Abstract
Unsustainable food practices in the global North have brought a lot of attention to the concept of alternative food networks. However, prevailing research perspectives have focused on urban areas or market-related activities and tended to overlook the widespread yet neglected food growing in home gardens, especially in rural areas. This paper uses a mixed method approach to study home gardening in two villages in Czechia, focusing on the state of the art of gardening, its sustainability context, and the perception of gardening by the local citizens. We have found that the vast majority of households grow fruit and vegetables, while livestock is also present. Home grown food, which has a supplemental character, is mostly shared within networks of relatives. An understanding of food production as a part of rural identity and tradition is an important element of the perception of gardening. Our findings contribute to the rich debates about the sustainability of food systems. The paper is innovative because it steps outside of the typical poverty or food security discourse of rural informal food production, as well it reveals information on livestock breeding, discusses home gardening in the context of rural development and food policies, and emancipates the semi-peripheral locality as a regular source of new knowledge.
Highlights
Recent trends in urbanisation, climate change, malnourishment, loss of biodiversity, land use changes, and most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic have brought wide attention to agriculture, food production, and distribution [1,2,3,4]
We provide an overview of the current state of rural home gardening, we continue with the sustainability context, and we end with a section that focuses on the future outlook of gardening and its context in rural life in general
From the perspective of the three pillars of sustainable development, we argue that rural gardening contributes to all of them albeit with different intensity
Summary
Climate change, malnourishment, loss of biodiversity, land use changes, and most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic have brought wide attention to agriculture, food production, and distribution [1,2,3,4]. The stream of academic research that is critical towards the negative impacts of conventional industrialized commercial agriculture in the global North, pays attention to urban agriculture or alternative food networks [9,10,11] with popular topics such as community gardens, vertical farms, farmers’ markets, box distribution schemes, edible cities, and other social innovations [12,13,14,15] These phenomena are criticized for being part of gentrification and having a lack of social inclusivity and limited opportunities for upscaling [16,17].
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