Towards post-industrial foodways: Public pedagogy,spaces,and the struggle for cultural legitimacy

Abstract

Re-embedding foodways in local communities and ecologies is an enormous undertaking that is supported in part through a myriad of educational processes. For niche spaces of post-industrial foodways, a crucial step toward normalization is being accepted, appreciated, and even desired by the wider society. This article explores how pedagogy underlies all food system change, especially for forming cultural legitimacy of emergent spaces. The theoretical perspective of public pedagogy is reviewed in order to provide an analytical frame for analyzing the educational processes that nurture cultural legitimacy for emergent food-oriented spaces. As various conceptions of public pedagogy have been used in a wide variety of contexts, I suggest an articulation that assumes learning to be an assemblage of spaces, practices, people, artifacts, and policies, which better captures the wide range of educational processes that precipitate cultural change (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988; McFarlane, 2011). To illustrate the role of public pedagogy in legitimizing emergent food-oriented spaces, I explore two specific cases. The first case of urban spatial policy takes public pedagogy as a starting point for the legitimization of certain spaces; while the second case of the residential front yard begins with a specific space that is a site of struggle with opposing public pedagogy processes, each creating cultural legitimacy for a different landscape form. By exploring the linkages between public pedagogy and space, I make the claim that education is the primary driver for food culture transformation.

Introduction

Re-embedding a food culture in local ecologies and histories is an undertaking that involves educational efforts across multiple spaces, diverse institutions, and an assortment of learning configurations. School institutions, from primary to tertiary levels, have responded through a variety of forms including establishing school gardens, providing organic food options in cafeterias, and incorporating environmental education curriculum. Outside the formal education system, learning naturally occurs in the informal, yet structured settings as varied as community centers, gardening stores, and urban farms in the form of workshops, demonstrations, volunteer work days and other experiences. In the domain of everyday life, which is equal, if not more vital, to food culture renewal, are sites as mundane as the household kitchen, dining table, restaurants, cafes, and supermarkets. In these spaces, learning occurs through simply engaging in the practices of daily life and navigating through the unfolding performance and materialities of the site. Undergirding this span of educational activity are a spectrum of policies that govern by supporting and/or constraining food-oriented spaces and the practices that occur there, whether through food-focused zoning, community garden regulations, urban agriculture incentives, and school lunch directives (Raja et al., 2008). As a gatekeeper directing the flow of knowledge through a given locality, policy plays a key role in shaping local learning ecologies. Policy, itself, emerges as the result of translocal learning as policymakers and influencers acquire governance strategies and trends from a range of mediums as “reports, the media, websites, blogs, contacts, conferences, peer exchanges, and so on” (Macfarlane, 2011: 369). Taken together, it is this extensive network of spaces, places, and policies that act discursively to form and renew the place-based narratives, local knowledge, and daily practices of a given locality, city, or region. This movement from industrial to post-industrial foodways is driven in part through a diversity of pedagogical spaces and processes. How does one account for the pedagogic influence of any given space or spaces in this constellation of educational sites? What theoretical perspectives capture the shifting of culture through this assortment of learning processes? In this article, I explore the use of the theoretical construct of public pedagogy to describe the use of education in all its un/structured forms to create cultural legitimacy (i.e. public pedagogy to legitimize the community garden). Cultural legitimacy, or the “need to be accepted by the wider public and fit with existing societal norms and beliefs” is a necessary precursor to emergent spaces being normalized and scaled up (Geels and Varhees, 2011: 910). While public pedagogy can also refer to the education that specific food-oriented spaces affords for its visitors (i.e. the public pedagogy of the community garden), this article is centered primarily in the first type of public pedagogy. There is, however, an interplay between two types of educational processes and both are vital in precipitating change in food systems. To this end, I will explore the theoretical substance of public pedagogy in its relation to the cultural legitimacy of space. I will then explore two different examples illustrating public pedagogy’s role in legitimizing space. The first example examines turban spatial policy as having pedagogic agency to reorganize food-oriented space. The second example examines the contested site of the residential front yard to demonstrate the relationship between competing pedagogies aiming to develop cultural legitimacy for divergent front yard landscape forms. Through exploring on the linkages between public pedagogy and the cultural legitimacy of space, I make the claim that education is the primary driver of cultural change. While I focus this theoretical inquiry on food learning and localization, the frame of public pedagogy that I utilize is applicable to other contexts involving cultural shifts.

