New Foods

4 Key excerpts on "New Foods"

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  Social Research after the Cultural Turn

  • S. Roseneil, S. Frosh, S. Roseneil, S. Frosh(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Geographers have been at the forefront of research into new and re-emerging forms of provision, such as farmers’ markets and community growing, and much work strives to understand the complexities of grower motivations and identities as well as relationships with consumers and the natural environment, rather than taking these as given. Concepts or practices once imagined as universal are now understood as changing and diverse as researchers seek to uncover geographies of food. This reflects the fracturing and diversification within Western food production/consumption in recent decades. The ‘quality turn’ has seen a move away from the former emphasis on quantity, the rise of myriad small and micro-producers and the valorisation of regional diversity and uniqueness within the food system. There is substantial overlap between research on food in geography and in sociology, and less commonality of thinking with eco- nomics or economic/industrial geography. Research on food is now at the (cultural) forefront of the ‘new’ economic geographies produced by the cultural turn. In contrast to the earlier sub-discipline of ‘agricultural geography’, this research is now more often called ‘agri-food studies’ and, as Ilbery and Maye (2008: 160) comment, ‘research in this area is increasingly focused on different types of food supply, which involves thinking about where and how food is produced, how it is retailed and how and where it is consumed’. I would add that geographers are now increasingly interested in the relationships, experiences, emotions and beliefs surrounding the food chain and the way that food relates to all parts of people’s lives.

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  World Hunger

  • Liz Young(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  There is ample evidence that the world food system is becoming increasingly integrated, so that who eats and who does not, and what they eat or do not eat, is now influenced by global processes which are quantitatively and qualitatively different from global processes in the past. This chapter overviews inherited international processes that govern access to food before detailing some of the most recent transformations of the global production, distribution and marketing of foods, which is creating new winners and losers in the competition over the production and consumption of food.

  The changing geography of global food production and consumption, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century

  The geography and diffusion of plants and animals in the ancient world, from Mesopotamia and other agricultural hearths, is a fascinating study, and trade in luxury foods existed in the centuries before European expansion: the trans-Saharan salt trade; the wine trade, which connected the Mediterranean regions to Northern Europe; the trade in olive oil; the trade in eastern spices to Europe. However, these transactions never represented a significant element of the diets of the majority of people, or even of the diets of the élite. The great bulk of food production and consumption was localised until capitalism emerged and diffused with the European conquests. The focus of this section is on some of the more important connections made between regions and peoples and their diets since European expansion and colonisation, that is, some important foundations of the contemporary global food system.

  The discovery of the Caribbean as a sugar-producing system initiated a process of producing a food cheaply in one location and transporting it in large volumes to be consumed in another. The case study of northeast Brazil (see Box 2.3

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  Eating, Drinking: Surviving

  • Walter Spiess, Farhana Sultana, Peter Jackson(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Springer Open

    (Publisher)

  It is a dynamic system which has changed dramatically in the past and will in the future (Rosegrant et al. 2012 ). Goodman and Sage ( 2013 ) assert that “ there is almost nothing more geographical than food in the ways that it intimately interlinks production and consumption, nature and society, bodies and landscapes, the global and the local, and indeed spaces, places, and everywhere in between ” (p. 3). This chapter maintains that the E. Young ( & ) School of Sciences (Geography and Environment), Staffordshire University, Leek Road, Stoke-on-Trent ST4 2DF, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2016 P. Jackson et al. (eds.), Eating, Drinking: Surviving , SpringerBriefs in Global Understanding, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42468-2_2 13 food system has become one of the most important globally embedded networks of production and consumption; its integral connections with the petroleum industry and global security only serve to con fi rm its centrality and signi fi cance (Le Billon et al. 2014a , b ; Goodall 2008 ; Weis 2009 ). Geographical perspectives on food illuminate a cruel paradox at the heart of contemporary globalization. Why do millions of people still die from hunger and hunger-related diseases while the health of millions is threatened by an obesity pandemic? In a world where millions enjoy a more varied diet than ever before and waste nearly as much as they eat, why does food scarcity still haunt millions? Meanwhile countries as varied as China, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt now suffer a “ double burden ” where under nutrition coexists with obesity as a major public health problem; a strange world too where “ some people destroy food because prices are too low, and others literally eat dirt because food prices are too high ” (Angus 2008 : 1).

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  Local Foods Meet Global Foodways

  Tasting History

  • Benjamin Lawrance, Carolyn de la Peña, Benjamin N Lawrance(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  We see this as a logical next step in the expanding domain of food and cuisine studies, the contours of which have recently been articulated by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. In the second edition of their now-standard reader, they ponder the mushrooming of the sub-field, and in particular how “food has permeated almost every scholarly field and become a widely accepted research topic.” Whereas when they embarked on their careers, food was “marginalized as a scholarly focus,” by the late 2000s, the proliferation in food, drink and cuisine research extends deeply into historical studies, anthropology, geography, ethnic studies, and sociology, and is also making significant inroads into human biology, archaeology, political science and economics. 7 As an intellectual project, this volume emerged from an ongoing conversation about food, drink, and globalization between two scholars – one seeking to write a book about the history of a foodstuff and its attendant foodways; and the other exploring how to teach the emergence of food and cuisine within a global historical context as a vehicle for the examination of geopolitical change and social history. 8 This book represents a concerted effort to ground our common interests in the narratives of things within the dynamic “global” communities that produce, transport, and consume them. Alexander Nützenadel and Frank Trentmann have forthrightly observed that although food and globalization “are inseparable,” financial markets, migration narratives, communication concerns and trans-national political contingencies have often overshadowed the contours of food globalization. 9 Popular histories of commodities and luxuries have done little to undercut this, however

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