Editorial: The role of reflexivity in care-full food systems transformations

Introduction: food practices and ethics in the Anthropocene

This paper is an epilogue to the special issue, which examines the connections among learning, teaching and practising ethics of food politics through diverse, thoughtfully theorised, case studies. The accounts share a commitment to finding new sites for political thought and action. They do so in the context of the Anthropocene, a time of extreme and exploitative production, waste and consumption that demands humans reframe the way they know and practise food. They also do so at a time when calls for interdisciplinary responses to knowing and responding to the Anthropocene have become increasingly strident. At their core, the papers focus their attention on reflexive practices of teaching/learning, which enact an ethico-politics of care and which promise to transform subjectivities and ways of organising food. In this epilogue I reflect on this promise.

Summarising the papers very briefly, both Turner (2018) and Spring et al. (2019) explore spaces of food waste redistribution. Turner examines ways of learning through playful practice, while Spring and colleagues investigate activist and charity-based teaching of ways to (re)organise food and food waste ethically. Raising questions of food sovereignty, Mann (2018) interrogates farmer-to-farmer teaching and learning, while Gordon (2019) focuses on a non-foundational learning of ethics. Each of the other papers addresses the mattering of learning in relation to food consumption: the ethico/religio-politics of eating meat in India (Sathyamala, 2018); the teaching and learning of a different ‘meat politics’ in European secondary schools (Bruckner and Kowasch, 2018); experimentation and experiential teaching of urban verge gardens (Hsu, 2019); collective meal making and eating as a way to convey food ethics through encounter (Kiddle et al., 2019); and the knowledge co-production of Black youths’ food consumption experiences (Jones, 2018).

Taken together, the papers dismantle oversimplified thinking that positions alternative against conventional food, or ethical against unethical food, which otherwise amounts to false binaries of good/bad food and, concomitantly, good/bad food producers and consumers. Instead, they embrace the complexities of embodied practice and situated knowledge to explore the transformative potential of the different ways we construct knowledge of food and food practices, and the ethico-politics of this potential. Individually and as a set, the papers connect with important movements in agri-food scholarship: diverse economy initiatives beyond monetised supply chains; the rethinking of food politics as experimentation; the politics and ethics of the more-than-human in and amongst food; the pedagogical politics of peer teaching and learning; the politics and ethics of food transgressions; and the embrace of Other forms of food knowledge, including embodied/gendered/racialised/indigenous knowledges. The papers put political economy accounts of food into conversation with diverse and community economy perspectives and approaches that focus on ethics, politics, pedagogy, affect and different forms of attunement.

The collection raises four pivotal questions. How is learning about/of food relevant to transformative ethical practice? How might we approach multifaceted food issues and political projects (e.g. animal ethics, ecological ethics, ethics of religion) through different ways of learning about food? How are these different ways of knowing food related to different ways of doing food (i.e. food practices)? How might we understand the world in ways that can engender transgression or difference as a counterpolitics to existing political economies of food production, distribution and consumption? And more broadly, the collection asks how might we practise a politics of care that accounts for these diverse learnings and teachings of ethics that transform food economies? Reassuringly, the papers offer up a diverse range of answers to these questions. I reflect upon these, and offer three key collective theoretical contributions.

Before turning to these points, it is important to stress that as a collection of stories, the papers provide a scholarly investigation of the link between food ethics, learning and practice. This domain has been underexplored in food scholarship, at a time when the popular infatuation with food reality television and celebrity chefs has taught us that the pedagogy of food ethics is a potentially generative site for new political imaginations. Jamie Oliver has confirmed not only that there is an ethico-politics to be practised, but that there is also a politics to be enacted through food that seems to transcend food. The papers in this volume connect pedagogy to this ethico-politics and reaffirm that food is ever more a critical and potentially transformative site for enacting (Lewis, 2009) these politics.

Alternative food initiatives: militant particularism and reflexivity in embodied knowledge practices

The term ‘alternative food initiative’ (AFI) has been traditionally applied to agri-food activities that ‘share[s] a political agenda: to oppose the structures that coordinate and globalise the current food system and to create alternative systems of food production that are environmentally sustainable, economically viable, and socially just’ (Allen et al., 2003: 61). The AFI brings to mind Harvey’s (1996) notion of ‘militant particularism’, where efforts to transform everyday lives inevitably carry forward situated knowledge and ‘particularisms’ including those that are problematic from different angles. Critical agri-food literature identifies such particularisms and their contradictions. These include the complexities of seeing the ‘local’ as a naively pure ideology for liberal politics when in reality the local can be encumbered with social, environmental or economic realities that are not sustainable or just (e.g. DuPuis and Goodman, 2005).

