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<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
How our food is grown is important but equally critical is who is doing that growing.<\/p>\n
While reflecting on modern day slavery, the abuse of labour rights or noxious trade deals may not be everyone\u2019s conversation topic of choice at the table, engaging with such questions is essential to moving towards a more ethical feast in the future.\u00a0 As human geographer Doreen Massey reflected, we are responsible to others \u2013 both near and far \u2013 not because of what we have done but because of what we are.\u00a0 Our identities depend on our relations with the world around us and how we engage with food says a lot about our individual and collective personas.\u00a0 But, when eating a delicious piece of cheese, sipping a cool glass of white wine or licking our fingers after a juicy mango, how much do we really think about the farmers and workers who have been involved in growing, tending, harvesting, packing and moving these food items to our retailer of choice?<\/p>\n
As David Harvey noted \u2018we can actually consume a meal without the slightest knowledge of the intricate geographies of production and the myriad social relations embedded in the system\u2019 (1996:231).\u00a0 This means that the foods we eat and the beverages we drink \u2018are mute; we cannot see the fingerprints of exploitation upon them\u2026\u2019 (Harvey, 1990:423).\u00a0 This disconnection between us and the peoples and places producing our food is being disrupted in various ways: through alternative trade systems like Fair Trade that aim to make the connections between producers and consumers more equitable and transparent; brands that are centred around, for example, anti-slavery initiatives; or the periodic expos\u00e9s in the media of practices that briefly shock us.\u00a0 Furthermore, efforts to re-localise globally extensive food chains are longstanding and events like \u2018Open Farm Sunday\u2019 in the UK, alongside farmers\u2019 markets, aim to bring consumers face-to-face with the practices and producers of food.\u00a0Such strategies are problematic since, as has been widely discussed in the academic literature, they generally reproduce very white, middle-class and gendered landscapes but more recent technological developments in agricultural production mean that spaces of mass food retailing could act to democratise these.\u00a0 Imagine a supermarket in which the usually cavernous roof space is filled with an overhead garden in which fresh fruits and vegetables are grown.\u00a0It reduces food miles, allows for extra-fresh produce and is more inclusive to a wider demographic.\u00a0 While we may object to further consolidation in the food chain, the squeezing out of smaller, specialist producers or the use of robotic technologies in food systems, all of these practices are tending towards something I would argue is key to our utopian feast: a sense of connection to what we are eating.<\/p>\n
To think this through further, I will draw on a research project I conducted a few years ago with conventional and organic farmers in the UK and Finland.\u00a0 I was interested in understanding how they dealt with the various regulatory, environmental, socio-economic and political challenges and uncertainties of modern farming.\u00a0Agricultural landscapes have always been ones of activity and the \u2018doing\u2019 of farming is a habitual drive to cultivate the land.\u00a0 Whether a farmer was organic or conventional in their approach, they were united in this belief.\u00a0 Therefore, farming landscapes are produced through a complex interaction of customary practices, which result from the farmers\u2019 constant engagement with the land, as well as common ideas of what makes a \u2018good\u2019 farmer and the moral framework established by the farmers\u2019 own former and ancestral practices.\u00a0 Such engagements alter and shape both the farmer and the land and, in my conversations with the farmers, a sense of the emotional and experiential nature of this relationship emerged.\u00a0When analysing these afterwards, Jane Bennett\u2019s concept of \u2018enchantment\u2019 was useful in understanding these experiences and how they were supporting the farmers to adapt and be resilient in the face of myriad and assorted uncertainties.\u00a0 This sense of being struck or shaken by an encounter that is simultaneously both extraordinary and everyday is only one possible form of emotional attachment shaping an individual\u2019s connections to a particular place, but it helps us understand how these individual responses can be scaled up.\u00a0The ethical response of care that being enchanted promotes connects into broader senses of collective responsibility to land and society.\u00a0 While it may seem overly dramatic to imagine a farmer standing spellbound by a vista they have been familiar with for 30 years, even a brief rupture with the ordinary – being taken off guard by something familiar – can be enough to provoke a renewed appreciation of a long-familiar object, animal or landscape.\u00a0In turn, this demands attention to how the world might be otherwise and promotes different perspectives, which is evocatively illustrated by the very visceral feelings of connection that some of the organic producers I spoke with had with their produce, soil and land:<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2026everything has to be done by hand, we can\u2019t spray a crop with weed killers, we have to go along on our hands and knees picking out every single weed.\u00a0 And when it\u2019s, when the carrots have just come up and the weeds are about the same size, this is a microscopic job, with a little fine knife that you flip the weeds.\u00a0 It takes days to weed the carrots, and that\u2019s just the carrots \u2026 you\u2019re not going to waste a carrot\u2026 they\u2019re all very meaningful\u2026\u2019 (Organic Horticulturalist, 2014)<\/p>\n