It should be noted that my use of the terms “industrial” and “post-industrial foodways” is largely based on the distinction between the overlapping tensions between industrial and alternative agriculture paradigms well-articulated by Beus and Dunlap (1990). These are the six tensions of: food system centralization vs. decentralization of land resources, and capital; dependence on vs. independence from capital, technology, markets, and specialists; competition vs. community; domination of nature vs. harmony with nature; specialization vs. diversity of crops, livestock, and production systems; and economic productivity vs. material restraint (Beus and Dunlap, 1990). This list, by no means exhaustive, can effectively be applied to describe post-industrial foodways. Also, each of these tensions may not apply to every foodways case. My choice of “post-industrial” rather than the “alternative” is meant to emphasize the movement of foodways, incrementally, away from industrial food paradigms. The term “foodways” accentuates the everyday spaces and practices of the food system and their underlying social and cultural discourse.

Public pedagogy: theory and substance

Public pedagogy has emerged as a viable frame for exploring the learning occurring outside the formal education system in physical and virtual spaces as varied as museums, zoos, television programs, and activist events (Biesta, 2012; Ellsworth, 2005; Hayes and Gee, 2010; Rich, 2011; Taylor, 2010). Shifting attention from school institutions and classrooms, public pedagogy stresses the notion that the mundane spaces of daily life, “where people actually live their lives and where meaning is produced, assumed, and contested” have pedagogic salience (Giroux, 2000: 355). Most relevant to understanding the educational potential of food-oriented spaces is Giroux’s assertion (2003) that public spaces and the practices associated with them are the primary arenas of struggle between competing discourses and values. His elevation of culture’s potency to educate in this key sentence: “Culture now plays a central role in producing narratives, metaphors, and images that exercise a powerful force over how people think of themselves and their relationship to others” (Giroux, 2004: 62).

While public pedagogy normally refers to the educational affordances and experiences associated with specific learning spaces (Ellsworth, 2005), I propose a second meaning of public pedagogy which pertains to the complex flows of knowledge and learning that act to legitimate certain discourses, narratives, spaces, and practices (of post-industrial foodways). Emergent post-industrial spaces (i.e. rooftop gardens, food recovery groceries, vertical farms, etc.) have tremendous instability when they first appear. While many factors contribute to their stability in the long term, this perspective emphasizes the role of education in all its un/structured forms in cultivating a societal awareness, acceptance, and demand—cultural legitimacy—for the spaces. To make sense of the range of learning processes associated with legitimizing food-oriented spaces, I adopt the perspective of learning assemblages which places agency in the synergy of spaces, practices, artifacts, policy (frameworks, documents, and discourse), and people (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988; Macfarlane, 2011). The assumption is that knowledge is emergent, fluid, and open-ended due to assemblages being spatially and temporally dependent. It also follows that the pedagogical and learning processes within spaces proceed not only from the space, but also from other elements of an assemblage that influence and interact with that space. Because learning assemblage theory accounts for a great diversity of learning configurations, it is suitable for analyzing the process of cultural legitimization of emergent food-oriented spaces which is encouraged by learning processes that are manifold and unpredictable.

The construct of public pedagogy in relation to cultural legitimacy of spaces can be distilled into three key features. First, public pedagogy implies there is an in/formal teaching and learning process. This view aligns with the tacit learning implicit in cultural pedagogies (Watkins et al., 2015) which explore the tacit learning implicit in unfolding everyday life experience. From this perspective, learning within the contours of everyday life is a series of “cumulative…continuous but uneven set of routines and recalibrations” (Watkins et al., 2015: 31). As the public interacts with a range of learning configurations in and around food-oriented spaces over a period of time, cultural legitimacy is formed. Second, the pedagogy may challenge an existing cultural discourse, maintain an unjust one, or simultaneously accomplish both. Theorists clearly communicate the need for public pedagogy to be a force to “challenge” or “push” against some established norm (Gaztambide-Fernandez and Matute, 2013; Giroux, 2000). Giroux’s usage (2000) of the term simultaneously considers learning sites to be more nuanced entities that either challenge, support, or simultaneously do both with respect to a given cultural narrative. This is a critical distinction because it recognizes the complexities and multiplicities of the emergence and flow of knowledge. Third, the pedagogical processes are experienced by the public. I suggest that the vernacular reading—the quality of being experienced by a wide range of people—is useful when applied to a diversity of learning configurations. This definition allows for analyzing an assortment of learning arrangements in terms of the degree of influence it wields in affecting cultural norms.