The case studies in this collection are all generative projects of food knowledge production presented as different to what is conventional. They are situated accounts and assemble a suite of ‘particularisms’ (varied historical and temporal contexts and on-the-ground knowledge) and associated potentialities for diverse food futures through their practices. In this way, the authors put examples of Anthropocenic food production and consumption into tension with the hopefulness of an alternative vision. Rather than embracing alterity as a pre-formed binary opposition to the conventional, the papers in this collection use practice and embodiment to highlight these militant particularisms and associated viscerality and feeling.

Through these accounts of ways of knowing ethics through teaching and learning, I explore the importance of embodied practice, and offer some theoretical insight. As explored here, individuals who ‘do differently' as part of AFIs come with their particularisms. In the cases in this collection, individuals’ embodiment of AFIs and their politics diversify sets of practices, generating different knowledges. These practices include, noticing difference in food practice (e.g. diversity, the unexpected, the experimental, and the transgressive), and framing it in ontologically particular ways. We might think of these individual bodies as instruments (Longhurst et al., 2008) that measure, read and calibrate (food)worlds through their diverse experiences of them. A summary of these embodiments includes not just the tangible ‘doing’ by AFI participants, but also their intensities of feelings, senses and emotions, amounting to affect. This affect changes our capacity to act, and to act differently to how is conventional (Massumi, 2002).

Further, this embodiment is not fixed. Attunement, thought of as the reflexive feedback of these affective engagements with the world (Sharp, 2018a) suggests that the process of being affected is continual and dynamic. Understood as an ongoing re-measuring, re-reading, and re-calibrating of these foodworlds, this reflexivity is demonstrated in the various accounts of AFIs in this special issue. Therefore, not only are AFIs seen to be generative in that they enact new foodworlds, but they enact them with a diverse, situated and changing ethico-politics.

Authors in this special issue describe embodiment and reflexivity in (literal) digestions of diverse knowledge in creative and disruptive terms. Jones (2018) and Sathyamala (2018), for example, emphasise the ontological production of the person through what and how one eats, while Bruckner and Kowasch (2018) describe how they teach ‘what is meat?’ based on an ‘ethic of the gut’. Kiddle et al. (2019) use eating collectively as pedagogy and content in learning to practise food differently. Turner (2018: 1) describes what could be identified as attunement through ‘intimate human bodily engagements’ of play with food waste. More broadly, Spring et al. (2019) mobilise Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy’s (2015) notion of a political ecology of the body and emphasise the co-constitutive viscerality of learning and food. Meanwhile, Mann (2018: 3) positions the participatory nature of agroecology as a teaching tool that is capable of ‘embodying histories’ of food production, and Hsu (2019) highlights the enactive potential of experiential learning about urban verge gardens. The significant point is that the notion of attunement brings together the political potential of using practice-centred methodologies and attention to embodiment to learn an ethical politics and a politics of ethics from situated pedagogical practice. As Carolan (2011:1) insists, thinking ‘with and through our bodies’ allows us to observe difference in food practice. I elaborate that doing this reflexively, helps us to reframe food in terms of its possibilities, engenders the production of different practices, and in turn wider change.

Care ethics, a care-full food commons, and food transformations

Each of the papers in the special issue addresses questions to do with an ethics of care. Each frames these concerns in different ways and addresses different substantive issues, yet each enacts its own ethics of care about, with or for food through its concern for what is neglected or hidden in conventional food systems practices. Practices of care identify needs, accept responsibilities and establish caring competencies (to care well) (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011; Tronto, 1993). They acknowledge the reciprocity in reflexive engagements with matters of concern (Hill, 2015) to enable us to ‘maintain, continue, and repair “our world”’ (Tronto, 1993: 103) for the survival and flourishing of everything in it. Critically, this includes engaging with the discomforts of conflicting care due to differing care values.

The practice of care-full ethics is in each of these senses reflexive, which leads me to round-off this special issue by asking what it offers as a pedagogy of attunement. The concept of attunement presents an opportunity to explore the links between ethics, politics and processes of care-fully knowing neglected or ignored aspects of food relations through the embodied subject. On an individual level it is not difficult to understand attunement to food through tasting, smelling and seeing it and its connections. Moving from the individual to the collective subject (see Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2015) is the challenge that faces pedagogies of enactment when it comes to AFIs, and the point at which the papers here come together to grasp the bigger potential of these reflexive AFIs.

