially sold food is not fresh and energy is overconsumed to refrigerate and transport food.

Other seriously damaging environmental consequences of commodifying food production and exchange include resource depletion by farming with massive machinery using non-renewable fuels and applying fertilisers with polluting and toxic ingredients. As the World Health Organisation (WHO 2019) reports that 1 in 9 people go hungry, 1 in 4 are severely or moderately food insecure, and that more than 1 in 4 children under 5 are affected by stunting, wasting or obesity – convivial degrowth acts of growing and eating together, and sharing what we have, offer ways to reconsider how we might improve our food practices in terms of sociopolitical acts. Chapters in this collection offer insights into more sustainable, resilient and healthy food systems within a relocalised and integrated food systems logic.

The contributors drill down into aspects of the social relations of care, alternative economic models, and more holistic, hybrid food systems. We focus not only on cities that grow increasingly important with the global trend of urbanisation and its consequences for just and accessible fresh food sources. This collection also explores connections, flows and relationships to hinterlands, and decentralisation within rural regions. Detailed accounts of experiences recount stories of barely visible and unconscious degrowing, decolonisation, conscientious initiatives to establish degrowth, postcommunist contexts, and ecofeminist themes of care highlighting traditional ecological practices and knowledge.

Degrowth movement and terms

Degrowth emerged very early this century as a provocative slogan with economic, scientific and philosophical roots. Despite rising attraction and interest, the degrowth movement has no headquarters. Advocates and campaigners intentionally remain decentralised in ‘a horizontal, multilayered and open network of activists’ who operate at many scales to apply degrowth principles to their everyday lives and ways of relating to others and Earth (Liegey and Nelson 2020). This means working towards ecologically efficient, regenerative and convivial ways of living, producing and consuming. A degrowth approach to work includes minimising paid work to focus on collective self-provisioning to fulfil people’s basic needs in housing, food, clothing and attending to care and wellbeing. In particular, Jones and Ulman (Chapter 2) spell out how this happens in practice, with an emphasis on food.

The degrowth movement celebrates ecological and political principles of frugal abundance, autonomy, commoning, conviviality, decolonising productivist imaginaries and open relocalisation. Given these concepts are unfamiliar to many outside the degrowth and associated movements, brief explanations follow. To begin, in a transformation from growthism, a central concept and objective is to ‘decolonise productivist imaginaries’. This means deconstructing concepts and beliefs associated with the ideals and practices that support growth dynamics and symbolism in contemporary societies across the globe. Going beyond the commonsense conclusion that another world is impossible, degrowth advocates evoke ways of being that celebrate diversity and quality of life. The principles of radically reducing social and economic inequality, making sure everyone’s basic needs are satisfied, reducing exploitation of the earth and living within its limits are universally applied in localised degrowth practices and strategies, thus forming ‘glocal’ initiatives.

The degrowth concept of autonomy is primarily influenced by the works of Cornelius Castoriadis (Garner n.d.) and has synergies with theories of autonomist Marxists (Cleaver n.d.). John Holloway (2002) has affected how degrowth activists conceive of power and influence in horizontalist and collaborative ways. Direct governance, co-governance, and personal and collective agency prioritise local power following the principle of subsidiarity. Not surprisingly, a degrowth ideal within cultural and ecological activities is commoning (Vivero-Pol et al. 2018). ‘Conviviality’ was defined by a pioneer of degrowth, Ivan Illich, to mean a cooperative, mutual, sociable and sharing approach complementing autonomy. For instance, citizens rather than experts or technocrats directly control technologies and institutions (thus, ‘convivial tools’).

Degrowth abundance is frugal: frugal use of Earth while living in, and with, personal, emotional and philosophical abundance. Think ‘small is beautiful’ (Schumacher 1999 [1973]) and that care of one another, solidarity, regenerating and nurturing our ecosystems, producing for quality, wellbeing and simplicity all carry a wealth of meaning and self-fulfilment. ‘Frugal abundance’ – also referred to as ‘happy sobriety’ – is practised in the context of ‘open relocalisation’ whereby goods and services are produced and shared locally to achieve social and environmental efficiencies. This enables direct governance of the local economy and polity. ‘Open’ relocalisation points to the celebration of diversity within locality and the maintenance of communications and free transference of knowledge and skills between such localities.

