Enacting other foodworlds: Affective food initiatives performing a care-full politics of difference

Abstract

Food scholarship has struggled with what to make of alternative food initiatives (AFIs), both practically and politically. The surge of interest in AFIs in the past few decades has focused on the ways that AFIs might operate independently of capitalist, anonymous and mass-production processes, and is based predominantly on urban studies in the global north. These studies often interpret AFIs as political movements and defiant alternatives to industrial agri-food relations, representing a performance of singular alterity. Commonly this understanding of “alternative” has been collapsed into a politics of consumer identity, which is studied from the outside in abstract terms. More recently, these ways of framing food knowledge have been criticised in the literature for oversimplifying the complex set of objects, moments, sites and relationships that food embodies. Understanding food economy differently involves re-drawing the boundaries that we conventionally place around food. Post-structural thinking helps us reimagine these boundaries. It also redirects attention to embodied practices of food that are largely overlooked in food scholarship, and recognises that the sensory realm filters and invites varied experiences of affect, including political incitements. Situated in the context of critical food geographies, this dissertation considers different food ontologies in order to open up diverse understandings of practice in diverse food initiatives, as opposed to conceptualisations that are contained in binaries or closed categories. These considerations include problematising the ubiquitous terms of “alternative” food initiative or network. I interrogate a novel set of connected, empirical food experiments in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, and explore what political work they do in the world. My approach to these experiments includes seeing them through different conceptual and typological lenses, co-producing food knowledge with a community food activist, and employing ethnographic and auto-ethnographic methods to explore unexpected and diverse food practices involved in dumpster diving, farmers’ markets, the Crowd Grown Feast, and in the production through practice (or “enaction”) of foodbox kale. This work advances a set of methods that involve spending intensive time in the field, sensing and reflexively “more-than-following” food. My thesis argues that the different food experiments encountered here share a deep ethic of care, and build on embodied and affective practice. At the core of this shared ethic lie practices of attunement that mediate the relations of what this thesis proposes are affective food initiatives. I propose that attunement enacts a care-full politics of difference and possibility that transforms foodworlds.