\u2018…we have one field that we get ragwort, which is terrible\u2026 I am having to manually pull and that is a nightmare for me.\u00a0 And I spend a week up there pulling the stuff and I, by the end of it, I\u2019m angry as anything\u2026\u2019 (Organic Dairy Farmer, 2014)<\/p>\n
Being on hands and knees carefully teasing apart carrots and weeds enchants by disrupting the normal viewpoint of the field through engaging in a tactile way with the soil and the plants at a different scale to usual. In a similar vein, rage against ragwort also provokes a revaluation of the field with the rupture created by the ragwort demanding an active consideration of how the field can be made better; the ragwort elicits an emotional response, which arguably left the recipient as shaken as the joy that could be found in carrots.\u00a0 Although the technology and scale favoured by conventional farmers tends to preclude these sorts of hands-on relations, it does not negate the possibility for enchantment.\u00a0 While the connections an industrial farmer has with their land and livestock may be different, they are still present. For example, all the animal farmers spoke with real passion about their animals, reflecting on key characters, power politics within herds or things that made them laugh or smile.\u00a0 Much of farming is about the routine, doing the same things on the same routes, but its inherent uncertainty disrupts these habitual encounters even if only in very subtle ways, which brings the familiar back into focus and highlights forgotten details.<\/p>\n
The enchantment felt by farmers enforced a constant, if unpredictable, renewal of their relationship with the landscapes and subjects that made up their farms, which strengthened their attachment.\u00a0 Being able to be enchanted allowed for otherwise everyday experiences, practices, spaces and objects to be revalued, which encouraged the farmer to remember why they started farming in the first place and motivated them to continue. The sense of connection that can come from growing food ourselves, and being enchanted by it, can enforce similar rethinking.\u00a0 Returning to carrots, as I found when recently thinning them, making the selection of which stays and which goes, and carefully spacing them out, the time involved, the sense of muscles seizing up as you crouch your way along a row does promote a stronger sense of connection and awareness of the care involved. In turn, this can feed into less wasteful practices regarding the remaining carrots since, in the words of the Organic Horticulturalist, \u2018they\u2019re all very meaningful\u2019.<\/p>\n
What then am I arguing that we can take from this?\u00a0 The current obsession with \u2018growing your own\u2019 appears to replicate those white, middle-class and gendered landscapes mentioned earlier and I appreciate that it is not practical for everyone to produce their own food. However, at this utopian feast there need to be at least a few things that we have nurtured, grown or collected ourselves but this doesn\u2019t need to be exclusionary.\u00a0 At any scale of production or time commitment this will not only have disrupted (repeatedly if momentarily) our habitual engagements with our window sills, gardens, allotments or parks, but preparing and eating them will enchant through perhaps disrupting our usual preparation patterns.\u00a0 Finally, the care that we gave that herb, salad leaf, strawberry or, indeed, carrot will remind us of the effort that has gone into making all those other parts of our feast, reminding us to consider carefully all those involved in its production, what we choose to include on the table and what we do with the leftovers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Agatha Herman<\/strong><\/span> is a Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University.\u00a0 Her research engages with issues of ethics and\u00a0justice in production\u00a0systems, with her most recent work focusing on the impacts\u00a0of\u00a0Fairtrade on\u00a0South African, Argentinean and Chilean wine producers.\u00a0 She was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow (2014-17) and is the author of <\/em>Practising Empowerment in Post-Apartheid South Africa: wine, ethics and development.\u00a0 She is also the series editor for the Bristol University book series <\/em>Spaces and Practices of Justice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 How our food is grown is important but equally critical is who is doing that growing. While reflecting on modern day slavery, the abuse of labour rights or noxious trade deals may not be everyone\u2019s conversation topic of choice at the table, engaging with such questions is essential to moving towards a more ethical… Continue reading Enchanting Food Production: enhancing our connections to the food we eat – Agatha Herman<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":230,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/imaginingalternatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/imaginingalternatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/imaginingalternatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/imaginingalternatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/230"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/imaginingalternatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/imaginingalternatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":195,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/imaginingalternatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions\/195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/imaginingalternatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/imaginingalternatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/imaginingalternatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}