The degrowth movement emerged in Europe, initially in France, to spread most rapidly in the English-speaking world since the mid-2010s. This collection simply confirms its internationalisation. The academic editors are a Welsh-Australian who has published on degrowth as an international phenomenon (Nelson and Schneider 2018; Liegey and Nelson 2020) and an Australian who has worked for many years on food projects in Australia since 2004, Venezuela (2009–2012), Dublin (2016–2018), Barcelona (2017–2020) and ten key European, African and South American cities (2018–2020). Chapters 3, 5, 6 and 9 focus on postcommunist central European countries, such as Hungary and the Czech Republic. Chapter 4 is based on fieldwork in Nairobi, in the Central African country of Kenya, by an academic based in Germany while Chapter 15 draws, in part, on research in the Chikukwa permaculture project in Zimbabwe. Chapter 12 refers to work across the globe. Chapter 13 interrogates decolonisation and food sovereignty in the Cree Nation of Chisasibi. Chapters in Part 3 explore projects and networks in Italy (Veneto), Spain (Catalonia and Barcelona) and the Portuguese-speaking world. Chapter 14 refers to food projects in Sweden. The collection proper begins with an Australian rural family revealing and analysing how they practice frugal abundance in food (Chapter 2) to end with a thought experiment on degrowth food supplies in the future of Melbourne (Australia), a state capital forecast to support a population of 8.5mn in 2050 (Chapter 15).

The degrowth movement meets alternative food networks

The emergence of the degrowth movement coalesces with a wide variety of alternative food networks (AFNs) spreading across the world. AFNs often describe their produce as ‘fresh, diverse, organic, quality and “slow”’ and their networks as ‘small-scale, short, traditional, community, local and embedded’ (Edwards 2016). A broad movement of food practices, AFNs are built on an ethics of social justice, environmental sustainability and animal welfare. They grew in popularity during the 1990s in response to increasingly apparent issues inherent within the industrial food system. AFNs seek to promote diverse alternatives to transform the food chain, support a return to community production, and connect ethical producers and consumers in local and direct ways. AFNs come in many forms, such as community supported agriculture (CSA), exist at different scales, are located in many places and support similar preexisting food movements, such as varieties of urban and organic agriculture and the slow movement. Often considered socially innovative, many AFNs place a contemporary twist on traditional practices.

AFNs often put many values and objectives of degrowth into practice but are not often mentioned in degrowth literature. When they are, there is an emphasis on productive AFNs or traditional food movements ignoring a food systems perspective, modern applications and the collective power of food movements. Such a disconnect between degrowth and AFNs can obscure and disempower while alliances of shared values can illuminate common ground to catalyse greater uptake overall of sustainable and just practices – as demonstrated in the recent degrowth collection (Burkhart et al. 2020). Similarly, certain chapters in our collection seek to highlight the diversity and contributions that such distinctive movements offer each other in achieving joint aims. The following discussion of AFN projects from points of production through to distribution, consumption and waste provides a context for the landscape of food for degrowth initiatives – samples of which appear in this volume – and a holistic understanding of alternatives emerging from a coalescence of movements.

Production

A wide diversity of productive degrowth food initiatives utilise ethical and sustainable resource use methods. Widely acknowledged approaches include self-provisioning, permaculture and agro-ecology, community gardens and the keeping of livestock, such as bees and chickens. Less apparent is a variety of, often adaptable, approaches. For example, recognising conflicts over urban space, the City of Melbourne (Australia) experimented with vertical and walk-through community gardens, while Huertos in the Sky, a social enterprise based in Barcelona (Spain) recuperates terraces to establish urban gardens. Another not-for-profit, The Lemon Tree Project, uses something as simple as a lemon tree to create spaces of encounter to promote both fresh food and social cohesion, while grassroots collectives proactively take over street verges to grow their own food (Frost 2019). The Council of Oslo works with migrant communities to grow micro-greens in the basement of housing blocks to supplement diets with fresh produce in on-site canteens.

Technologies of production come in a variety of forms enabling both simple and complex approaches. For example, an aquaponic kit may use many parts that few can benefit from or remain quite simple for the benefit of many as in neighbourhood aquaponic experiments in Caracas (Edwards, forthcoming 2021). Food for degrowth occupies a gradient from ‘lighter’ transitions to ‘darker’ transformations. Steps to a fully realised degrowth project recognise that small transitionary stages are needed to secure long-term transformational goals. Concepts and practices of food security may meet immediate needs while, like degrowth, food sovereignty considers holistic goals of autonomy and the power of choice to make decisions (Agarwal 2014). As shown in chapters in this volume, understanding the complex cultural context of local transitions is paramount.

Distribution and consumption

A wide variety of distribution and consumption options for AFNs speak to degrowth themes, such as CSAs and ‘food hubs’ that Blay-Palmer et al. (2013, 524) define as ‘networks and intersections of grassroots, community-based organisations and individuals that work together to build increasingly socially just, economically robust and ecologically sound food systems that connect farmers with consumers as directly as possible’. Other alternatives include ‘cow-share’ and ‘hive-share’ programmes where small groups care for livestock together to share production. ‘Rent-A-Chook’ in Sydney (Australia) provides flexible and accessible forms of ownership and offers keeping chickens at home trials. Various food box delivery programmes such as CERES (Community Environment Park) Fair Food in Melbourne (Australia), support local producers throughout the year, asylum and migrant workers, waste minimisation and educate.

Embedded ethics, a principle shared with degrowth, carries over into ethical diets, where individuals...