Geographies Of Food Research Articles

The Future of The Geographical Journal: Engaging with Public Issues

The Future of <i>The Geographical Journal</i>: Engaging with Public Issues

“Free” food with a side of shame? Combating stigma in emergency food assistance programs in the quest for food justice

Anti-hunger advocates and food geographers have often overlooked the role of emergency food assistance in struggles for food justice, dismissing food assistance as addressing symptoms rather than root causes of food insecurity. Yet, the vast network of food pantries and other free food programs are more than a stop-gap measure for millions of Americans — and thus warrant a closer look at how their practices, policies and spaces feel in practice and with what implications towards food justice goals. In this paper, we argue that barriers to emotionally-accessible food, in the form of neoliberal stigma around “free” food, play a prominent role in shaping peoples’ experiences with food assistance. Based on participatory research with a food redistribution non-profit in Boulder, Colorado, we discuss how the emotional burdens of food insecurity manifest in individual experiences with emergency food assistance programs and staff, leading to isolation and disconnection which actively inhibit more inclusive food systems. This research responds to scholarship in geographies of food and emotion, contributing analysis into how discomforts of (lacking/receiving) food are experienced viscerally. Furthermore, we discuss implications of the emotional (dis)comforts of food assistance when examining the role of emergency food assistance in broader struggles for food justice. To this end, we point to alternative practices in food assistance programs which might actively counteract narratives of neoliberal subjectivities, while simultaneously broadening the food justice community in terms of who feels comfortable participating in, and shaping, more equitable food systems.

Review: De los plátanos de Oller a los Food Trucks: Comida, alimentación y cocina puertorriqueña en ensayos y recetas, by Cruz Miguel Ortiz Cuadra

Review: <i>De los plátanos de Oller a los Food Trucks: Comida, alimentación y cocina puertorriqueña en ensayos y recetas</i>, by Cruz Miguel Ortiz Cuadra

Review: Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C., by Ashanté M. Reese

Review: <i>Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C.</i>, by Ashanté M. Reese

Feeding the City, Pandemic and Beyond

Feeding the City, Pandemic and Beyond

Editorial Letter

Editorial Letter

The history of the land: a relational and place-based approach for teaching (more) radical food geographies

The History of the Land (Brown et al., 2019) is a workshop, field trip, and pedagogical lens developed at Grow Dat Youth Farm in New Orleans and led with teenagers and adults. Using popular education methods, the lesson explores the relational biography of the land on which the farm currently resides. We argue that the history of the land is essential to understanding the spatial and social configurations of contemporary foodscapes; however, critical land histories are not engaged with in many alternative food initiatives and food justice organizations. We offer the adaptable pedagogical apparatus of the History of the Land as a tool for others to further the generative convergence of food geographies and anti-oppression work. In addition to discussing the workshop at Grow Dat, we reflect upon our own learning and healing from participating in an ongoing series of history of the land field trips to rural Mississippi where several of us hold deep personal ties to the land. We coauthors are a collective of farmers, food activists, educators, and academics. Across differences of gender, race, sexuality, class, location, and history, learning about the land together has brought us into intimate conversation about loss, memory, narration, transformation, and how we imagine alternate, liberatory futures.

Envisioning radical food geographies: shared learning and praxis through the Food Justice Scholar-Activist/Activist-Scholar Community of Practice

Food justice scholarship and activism have coevolved and at times been intertwined over past decades. In some instances, there are clear distinctions between “scholarly” and “activist” activities. However, individuals, groups, and actions often take on characteristics of both, producing knowledge at multiple sociopolitical scales. Recognizing and building upon these dynamics is important for strengthening food justice work. This is especially salient in an era in which academia, including geography, seeks more public engagement, yet has a complicated history of appropriating and/or dismissing experience-based knowledge, exacerbating uneven power-knowledge dynamics. These topics are of direct relevance to geography and intersect with radical geography traditions through engagement in social and political action and putting socio-spatial justice theory into practice. Since 2014, a small-but-growing group of individuals interested in the intersections between scholarship, activism, and geography have cultivated a Food Justice Scholar-Activist/Activist-Scholar Community of Practice (FJSAAS). This article examines the evolution and praxes of FJSAAS focusing on power-knowledge and radical geographies. Based on an analysis of FJSAAS records and recollections of participants since its founding, we discuss challenges encountered, the broader relevance for similarly positioned communities of practice, and offer recommendations for those engaging in food justice scholarship, activism, and/or radical geography. We conclude that radical geographies, concepts of radical food geographies, and scholar-activist/activist-scholar praxis are mutually reinforcing in recognizing experience-based knowledge as part of envisioning and putting into place a more just food system.

Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C.

Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C.

Geographies of food beyond food: transfiguring nexus-thinking through encounters with young people in Brazil

ABSTRACT Engaging contemporary forms of nexus-thinking with interdisciplinary food scholarship and childhood and youth studies, this paper explores the social, cultural and political implications of young people’s entangled connections with – and beyond – food. The paper draws on a large-scale research project investigating young Brazilians’ relationships with and understandings of the water-energy-food nexus. Based upon ethnographic, mixed-methods research, we attend to young people’s everyday, material experiences of water-energy-food, and call for a transfigured nexus-thinking, alive with the lives, cares, relationalities and politics at the heart of ‘the nexus’. Through examples ranging from participants’ routines, rhythms and mobilities to experiences of food insecurity, we show how young people express a range of social-political sensibilities that articulate with food and expand nexus-thinking in several interconnected ways. First, by exposing the multi-scalar and multi-temporal processes underlying their everyday ‘nexuses’. Second, by destabilizing the water-energy-food nexus to include ever-new elements emerging from lived experiences of resource access. Third, by showing the embeddedness of resources in the cultures, politics and social fabric of communities. Fourth by uncovering the workings of social difference in articulating nexus dis/connections. It is through these encounters with youths in Brazil that we propose a (re)politicisation and critical transfiguration of nexus thinking.

Geographies of Food: Place, Space, and Scale in Food Studies

Food is essential to human existence. What we eat and how we eat says who we are. There has long been interest in describing and explaining our connections to food as well as understanding the diff...

Black Residents Navigate an Unequal Food Landscape in Washington, D.C.

First paragraph: In Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C., Dr. Ashanté Reese guides us through the interconnected issues that affect the food landscape in many low-income Black communities, through the words and experi­ences of residents of Washington, DC’s, Dean­wood neighborhood. In examining residents’ “geographies of self-reliance,” she uses the neigh­borhood as a prism to refract the intertwining and contradictory forces hidden within the inaccurate label “food desert.” As she says in her concluding chapter, “The neighborhood functions as an intermediary space where macro-level processes, such as where resources are placed, can be con­nected to micro-level processes, such as how residents determine what to buy and where to buy it from” (p. 131). . . .

:Black Food Geographies: Race, Self‐Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. Ashanté M. Reese. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. xviii + 162 pp. (Cloth US$90; Paper $22.95; E‐Book $21.99)

:<i>Black Food Geographies: Race, Self‐Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C.</i> Ashanté M. Reese. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. xviii + 162 pp. (Cloth US$90; Paper $22.95; E‐Book $21.99)

For food space: theorizing alternative food networks beyond alterity

&lt;p&gt;In response to calls by scholars to deepen theoretical engagement in research on Alternative Food Networks (AFNs), in this article we critically discuss and assess major theoretical approaches deployed in the study of AFNs. After highlighting the strengths and limitations of each theoretical approach, we provide an alternative framework – which we refer to as the Geographical Political Ecology of Food Systems – that integrates the contributions that have emerged in the study of the alternative geographies of food with an understanding of capitalist processes in the food system. We do this by bringing together literature on the political ecology of food systems and multiple spatialities, including Doreen Massey's understanding of space as a heterogeneous multiplicity and Eric Sheppard's conceptualization of sociospatial positionality. We utilize research on agrarian change and AFNs in Eastern Europe to elaborate this approach. We argue that this new perspective helps navigate tensions in AFN scholarship, and provides new avenues for research and action. We focus particularly on the ability of AFNs to provide a sustainable livelihood for participating farmers, thus far a neglected topic in AFN research in Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Keywords: &lt;/strong&gt;Alternative Food Networks, Eastern Europe, spatialities, positionality, livelihoods&lt;/p&gt;

Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. Ashanté M. Reese, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019, 183 pp.

Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. Ashanté M. Reese, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019, 183 pp.

Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C by Ashanté M. Reese

Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C by Ashanté M. Reese

Visceral geographic insight through a ‘source to senses’ approach to food flavour

This article examines the experience of eating and changes to the vital materiality of food through the lens of flavour. A trans-disciplinary approach is used to gain insight from gastronomy and the neurobiology of flavour perception. Technological shifts in processing food and beverages are highlighted which show complex influences on flavour. We demonstrate the value of broadening visceral geographic understanding of the biosocial nature of flavour and the senses to answer questions about the need for new methods in visceral geographic enquiry and the role of AFNs. We propose a ‘source to senses’ approach to the visceral geographies of food.

Global Crop Value Chains: Shifts and Challenges in South-North Relations

The worldwide importance of crop production is undisputed due to its function for basic nutrition of billions of people. Yet, the emergence of global forces implies severe consequences for the organization of crop value chains. These forces particularly include processes of liberalization and deregulation, the dominance of large retail groups as well as ever-changing consumer demands, leading to continuous reconfigurations of crop value chains. Based on a literature review, this paper aims at thematically ‘organizing’ and differentiating the key findings of relevant empirical studies on global crop value chains, with a particular focus on South-North relations. Thereby, current shifts and challenges are identified and analysed with special attention paid to spatio-relational dimensions. The spatial perspective is important since crop value chains both shape and are shaped by specific geographical settings which is, among others, considered in the growing literature on food geographies. Overall, we could extract three strands of literature on global crop value chains: the integration of smallholders; the role of food standards; and the effect of ‘hidden’ dynamics. These issues especially reveal the interdependencies between the Global South and the Global North as a crucial feature of contemporary crop production and distribution systems. These are A further outcome of the literature analysis is the derivation of suggestions regarding future research and areas of needed progress.

Insects as food in the Netherlands: Production networks and the geographies of edibility

A nascent subfield within food geographies research investigates edibility, or how things ‘become food’. In the context of efforts to create more sustainable foodways in Europe and the US (the ‘West’), this question is pertinent. One proposed contribution to these efforts is the Western adoption of insects as human food. Related scientific and commercial activity in the Netherlands has been prominent in this area. This paper draws on research with people involved in the development of a Dutch edible insect network, and with the production, supply and consumption of a range of insect-based foods. It explains how this network arose out of the interaction between heterogeneous, mutually-influential actors, and acts to delimit the ‘horizon of possibility’ for insect-based foods. The paper then presents a case study of a range of insect-based foods, arguing that the food products themselves, and their edibility, can similarly be understood as a network effect. Agency in both the design of foods and the construction of edibility is conceptualised as distributed, multiple and contingent. The paper also discusses the disjuncture between edibility (in principle) and routine consumption (in practice): new foods may be successfully positioned as ‘edible’, but this does not mean that people will eat them. Implications for debates on the conceptualization of edibility are discussed.

Geographic Prevalence and Mix of Regional Cuisines in Chinese Cities

Previous research on the geographies of food put a considerable focus on analyzing how different types of food or ingredients are consumed across different places. Little is known, however, about how food culture is manifested through various cooking traditions as well as people’s perceptions over different culinary styles. Using a data set captured from one of the largest online review sites in China (www.dianping.com), this study demonstrates how geo-referenced social review data can be leveraged to better understand the geographic prevalence and mix of regional cuisines in Chinese cities. Based on information of millions of restaurants obtained in selected cities (i.e., provincial capitals and municipalities under direct supervision of the Chinese central government), we first measure by each city the diversity of restaurants that serve regional Chinese cuisines using the Shannon entropy, and analyze how cities with different characteristics are geographically distributed. A hierarchical clustering algorithm is then used to further explore the similarities of consumers’ dining options among these cities. By associating each regional Chinese cuisine to its origin, we then develop a weighted distance measure to quantify the geographic prevalence of each cuisine type. Finally, a popularity index (POPU) is introduced to quantify consumers’ preferences for different regional cuisines. We find that: (1) diversity of restaurants among the cities shows an “east–west” contrast that is in general agreement with the socioeconomic divide in China; (2) most of the cities have their own unique characteristics, which are mainly driven by a large market share of the corresponding local cuisine; (3) there exists great heterogeneity of the geographic prevalence of different Chinese cuisines. In particular, Chuan and Xiang, which are famous for their spicy taste, are widely distributed across the mainland China and (4) among the top-tier restaurants ranked by the consumers in a city, the local cuisine is not usually favored, while other cuisines are favored by consumers in many different cities. This study demonstrates the use of social review data as a cost-effective approach of studying urban gastronomy and its relationship with human activities.