Anna Davies - Urban Food Sharing: Rules, Tools and Networks

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by

Policy Press 2019

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ISBN 978-1-4473-4982-2 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-4473-4984-6 (ePub)

ISBN 978-1-4473-4985-3 (Mobi)

ISBN 978-1-4473-4986-0 (OA PDF)

The right of Anna R. Davies to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Front cover image: Rooftop Farm at Raffles City, by Edible Garden City

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This book is dedicated to Dimitri, Thomas and Elsa.

Contents

Anna R. Davies is Professor of Geography, Environment and Society at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, where she directs the Environmental Governance Research Group and is a member of the Steering Group of the Future Cities Research Centre. Her research interests explore the interface of environmental governance and sustainability and she has published widely in this area. In addition, Anna has advised the Irish government on environmental and sustainability issues as an independent member of its National Economic and Social Council and the National Climate Change Advisory Council. She is a board member of the European Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption and Production Dublin, a founding member of Future Earths Knowledge Action Network (KAN) on Systems of Sustainable Consumption and Production and the inaugural Chair of Future Earth Ireland. Anna currently serves on the governing board of the International Science Council, which seeks to support a global voice for science, and she also has a long association as a board member with The Rediscovery Centre in Ballymun, North Dublin, a social enterprise that provides a creative space connecting people, ideas and resources around the common purpose of sustainability through resource efficiency and reuse.

This book draws on research conducted as part of the European Research Council project SHARECITY, Grant No: 646883. SHARECITY involved collaborative research with thousands of food-sharing initiatives, food sharers and those who govern food sharing. This book would not have been possible without their willingness to share experiences and insights with the SHARECITY team. My particular thanks go to the SHARECITY research team members Ferne Edwards, Brigida Marovelli, Oona Morrow, Monika Rut and Marion Weymes who helped to form and populate the SHARECITY 100 database as well as conducting ethnographic research in urban areas across the world.

Food sharing is a fundamental form of cooperation that is particularly noteworthy because of its central role in shaping human life history, social organization, and cooperative psychology. (Jaeggi and Gurven, 2013: 186)

When was the last time that you ate together with others? Maybe you had breakfast with your family or lunch with your friends. Such food sharing is often part of everyday routines; habitual practices that we rarely reflect on, except when they change. Perhaps an extended daily commute to work in a new job means that breakfast with the family gets replaced with a snack on the go, while the leisurely lunch dates with colleagues might get substituted with lunch al-desko when work demands rise. Certainly, anecdotal evidence in the mass media of growing isolationism around eating is becoming increasingly bolstered by academic studies that show the dangers of eating alone (Dunbar, 2017). Research examining eating trends has found that the average American does not eat with others on a daily basis. Even more surprising is that one in every five meals is eaten in a car (NPD, 2014). This is concerning when considered alongside analyses that have found that children who do not regularly eat with their parents are significantly more likely to have behavioural issues at school and in later life, and are more likely to be overweight. Meanwhile, children who do eat with their family experience less trouble with drugs and alcohol, exhibit healthier eating patterns, show better academic performance and report being closer with their parents (CASA, 2012).

Food sharing is a foundational human practice at the very core of human civilisation, helping to secure sustenance, cement social relations and permit role specialisation within societal groups. While other species also share food, the patterning, persistence and complexity of food sharing within human groups means that we share food like no others. This has led to a suite of theories attempting to explain why people first began to share (Kaplan and Gurven, 2005). Some of these theories see sharing as a process of natural selection; an instrumental means to ensure reproductive fitness and ultimately the survival of individuals and kinship networks. This is exemplified by the toleration of begging and food theft within groups when food is abundant and the donation of food first to close relatives in times of scarcity. Other theories emphasise the reciprocal dimensions and cooperative demands of sharing, arguing that people learnt to share as a result of numerous push and pull factors (Jones, 2007). For example, sharing can be a pre-emptive response to avoid punitive treatment from others in the group or as a means to improve status within hierarchical social settings. However, much of the research on which sharing theories are based has been conducted within small-scale societies, particularly with hunter-gatherers or groups that combine foraging with simple forms of horticulture. The justification for this focus is pragmatic: foraging societies often share food between families on a daily basis, providing a rich source of data on sharing practices. It is also driven by the disciplinary interests of evolution scholars, for while foraging as a primary means of food provisioning is increasingly rare and far removed from many contemporary experiences, the majority of human history is dominated by such food provisioning systems, with agriculture emerging only in the last 10,000 years. These reflective studies are certainly important for providing insights into the evolutionary dimensions of food sharing, most particularly with respect to the ways in which sharing performs highly socialised forms of interaction; but are they relevant to contemporary urban food sharing?