We approach our task of exploring the papers of this symposium as a strategic intervention in the production of knowledge about food futures at what is a difficult and crucial time. We use a series of questions to interrogate the political and intellectual project of the Food Regimes (FR) literature and its explicit and implicit potential. This framing springs from our engagement with Post Structural Political Economy (Le Heron 2007; Lewis et al. 2008). This has meant we have come to see the FR literature as a composite of political and intellectual projects and therefore not only inherently pedagogic but also likely to help perform or enact different futures. Recent engagement with the concept of biological economies with colleagues from multiple disciplines and research organisations in New Zealand (Campbell et al. 2009), together with our own ongoing work on globalising food chains, has sharpened concern over concepts of engagement, innovative actors, and the creation of multiple rural values. We have thus become interested in the generative potential of categories—that is, the potential of different framings and groups to energise and make possible new research connections and thinking. This paper deploys the ideas of engagement and performance as central concepts through which to interrogate the present collection of FR papers. Our approach follows Kathie Gibson’s key-note address to the meeting of the influential, trans-disciplinary Australasian Agri-food Research Network (AFRN) in November 2006 at the University of Otago, Dunedin. Introducing her recently published A Postcapitalist Politics (Gibson-Graham 2006) to a research collective founded on FR thinking proved a productive provocation. Gibson emphasised the need to understand globalising locals, the values of weak theorisation, and the political potential of understanding communities as bundles of assets that might be configured and mobilised in new ethical and political positions rather than as pre-constituted communities of need. Her intervention added new dynamism to the AFRN, with Gibson-Graham later widely cited by a new, proliferating and energetic generation of agri-fooders at the large 2008 Sydney meeting. This uptake effectively performed Gibson-Graham’s message that theoretical effort is always in-the-making and that ethics and politics often change and can be changed. We suggest that this sort of revitalisation is also apparent in the latest expression of FR as laid out by these contributors. Through this symposium, fresh insights are being made available for a new generation of scholarship. We begin as Gibson-Graham do, with situated knowledge. Our opening heading indicates that knowledge is produced, interpreted and enacted in particular locales, by particular individuals, located in particular trajectories. The 20th anniversary of the claims of FR literature is an opportunity to elaborate the enduring relevance of the notion of situated knowledge in a world where understanding is highly unstable. We must stress that our spatial and political location as Australasian—with all the urgencies and translations that go with this positioning and context—influences our interpretation (without claiming to produce a representative Australasian view). A further R. Le Heron (&) N. Lewis School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland, 10 Symonds Street, Auckland 1142, New Zealand e-mail: leheron@auckland.ac.nz