Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: Why an ethnographic contribution connecting skill, food, and sustainability?Sustainable food is a pressing concern in Europe, as elsewhere around the world.As we write this introduction, diverse socio-economic actors operating in increasingly complex and challenging contexts are experiencing new vulnerabilities caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, energy crisis, and war in Ukraine.Startling increases in food poverty are being reported by European media, with an additional 200 million people confronting acute food insecurity since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic (Harvey 2022).Philanthropic organisations rush to open new food banks and parents report cutting back on food consumption, while the multinational corporations that control 70-90 per cent of the global grain trade have made a "record bonanza" since the Ukraine war began (Harvey 2022; Lawson 2022; Yucel 2022).Many agree that we need radical changes to make food provisioning more sustainable.In the words of the United Nations, "Everyone, everywhere must take action and work together to transform the way the world produces, consumes, and thinks about food" (UN n.d.).This daunting scenario is directly addressed by the four articles and report that comprise this special issue of kritisk etnografi.With contributions grounded in first-hand ethnographic observation of diverse European contexts, we consider our positioning in food provisioning systems: not only where we are and where we need to go, but what is at hand to make the change, what works and what is stunted in its striving -often by sociocultural considerations that rarely enter dominant sustainability agendas.Anthropological research on food provisioning is seldom spotlighted at international summits or featured in major news stories, yet ethnographers know a great deal about "the way the world produces, consumes, and thinks about food" (UN n.d.), including which action is (or is not) congenial to "transforming" foodways in specific contexts and among specific people (e.g., Barnard 2016; Grasseni 2013; 2020; Pilgeram 2011; Rissing 2019).Our ethnographic insights on "sustainable food" in Europe examine skill in relation to food production, distribution, and consumption.If change is what is needed for Europe and the world to achieve sustainable foodways, then skills to support that change must be developed. Sustainability talk is here to stay, but what does it mean?Despite critique from anthropologists and other social scientists that "sustainability" is unclear, weak, and/or oxymoronic (e.g., Duell 2013; Hinton 2015; Redclift 2006), sustainability
DOI: 10.33063/diva-490447
Authors: Maris Boyd Gillette, Cristina Grasseni
Institutions: Leiden University, University of Gothenburg
Language: English
Domain: Life Sciences
SDGs: Zero hunger, No poverty
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4393067393