Towards post-industrial foodways: Public pedagogy, spaces, and the struggle for cultural legitimacy

Abstract

Re-embedding foodways in local communities and ecologies is an enormous undertaking that is supported in part through a myriad of educational processes. For niche spaces of post-industrial foodways, a crucial step toward normalization is being accepted, appreciated, and even desired by the wider society. This article explores how pedagogy underlies all food system change, especially for forming cultural legitimacy of emergent spaces. The theoretical perspective of public pedagogy is reviewed in order to provide an analytical frame for analyzing the educational processes that nurture cultural legitimacy for emergent food-oriented spaces. As various conceptions of public pedagogy have been used in a wide variety of contexts, I suggest an articulation that assumes learning to be an assemblage of spaces, practices, people, artifacts, and policies, which better captures the wide range of educational processes that precipitate cultural change (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988; McFarlane, 2011). To illustrate the role of public pedagogy in legitimizing emergent food-oriented spaces, I explore two specific cases. The first case of urban spatial policy takes public pedagogy as a starting point for the legitimization of certain spaces; while the second case of the residential front yard begins with a specific space that is a site of struggle with opposing public pedagogy processes, each creating cultural legitimacy for a different landscape form. By exploring the linkages between public pedagogy and space, I make the claim that education is the primary driver for food culture transformation.