Introduction

Abstract

The articles in this issue of Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment represent a diverse set of both empirical and conceptual interventions into the relationship between food, sustainability, and local socio-economic conditions. Despite this diversity, a few key themes emerge, which will be familiar to anyone working on food, agriculture, and sustainability in anthropology and cognate fields: a tension between financial pressures, climate change, and cultural values; racism as an undercurrent of many of the policies and practices around food provision; and sites of food production, exchange, and consumption as sites of placemaking, community formation, and care. In her article, Micah Trapp examines the intersection of race, food, and health in the context of school food programs, which have received widespread attention in recent years in both popular media and academic literature. Trapp's detailed study shows how even relatively young students are keenly aware of what constitutes a healthy school lunch, and they are able to articulate compelling explanations for what makes lunches less healthy, such as the addition of preservatives on otherwise tasty pre-sliced apples. Through Trapp's vivid and sensitive ethnography, healthiness emerges as racially coded and disciplinary, with students' performances of more diverse understandings of health offering a necessary alternative to a hegemonic vision of nutrition that serves both whiteness and capital. Given this relationship between racism and food provisioning, findings by Karen Rignall and colleagues – that alternative food hubs in the US South face significant challenges in their attempts to integrate racial justice concerns in their operations – might not come as a surprise. Their analysis of this tendency, however, yields an interesting and important conclusion: justice-oriented initiatives often fall into what the authors refer to a “justice trap,” incorrectly assuming that what counts as “justice” is both self-evident and widely transposable across contexts. Like nutrition, approaches to alternative food systems must take into account the diverse experiences and ideologies of food justice. Dorji Wangchuk analyzes the ways Brokpa yak farmers in Bhutan have responded to both climatic and sociopolitical changes in the region. Drawing on interviews and participant observation with herders and other stakeholders around the villages of Merak and Sakteng, Wangchuk highlights several challenges for yak farmers, from conflicting views on the value of cultural conservation versus environmental conservation apparent in debates around land ownership to the rapidly changing climate of the Himalayas. Through Wangchuk's account, the sustainability of yak farming in Bhutan emerges as a multi-faceted issue inextricable from global climatic changes, national land management policies, and local social and cultural values. In a similar vein, but in a very different empirical context, Margaret du Bray and colleagues adopt the notion of “lifeways” to consider how farmers in the Eastern Snake Plane aquifer region of Idaho understand and respond to changing landscapes of agricultural water– both physical and political. This approach lets them explore the way different identities and values intersect, as members of a particular religious group, as members of particular local communities, as people facing different levels of financial pressure as farming becomes less profitable, and as people with distinct and sometimes divergent commitments to environmentalism. Yue Gu and Robin Rodd investigate the social attributes of a live poultry stall in Wuxi, China. There has been, perhaps unsurprisingly, a flurry of interest in the biopolitics of wet markets over the past few years, but this article turns our attention away from the wet market as a whole and toward the individual stalls that constitute these larger entities. In doing so, Gu and Rodd are able to untangle some of the competing narratives about what wet markets are – culinary oases versus petri dishes – highlighting the deeply political nature of these sites and the different ways their futures are debated. Sophie D'Anieri also examines the tension between the marginality and the centrality of particular spaces in contemporary global capitalism. Drawing on feminist ethnographic methods, she shows how kitchens and gardens play an important role in the daily lives of Mexican immigrants working in the Wisconsin dairy industry. She theorizes these sites as “pericapitalist” spaces – both within and at the margins of capitalism – that are fundamental to her interlocutors' practices of care and worldmaking. Finally, in line with the journal's new book review policy, Supurna Banerjee has brought two recent books on the gendered political ecologies of tea production into productive conversation with each other, Tea and Solidarity by Mythri Jegathesan and Everyday Sustainability by CAFE's own Debarati Sen. Banerjee's review teases out an important thread running between two otherwise very different books, namely that the dynamics of neoliberalism are not a mere frame within which the politics of the plantation economy should be understood, but are in fact “constitutive” of the lived experiences of workers on and around those plantations.