Policy and the public pedagogy of space

In this next section, I explore the role of policy in creating cultural legitimacy for specific types of foodways. Specifically, I focus on urban spatial policy and its educational influence in contributing to either an industrial or a post-industrial food culture. By doing so, I make the claim that many policy directives that are not typically viewed as “educational” do have profound educational consequences in that they regulate and distribute the culture-forming informal learning opportunities around food available to the public. Policy therefore acts with other elements to form learning assemblages which educate the public about the shape and character of its foodways. In terms of urban policy, its influence in driving food systems change in regressive or progressive ways has been recognized (Perrin, 2013; Thibert, 2012), while its role as a gatekeeper and distributor of food learning experiences has been largely overlooked. Policies that govern and structure space, such as land-use zoning and animal agriculture regulations, have educational salience in that they determine the permissibility and character of food and food practices of any given city space. For instance, from the first half of the twentieth century, planning regulation’s emphasis on aesthetics, hygiene, and efficiency effectively gutted cities of informal food cultivation, preparation, and selling in public areas (Brinkley and Vitello, 2014; Donofrio, 2007). The City Beautiful movement that began in the late 1900s promoted a spatial imaginary focused on spacious and well-manicured urban green spaces with a view that morality could be promoted through aesthetics. However, food’s central importance to urban life was overlooked—public food markets were viewed as either needing beautification or relocation into industrial districts due to their visual perception of disorder and uncleanliness (Donofrio, 2007: 30). Also, the emphasis on public health in urban regulations effectively removed animal agriculture in the city at the expense of waste management and local food supply benefits (Brinkley and Vitello, 2014). The synergy of urban imaginaries, city policy, planning documents, and the resulting built environments acted to limit the exposure of urban dwellers to food practices common a century ago, which has resulted in a pervasive cultural illiteracy around basic food knowledge (i.e. identification, cultivation, preparation, etc.), and moreover, an expectation that plant and animal agriculture does not belong in the cityscape. Furthermore, codified regulations allowing only strictly regulated food preparation and selling practices in commercial spaces in conjunction with food industry marketing has served to de-materialize and de-nature food at a cultural level. Vileisis (2008), in particular, has documented the food industry’s role in the “denaturation” of food products, through obscuring its production history in its marketing (i.e. milk cartons showing cows grazing in pastures), leading consumers to imagine an idealized version of a product, while hiding unsavory factory processing practices. ¹

Likewise, urban policy can also guide the re-establishment of local food spaces in cities, which act to re-educate the public about place-based foodways. The preeminent example of this is Cuba’s transition from large industrial agriculture to small-scale farming in the early 1990s. Spurred by the state of emergency created by the demise of the Socialist bloc and its imports to Cuba in 1989, which included half of its agricultural chemical inputs, and about 60% of its daily caloric requirements, Cuba implemented a massive change to its food system through a suite of policies (Altieri et al., 1999). Policy reforms included allowing citizens to apply for underused land if utilized for agriculture, loosening laws for selling home-grown produce, and providing various training and agricultural support for grassroots food production. These and other policy measures catalyzed the formation of urban agricultural spaces and an informal economy of food exchange. In 1997, community gardens repurposed from vacant or decaying lots in Havana rose to around 5,000, which does not include the plethora of gardens on interstitial spaces as city ordinances were relaxed (Altieri et al., 1999). Between 2008 and 2012, Cuba distributed state-owned—about 100,000 farms on over 1 million hectares—for small-farm production (Reiter et al., 2014). The food policies brought sweeping change to Cuba’s food system, resulting in a cityscape transformed by the influx of green space and an extraordinarily high level of food security—enough food to cover 90 percent of Havana’s needs (Altieri et al., 1999). Cuba’s case illustrates how national and urban policies connected with land-use, economics, and training have agency to initiate a radical food re-education at a culture-wide level through the reorienting space toward localized foodways. While not as comprehensive in scope, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in urban policy in other parts of the world, taking forms such as city food plan frameworks, urban agriculture incentives, and community food security initiatives (Morgan and Sonnino, 2010). Many local, regional, and national governments are revisiting their policy structures to allow the re-introduction of plant and animal agriculture in cities. For example, city regulations permitting urban animal agriculture such as backyard chicken, goat, and beekeeping are becoming increasingly common in many municipalities (Bouvier, 2015). There has also been a wellspring of interest in informal food vending as evidenced by the growing commonplace of food trucks and street food vendors in cities, all of which are undergirded by urban regulatory frameworks (Ehrenfeuch, 2016). Again, urban policy determines the types of food knowledge and practices that will be present in a given space, whether those that maintain industrial foodways or contribute to post-industrial foodways. The assemblage of policy and resulting food-oriented venues and activities act as public pedagogy to shape cultural sensibilities concerning food.

