Culture Agriculture Food and Environment最新文献

This article explores community-based food production and sharing practices in eastern Kentucky that are often obscured by dominant neoliberal paradigms and market-based solutions. I begin with an orientation to eastern Kentucky, which is nestled in the mountains of central Appalachia, and its history of economic precarity and subsistence. Next I introduce my methods, followed by discussions of food sovereignty. Through the presentation of ethnographic evidence from participant observation and in-depth, semi-structured interviews in eastern Kentucky, I illustrate an extant “quiet food sovereignty”—community-based food production that is overlooked by institutions and unrecognized by practitioners as constituting food sovereignty. I argue that any push to marketize growing, gathering, and/or hunting food in eastern Kentucky is not the solution to economic precarity or poor public health in that part of the state. As I illustrate, small farming (or large farming, for that matter) is not an economically viable (although socially and culturally valuable) option in the United States. Instead, I argue for local and federal efforts that support community food sovereignty.

Food, waste, and food waste are embroiled in a wide array of political and moral debates in the United States today. These debates are staged across a range of scales and sites—from individual decisions made in front of refrigerators and compost bins to public deliberations on the U.S. Senate and House floors. They often manifest as a moral panic inspiring a range of Americans at seemingly opposed ends of the political spectrum. This article contrasts three distinct sites where food waste is moralized, with the aim of deconstructing connections between discarded food and consumer ethics. In doing so, we argue that across the contemporary American social strata, food waste reduction efforts enfold taken-for-granted ideas of moral justice, or theodicy, that foreground individual responsibility and, as a result, obfuscate broader systemic issues of food inequality perpetuated by late stage capitalism.

Green political theorists often highlight local food systems as an exemplar of ecological citizenship. Nevertheless, the topic has received scant systematic and critical treatment within green political theory. Although local food initiatives generally tend to be environmentally friendly, not all such initiatives lead to better environmental outcomes, nor can they be essentially characterized as citizenship practices that foster social justice. This article argues that a situated analysis is necessary to understand how a particular local food initiative promotes ecological citizenship. Through a qualitative study of community supported agriculture (CSA) participants in the greater Edmonton region of Canada, this article analyzes the civic virtues nurtured by this community and interrogates the extent to which their everyday practices resemble ecological citizenship. It concludes that discursive and structural limitations prevent the Edmonton CSA community from achieving meaningful diversity and addressing social justice concerns within its realm.

This article illustrates how Mexican farmworkers in Wisconsin dairies negotiate forces of capitalist oppression through the production, preparation, sharing, and consumption of food. Engaging Anna Tsing's “pericapitalism,” I argue that farmworkers create spaces within and beside capitalism that enable strategies of care, relationships of solidarity, and the remaking of worlds. These practices facilitate not just farmworkers' survival within exploitative systems but also their ability to flourish. Critically examining the notions of agency, victimhood, oppression, and resistance that dominate narratives of Mexican migrant labor, this article draws from feminist ethnography to illuminate the various ways that farmworkers in Wisconsin dairies negotiate relationships to food, gardening, and cooking in order to create durable and livable worlds.

Despite aspirations toward more equitable and sustainable food systems, alternative food movements have been critiqued for reproducing the inequalities of the agrifood system they contest. This article examines the challenges a group of justice-oriented food hubs face in integrating racial justice into their work. We ask whether the financial pressures of enacting alternative approaches to food hub work within market logics can squeeze out racial justice goals. We find that dominant framings of alternative food movements diminish Black activism. We argue that justice-oriented food hubs can get caught in a “justice trap” similar to the “local trap”—the tendency to assume that the local scale is inherently desirable and leads to a socially just food system. The notion of a justice trap signals the assumption that what constitutes justice in the food system is self-evident and that different forms of justice are automatically subsumed within the general concept of “food justice.” Our analysis indicates that the justice trap arises from an inability to articulate the racial justice implications of the everyday realities of running organizations within the market logics that dominate even alternative food movements.

Emblematic of the ubiquitous wet markets in China, the live-poultry trade has far-reaching influences on Chinese people's diet, culinary art, social interactions, and cultural identities. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the live-poultry trade has also borne the brunt of this public health crisis due to its notorious history of spreading avian flu and its association with the spread of coronavirus. There have been serious consequences—successive open-ended bans on live poultry trade at urban markets have been announced by several cities, Wuxi, China, included. Based on seven-week field research on a conventional live-poultry stall at a major wet market in Wuxi, this article examines the live-poultry stall's work setting, interactions between live-poultry vendors and consumers in building and practicing culinary values (including food qualities and cooking mastery), ethical issues around live-poultry slaughtering, and how the local Wuxi government contrives to rehabilitate the city from an “endemic” business via an epidemic. We argue that there are underlying political agendas relating to cravings for modernity and urbanization behind a seemingly radical hygienic discourse, which tends to proselytize cultural customs and suppress the social functions of public space. The live-poultry stall thus undergoes intersectional framing as a “culinary oasis” versus a “petri dish,” and a “social courtyard” versus a “political theater,” in this national anti-epidemic movement.

This article explores the impacts of recent trends in yak farming on yak herding culture among the Brokpa of Merak and Sakteng in eastern Bhutan. It assesses the challenges experienced by herders in the context of climate variability and socioeconomic development. The data were collected through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 20 Brokpa in Merak and Sakteng and through analysis of livestock census records of six consecutive years (2013–2018). The results of the study reveal a number of significant issues: a labor shortage resulting from Brokpa youths leaving villages for better job opportunities, overgrazing and shrinking of rangelands, and declining yak populations due to disease and predation. In addition, study respondents worried about the unpredictable displacement of Brokpa and a possible loss of identity as a result. Unless alternative policies and interventions are adopted to ensure the sustainability of yak farming and rangelands, the future of yak herding culture is uncertain.

School food programs across the United States are plagued by widespread criticism and face urgent calls for reform and public discourse has also become fixated upon “healthy” eating as a means to address a variety of child health problems. Scholars widely challenge the admonishment to eat “healthy” as laden with privilege and recognize the inherent, hegemonic whiteness of contemporary alternative food movements, but few studies have directly examined the relationship between race and school food programs. This paper draws on ethnographic research to unpack “healthy eating” through the perspective of elementary school students and shows how they challenge dominant narratives that assume kids do not like vegetables and expose the fallacy of nutrition education as the key to healthy eating. Through the performance of vegetable nutrition, kids critically engage with normative nutrition messages and begin to reveal a racialized consciousness of school food.

Anthropologists developed the lifeways construct to understand how communities make a way of life on certain landscapes. In this paper, we pair the lifeways construct with that of “lived experiences” to include processes of change in lifeways. Using a case study of farmers in Idaho's Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer region, we explore farmers' efforts to adapt to changes in agricultural water policy. Based on interviews with farmers, we identify several components of farmers' lifeways, including place-based identity, stewardship, trust in decision-makers, and financial well-being. Our findings suggest that the relationships between farmers and their landscapes are shifting as a result of water governance changes. When combined with dynamic global economic factors, ever-shifting regulatory and governance priorities and social-ecological changes are likely to continue producing new and interacting challenges to which farmers—and their lifeways—will need to adapt to survive.