Kiddle et al. (2019) assert that there can be a common ethics, where individual attunements are shared through the mutual, reciprocal experience of a seven-course meal, catalysing a commons approach to generative ethics around food. In her contribution, Bethany Turner (2018) explores how the embodied, playful, experimental interactions of gardeners and food networks who work with the interspecies entanglements of food waste: (1) help them recognise its relational importance; and, (2) help develop skills and competencies necessary for responding to uncertain futures (such as the unpredictability of waste flows). She surmises that training our sensitivities to be ‘moved by food’ – picking up on some participants’ genuine disgust at throwing food away – and responsive to these more-than-human entanglements and mutual vulnerabilities has potential to induce and support ethico-political beliefs and practices that disrupt anthropocentric thinking.

Further, to a shared ethics and pedagogical practice, Spring and colleagues (2019) critically discuss activist and charity food waste redistribution organisations. While certain particularisms they point out might serve to depoliticise and individualise food distribution, they also create new value from waste. The hands-on approach of these organisations engenders a sensorial, embodied and affective learning of and from food – of, for example, food’s habits as it perishes, or its behaviours in being preserved – that teaches handlers more about food than conventional expiry dates do. This new value, catalysed and created in this common space, could transform urban food (re)distribution structures. There is therefore a sense in which the experiments, initiatives and networks depicted in these nine papers are embodied, affective, and transformative on a level that is more than individual.

I have established that the way individuals act depends on the ethical, or, care coordinates of the person affected and the context (or relations of food) in which they practise, but reflexive practice is certainly different in that previously neglected aspects of food are made more (or less) – figuratively or actually – visible, colourful, fragrant, audible, tactile and flavoursome in abundance (or scarcity). Knowing food in this way – training sensitivities to be moved by food and responsive to these typically hidden, more-than-human entanglements and mutual vulnerabilities – arguably has the potential to change the ethical coordinates of the learner, reconfigure food objects and their assemblages in care-full ways.

The nature of enactive research and framing also works to de-centre the researcher as expert in sense-making; rather, situating them amongst others (practitioners and research participants) in the assemblage, as co-producers of knowledge (Law and Urry, 2004). Co-learning and co-participation therefore have space to take place. The peer-to-peer learning (Mann, 2018) and the continuous re-questioning of collective identity, meaning and purpose behind food activism efforts (Gordon, 2019) are examples here. Enactive research also validates what might be seen as small-scale efforts. Kiddle and colleagues’ (2019) work is placed neatly in this frame, where a small group of ‘non-expert’, (non-)professional cooks generated – in their words – a community of practice.

The concept of care is helpful to bring these papers together to note the learning and teaching potentials of AFI ethics. Care can be seen to be complementary where food practices are reflexively affective, but enactive approaches that construct these food systems also interrelate in conflicting ways. This might be seen in a clash of care ethics. Indeed, the papers assembled in this collection regard the value of food in diverse, non-conventional ways, taking into account situated historical contexts, religion, culture, institutional frameworks and structural oppressions, socio-economic situations and socio-material worlds. Christina Sathyamala (2018) exemplifies this when she points to the perhaps more familiar ecological and animal welfare ethics of care in meat-free eating in the global north, but makes a sharp turn to the situated context of eating beef in India as an act of political subversion in the face of its ban by the Indian state (where upper-caste Hindus are vegetarian, and lower-caste ‘untouchables’ are eaters of beef). Where vegetarianism might be conventionally construed as a moral marker, to deny an identity group their practices is morally fraught. We learn that eating beef in the Anthropocene is therefore as much a question of animal and ecological ethics as it is of cultural ethics. Naya Jones (2018) tackles the ethics of marginalised subjects and the problem of non-specific ‘healthism’ or ‘hegemonic nutrition’ guidance. Her ‘Favourite Meals’ workshop focussed on sensory aspects of food, and was run with Black youths as participant knowledge co-producers. She argued that marginalised groups are most often the object of study, and to take up her message in a care context, to make transparent the work of these participants there is a need for their situated and relational knowledges to be constructed reflexively, by, these actors, themselves.

Spatially and temporally situated reflexive care

The sometimes brief, experimental exercises practiced by AFIs, such as Kiddle et al.’s (2019) initiative, can generate more lasting effects. While in some social movement circles, where the only recognition of activism is ‘demonstrat[ing] relentless dedication, and contribut[ing] a sustained effort’ towards a cause (Bobel, 2007: 147), ‘change-making’ might feel out of reach for many. However, enacting co-produced knowledge in place means that the efficacy of making care-full change need not be temporally defined. Instead, it is a more nuanced and complex notion of the care of the collective as a social movement (Bobel, 2007), in the moment. Hsu’s (2019) descriptions of verge gardens locate fluid sites of teaching and learning. The shared knowledges and practices therein create new situated competencies and understandings where outcomes are unpredictable; for example, knowing what food may or may not grow in current weather conditions. Gordon’s (2019) paper highlights the temporally changing identities of food sovereignty collectives in Spain. Such dynamics include managing their changing and contested terms of reference (e.g. the dynamic meaning of terms like ‘fair trade’ that keep them ‘alive’). He considers ethics and ethical practices more as time-specific process, in learning how to care for others.