Policy is pedagogic in that it reflects dominant social imaginaries of any given time. As new social imaginaries emerge, subsequent policies are developed and act to culturally legitimize emergent food-oriented spaces. The urban imaginaries of a utopian city that is green, orderly, and sanitized propelled much of the urban spatial policy of the first half of the last century; the social imaginary of a food secure country drove the food policies of Cuba; while the environmental imaginary of urban or community resilience influence much of the emergent urban food policy. Lastly, policy also often has a pedagogic dimension through the inclusion of education-related activities and materials to teach or support a given policy. In Cuba’s overhaul of its food system, agricultural support through on-site consultation was mandated through its policy. In the recent policy initiatives to relocalize food in cities, promotional materials in the form of local government websites and brochures reinforce a local council’s commitment to a specific social imaginary, most often healthy lifestyle, environmental sustainability, and/or community development.

Public pedagogies of the residential front yard

In the last section, I focus on popular and emergent conceptions of residential front yard, arguably the most visible landscape form in the suburban streetscape, in order to articulate how a single built environment form can have divergent cultural expectations in relation to food which are both cultivated by assemblages of educational configurations. My intention is not to do a comprehensive analysis of these spaces, but to provide an initial account describing how the flow of discourse around food-oriented spaces may be interpreted through the public pedagogical lens. I have chosen this space because of its ubiquity and central position in the flow of everyday life, rendering any pedagogies associated with it as having a high degree of “publicness.” Also, with the recent trend of utilizing the residential front yard for edible gardens, the ontology and function of the space have become contested, making it a compelling case for analysis.

The iconic grass lawn as the default landscape choice for suburban front yards is largely the result of an array of educational processes that began in the aforementioned City Beautiful Movement at the turn of the last century and continued many decades after. Jenkins (1994) has documented in detail how in the United States various government agencies, lawn care companies, the golf industry, wealthy citizens, garden associations, and neighborhood gardening groups pushed for the lawn to be the standard front yard landscape through a complex and varied learning assemblage consisting of convention meetings, garden shows, demonstration spaces, advertising, popular magazines, mail-order catalogs, neighborhood cleanup campaigns, private and corporate-sponsored landscape competitions, gardening training programs, school garden programs, newsletters, and the lawns themselves. Through a wide range of actors, activities, and channels, the ideal of a well-manicured grass lawn was encouraged and taught. Other popular conceptions of the front yard, such as sand and weeds, agricultural space, and Mediterranean-style landscaping, were viewed as substandard or even eyesores and their conversion into grass lawns were viewed as encouraging morality and decency, especially when done in the low-income neighborhoods. Jenkins notes how a prominent the national gardening club encouraged its members to have their gardens be as publically visible as possible, even from freeways, trains, and steamships, as to increase their influence. This clearly reflects public pedagogical intent; there was a strong desire not only to educate through events and training, but also to encourage the realization that the gardens, themselves, are primary sources of education for any passerby (39).

Nineteenth-century front yard spaces were commonly used to grow vegetables for household use or grass for domestic animal grazing. However, efforts to elevate the grass lawn as an ideal landscape form continued for several decades, at least in part due to pressures from a multibillion-dollar lawn care industry, and eventually succeeded in standardizing the grass lawn for an entire culture, at the cost of any other forms, including those that involved agriculture. The front yard transitioned from being a place for the production of food to the consumption of aesthetics which mirrored (and perhaps encouraged) a similar shift in the wider culture. Food production knowledge, literacy, and practices were replaced by lawn maintenance know-how and practices which revolved around the constant application of chemical pesticides, herbicides, and synthetic fertilizers. Lawn care practices have become entrenched until the present. Robbins and Sharp (2005) lament that Americans, today, are willing to overlook the damaging impacts to human and environmental health simply because of approval or fear of disproval from their neighbors—a social norm that was cultivated a century ago through public pedagogical processes.

