Colin R. Anderson - Conversations in Food Studies

Edited by Colin R. Anderson , Jennifer Brady , and Charles Z. Levkoe

Foreword by Mustafa Ko

University of Manitoba Press

Winnipeg, Manitoba

Canada R3T 2M5

uofmpress.ca

The Authors 2016

Printed in Canada

Text printed on chlorine-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system in Canada, without the prior written permission of the University of Manitoba Press, or, in the case of photocopying or any other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca, or call 1-800-893-5777.

Cover design: Jess Koroscil

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

The University of Manitoba Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for its publication program provided by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage, Tourism, the Manitoba Arts Council, and the Manitoba Book Publishing Tax Credit.

MUSTAFA KO

When the editors of Conversations in Food Studies first informed me about their plans to pursue this project well over two years ago, I could see that it was not going to be a typical edited volume. The way they planned to work collaboratively with an impressive group of scholars to design, write, and edit the chapters, made this an exceptional project. Traditionally, edited volumes avoid new and unconventional research topics and writing styles and limit participation to well-known writers to secure marketability. The conventional advice offered is to publish in well-established disciplinary journals with high-impact scores, avoid edited volumes, and stay with safe topics. Conversations in Food Studies, however, is an edited volume of scholarly contributions written by a group of emerging and senior scholars who collectively inquire into new directions in food studies, an emerging interdisciplinary field of scholarship. It is new, exciting, inspiring, and unconventional.

The field of food studies is informed by analytical and critical insights and methodologies of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. It examines the interconnections that make up the food system as a whole. Despite its relatively short history in Canada, this has been an impressive decade for food studies research and interdisciplinary collaborations. There have been a number of Canada Research Chairs in food-related fields as well as several projects funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) that have brought researchers in academia and community organizations together. Among the examples of this bountiful harvest, there are now two Canadian scholarly journals emphasizing interdisciplinary research in food studies: CuiZine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures / Revue des cultures culinaires au canada and Canadian Food Studies/ La Revue canadienne des tudes sur l'alimentation. Further, there have been a plethora of special journal issues, books, and articles highlighting the contributions of Canadian scholars in social sciences and humanities focusing on food. Conversations in Food Studies adds masterfully to this bounty.

As a relatively new field of inquiry, food studies is characterized by its interdisciplinary focus, systemic perspective, and dedicated commitment to change. Continuing in this tradition, this book reminds us of the importance of critical inquiry, collaboration, and conversations in transgressing boundaries for cross-disciplinary and inter-epistemological inquiry. Its authors underline the importance of cooperative and collective engagement among researchers, practitioners, activists, policy makers, and other stakeholders and demonstrate how food studies can contribute to this critical conversation.

Food studies seeks to examine the complex web of practices, processes, structures, and institutions in which we humans engage with one another and with nature in defining and transforming part of that nature into food. This is a complex process involving not only certain tasks and procedures such as production, distribution and consumption but also cultural codes, ideologies, and politics.

Going beyond a traditional sectors specific thinking, the authors of this volume organize their intellectual inquiry and conversation around four themes: representing, governance, undoing, and learning. This unconventional classification provides a chance to look at the practical, social, and political implications of how knowledge about food is represented and how these representations might reveal and conceal new possibilities. It looks at how both state and non-state actors shape and control contemporary food systems, how food studies can organize and transform the structures that bolster the dominant food system, and how transformative learning in food studies can contribute to individual and collective food system change.

This book is one of the early outputs of the new generation of scholars of the Canadian Association for Food Studies/ lAssociation canadienne des tudes sur lalimentation (CAFS/ACA). When CAFS/ACA was established in 2005, the founding group of university- and community-based researchers all agreed about the need for establishing a research network to promote critical, interdisciplinary scholarship in the broad areas of food production, distribution, and consumption. We had all hoped that the new association would be a space for promoting interdisciplinary scholarship and exchange among researchers who are committed to not only understanding how the food system works but also to finding ways to contribute to its transformation. Exceeding our expectations, CAFS/ACA has become a school for promoting critical inquiry and scholarly exchange. This book is one of the best examples of this critical inquiry and collaborationa very daring volume in its approach to scholarship. It is disrupting disciplinary boundaries, questioning the institutions and structures of our modern food system, and critically engaging with some of the conventional critical inquiry.