Thinking through these reflexive and subjective encounters relationally, and accepting that no act of care is truly independent of any other, we might also consider the spatial dimension of this AFI work: for example, re-assembling physical space (Sharp, 2018b) that engenders practice-based acts of care for communities and environment in Hsu’s (2019) work. It explores the urban design and semiotics around food spaces like neighbourhood verge gardens which provides the empty stage for a confluence of public performances, discursive acts, social practices and non-human labour. The theory of affective atmospheres (Anderson, 2009; Brennan, 2004) is helpful here in highlighting the ‘singular affective qualities that emanate from but exceed the assembling of bodies. As such, to attend to affective atmospheres is to learn to be affected … by that which is determinate and indeterminate, present and absent, singular and vague’ (Anderson, 2009: 77).

Spatially, as for temporally, these spaces of care are therefore also dynamic. Individual attunements (the reflexive combination of noticing, framing and sensing) that emerge out of embodied acts of AFI work might in turn generate a locational collective affect (Michels, 2015: 255). This affect might be felt throughout groups of actors in place as they embody their communities of practice, enveloping the locations in which they work and making observable the potentials of organisational space. Atmospheric affect serves to geographically situate the practices and actors depicted here, whether in – but not defined by – the majority (Mann, 2018; Sathyamala, 2018) or minority world (Gordon, 2019; Hsu, 2019; Jones, 2018; Kiddle, 2019; Spring et al., 2019; Turner, 2018), rural or urban locations, or some combination of these. Mann (2018) tells how farmer-to-farmer learning, and incorporating multiple knowledge bases in food sovereignty movements, contest the corporatised food regime in her case regions of Brazil and Chile. Participating in social processes that bring gender and indigenous knowledge to the fore, and embedding problem-solving in the rural communities in which student-farmers live, affords opportunities to co-create: (a) knowledge; (b) a mutual vision; and (c) a mobilisation of farmers to link local challenges to larger scale social movements, and confront unequal power structures that lead to alienation.

Conclusion

The papers here highlight the multiple relations that animate and constitute alternative food work. They do so by examining and effecting new assemblages of ethics in embodied cases to make sense of the varied and contested ways of knowing food. They show that not only do established analytical categories – such as producer/consumer, urban/rural, conventional/alternative and good/bad foods – have blurred boundaries, but they hide and distort new assemblages of emergent relations among multiple subjects and objects that, left uncategorised or to create their own categories, might develop into new worlds. The papers offer us a better way forward than positioning AFIs against conventional worlds in binary opposition, which consciously writes out of the present their performativity and possibilities of making other, care-full worlds. By focusing on pedagogical practice as a means for different ways of knowing and doing, the papers also confirm the generative potential of ‘assemblage’ as a metaphor for encouraging enactive food experiments (Lewis et al., 2016; Sharp et al., 2015; Sharp, 2018b). In short, the different approaches taken by the papers in this special issue and their focus on pedagogy, emergence and affect present a way of thinking and doing research that is much needed if critical food geography as a platform for imagining and practising food spaces differently.

In this epilogue, I have argued that reflexive ways of teaching/learning welcome the complexity of diverse, encounter-based, experimental and social practices that enact a different politics and a pedagogy of attunement, for transformation. I have suggested that: firstly, particularisms and situated knowledge offer a diverse ethico-politics, that when performed in the context of embodied food practices, enact diverse foodworlds. Secondly, the reflexivity practiced is continual in teaching and learning, and as a result the novel foodworlds enacted are themselves dynamic. Thirdly, attunement through the embodied subject connects ethics, politics and processes of care-fully knowing neglected food relations. Ideas of collective attunements move the reflexivity of the individual to the multiple bodies that make up foodworlds, accepting their changing relations and capacities.

To finish, I want to suggest that bringing together these observations helps us to understand how it is that we go about the opportunities of enacting new worlds rather than arguing about whether this is possible. This is the lesson of turning attention to pedagogy, but the papers in this special issue also remind us that transformational pedagogies need to be strategic and, importantly, responsive (Freire, 1993: 88). One way, then, of assembling these various insights is to practise enactive AFI research that identifies and takes up the opportunities for more caring relations that can be found on the ontological edges (of economy, value, gender, race, ideology, terminology, sense, space and place). Here a concern with recognising, practising and sharing reflexive attunements will in itself enact hopeful connections and different ways of caring and becoming. The cases presented in this special issue teach us that the practices of hopeful actors altering their knowing and political acting through their embodied attunements to food, and therefore playing their parts in collectively making food, will materialise as real difference in our food futures.