In the past decade or so, however, there has been a trickling of interest in recapturing the front yard for food cultivation. Led primarily by local food activists and avid gardeners that question the aesthetic of the grass lawn, there is growing recognition of the residential front yard having value as space for edible landscaping. However, the notion of turning one’s front yard lawn into edible landscaping is a radical and unsettling idea for many neighborhoods, particularly as edible front yards are still far from being a socially legitimate landscape form. Residents that have chosen to create front yard edible gardens often face fierce resistance from neighbors and local governments because of their perceived incongruity with accepted neighborhood aesthetics. In the case that the spaces do not comply with existing land or neighborhood codes which often prohibit non-uniform residential landscaping, gardeners are fined and/or their gardens are demolished by city authorities (Herrmann, 2015). These tensions emanate directly from the cumulative decades of pedagogy that effectively enshrined the ideal of aesthetic uniformity for neighborhoods within not only cultural preferences, but also built environment policy. This is another example which demonstrates the agency that policy has to regulate and determine the educational affordances and constraints available in a space for learning about foodways.

It should also be noted that edible front yard gardens are clearly a public pedagogical space on its own. The front yard is naturally a performative space that faces neighbors and passerby; their unique location near the intersection of private and public space intensifies landscaping choices and gardening activities of that space. From this vantage point, edible front yard gardens challenge current suburban sensibilities and assumptions about how front yard space is used.

However, the “stabilization journey” of front yard edible landscaping can be helped along through the addition of educational processes that inform the public not only about its community, health, and ecological benefits in ways that influence dominant aesthetic preferences. Learning configurations that lead to the cultural legitimization of the edible front yard are necessary, not unlike the public pedagogical efforts that enculturated the suburban lawn. Much like the learning that happens in formal settings, effective public pedagogy can be designed, implemented, and refined.

The front yard lawn is only one example of the larger movement of reconfiguring mundane spaces of city, including nature strips, abandoned lots, and rooftops, for post-industrial foodways, and illustrates how a built environment form and its aesthetics can be either oriented toward commercial profit and environmental harm or stewarded toward community and ecological benefit. Tremendous potential remains in converting this spectrum of interstitial spaces for agricultural use, especially if this practice is normalized and scaled-up across a given region. However, culturally entrenched notions of street and city forms and functions hinder this progress. Each spatial type has its own stabilization journey that can be encouraged through policy and programming that considers how pedagogy reshapes these spatial expectations.

Conclusion

Through the public pedagogy lens, the struggle over shaping foodways can be recast as a multi-layered conflict of competing pedagogies situated among and around ever-shifting spaces that are key sites to forming food culture occurring over centuries of history, with spaces gaining or losing cultural acceptance according to this volatile current of knowledge and learning. What is brought into focus are the various configurations of educational processes implicit in the industrial food complex taking over the range of spaces that make up foodways, as well as in local food actor attempts to regain them. Directing this flow and counterflow of knowledge and ideas are not only the spaces and their practices that situate foodways, but also a range of policy frameworks that regulate, orient, and create cultural legitimacy for those spaces.

I have outlined an approach for analyzing the educational dimension of foodways through the framework of public pedagogy. Foodways are continually shaped and reshaped through principal actors, which include the industrial food complex, local food advocates, and municipal governments that utilize a diversity of learning assemblages as public pedagogy to influence spaces, practices, and values. The industrial food complex, through an array of pedagogical processes and undergirded by modern city planning ideals, have succeeded in commodifying foodways, which have led to far-reaching impacts to everyday social life. Local food movements can utilize pedagogy for the purposes of re-emplacing food in local histories re-educating people’s senses for gastronomy (Petrini, 2007), developing terroir (Trubek, 2008), and reviving commensality (Seremetakis, 1994)—all key features of post-industrial foodways. The struggle to determine food culture requires a commitment to devising and implementing a diversity of public pedagogies. Developing post-industrial foodways through the renewing and reconfiguring of place-based practices and spaces is a pedagogical undertaking across vast array of spaces. How food-oriented spaces, along with their accompanying learning processes can be better designed to affect a cultural shift is a critical question requiring further consideration.