Abstract
The current food system is unsustainable and no longer able to cope with the challenges caused by climate change and consumer behaviours. In this context, agroecology, with its commitment to crossing disciplinary boundaries, has been endorsed as one of the main approaches to the creation of a sustainable food system. Despite this, the integration of the social research on food has not been evident enough in agroecology as a discipline. To be sure, studies related to foodways, food traditions, and, more recently, food heritage have long been present, and have provided important insights into the social and cultural aspects of food. However, there appears to be little convergence between this body of research and the mainstream agroecology literature. This paper aims to address this disconnection between the sociocultural and environmental aspects of the food system, and to propose ways of moving forward. We argue that knowledge about food heritage can be a catalyst for the achievement of agroecology’s vision for whole-system transformative change, and a moving towards global food security and nutrition. Using the agroecology framework of the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and looking at the examples of the subak system in Indonesia and the EU-funded BigPicnic project, we employ the elements of ‘co-creation and sharing of knowledge’, ‘culture and food traditions’ and ‘human and social values’ as entry points for the creation of sustainable transitions of the food and agricultural systems.
Highlights
As the current food system is deemed to be unsustainable and no longer able to meet the world’s food demand, the transition of a food system to multidimensional and transdisciplinary approaches that highlight complex interactions between the visible and invisible elements of the food system becomes more important
The paper concludes that, owing to its capability to make the invisible elements of the food system and its actors visible, food heritage research can fulfil the vision of the agroecology discipline to link food knowledge, values and traditions to natural science research and innovation, deliver co-benefits to nutrition and communities, meet key policy priorities, and transform the food system
It has been pointed out that despite some sporadic empirical research that connects cultural food traditions and agroecology, little work has been done to illustrate how the two intersect [9]. This has been observed despite the recognition that, for agroecology, the problem of the food system cannot be separated from the study of human communities [47], even though agroecology should seek to consciously “combine the experiential knowledge of farmers and indigenous peoples with the latest insights from the science of ecology” [48]
Summary
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