Food futuring in Timor-Leste: Recombinance, responsiveness, and relationality

David Szanto

doi:10.5304/jafscd.2022.112.012

Abstract

The pluralistic nature of food culture and food systems produces complex and blended realities for research, often prompting approaches that embrace mixed methods and cross-sector partnerships. In parallel, calls for the decolonization of research methods have brought attention to the importance of relationality when working with local communities and traditional knowledge holders. This article presents the process and outcomes of the Timor-Leste Food Innovators Exchange (TLFIX), a multifaceted initiative centered on the contemporary and historic foodways of Timor-Leste, including current challenges to individual health, cultural identity, and economic-ecological sustainability brought about by centuries of colonial and transnational influence. Conceived within an international development context, TLFIX aimed at building local empowerment, economic development, and social change. Methods included quantitative, qualitative, and material-based approaches, including surveys, storytelling, and culinary innovation. As a “consulting academic” on the project, I contributed to the research design, coached team members on storytelling-as-method, and participated in a portion of the work. For the current text, I use the notions of recombinance, responsiveness, and relationality to interpret our collective experience and to frame an example of carrying out mixed-method and mixed-participant work in complex food contexts. As a whole, this example illustrates ways in which to leave space for improvisation and emergence within food practice and scholarship.

Highlights

Food scholarship that involves material practice— growing, processing, cooking, serving, eating, disposing—presents a range of challenges to positivist academic conventions (Atkins, 2010; de Solier, 2013; D. Miller, 2005; Szanto, 2016)
While food systems are often studied through disciplinary frameworks such as sociology, economics, biology, and geography, the material nature of food itself tends to blur disciplinary lines while implicating pluralistic, sensory, and embodied forms of knowledge, including those that resist textual description
This paper presents outcomes from the TimorLeste Food Innovators Exchange project (TLFIX), a multifaceted futuring1 initiative centered on the food and foodways of Timor-Leste, including challenges to individual and collective health, as well as cultural and economic sustainability

Summary

Introduction

Food scholarship that involves material practice— growing, processing, cooking, serving, eating, disposing—presents a range of challenges to positivist academic conventions (Atkins, 2010; de Solier, 2013; D. Miller, 2005; Szanto, 2016). Some food scholars have adopted hybrid models that bridge sectors, enable partnerships with on-the-ground practitioners, and highlight transdisciplinarity (de Marchi, 1999; Levkoe et al, 2016; Strand et al, 2003). Adding to such hybridity, fields such as sensory studies, ecofeminism, and Indigenous studies have contributed paradigms to food studies that support a “performative turn” (Conquergood, 1989; Szerszynski et al, 2003). Research involving food systems transformation implicates “non-linear, long-term, multi-actor processes ... that are not very amenable to planning and control” (Leeuwis et al, 2021, p. 770)

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Discussion

Conclusion