3) Publics

<– Creativity —  Conclusions –>

These creative engagements with the textures of food have the potential to generate new conceptions of the political, new ethical engagements with agri-food systems, and new forms of activism. They have the potential to show that public cultural geographies can do more than increase public understandings of Geography as a discipline (Wylie 2010) and/or to engage publics in academic research through collaborating with museums, broadcasters and other public institutions (Crang 2010: see Fuller 2008, Fuller & Askins 2010 for reviews). We are excited by the prospect of geographers working with publics not only like/as artists, but also like/as activists. Therefore, in this final section, we concentrate on work by cultural and other geographers who have explicitly aimed to appreciate, critique, perform and transform diverse public geographies of food.

Let us start with the sweeping terrain of the ‘global food crisis’. Recent food price spikes and related concerns about the sustainability of food systems have led to the re-emergence in international policy contexts of a discourse on ‘food security’ (MacMillan & Dowler 2011; Mooney & Hunt 2009; McDonald 2010). Food geographers have begun to respond to these concerns by cultivating new scripts for the ‘drama of food’ (Belasco 2008), critiquing dominant public policy discourses through highlighting the spatial contradictions and tensions inherent in food-society relations and politics. David Nally (2011) shows, for example, how food security is constructed from a narrow neoliberal viewpoint, which he terms ‘a neoliberal truth regime’ (49). This presents global markets, agrarian biotechnologies and multi-national corporate initiatives as the ‘structural preconditions’ to alleviate hunger. Nally (2011) highlights the interdependency between abundance and scarcity and the way that the modern food regime relies on over-production in some places and under-production in others. Lucy Jarosz (2011) also shows how scaled definitions of food security have been used to serve neoliberal ideology, linking individuals to global modalities of governance that emphasise the instrumentality of agricultural productivity in development strategies.

As Jarosz, Nally and others powerfully show, geographers have important roles to play in public debates about food security. Their work reveals how scale can be used to justify political actions and support ideological objectives on the grounds of ‘moral responsibility’. It challenges claims that suggest food chain resilience can be best achieved via market liberalization and risk management. The challenge now for food geographers is how to make these new food scripts more ‘public’ – i.e. how to find ways to enter and inform public debate. To date geographical critiques challenging neoliberal discourse of food security have not really entered public debate. They exist instead alongside a ‘public world’ championed more by social movements (e.g. La Via Campesina) and NGOs (e.g. Oxfam) that explicitly challenge and espouse alternative food security visions, advocating, for instance, food sovereignty, food rights and agro-ecological approaches over market solutions. Some ‘public food scholars’ are influential in these debates. Raj Patel [http://rajpatel.org/], a writer, activist and academic, is notable here, often using blogs and other social networking platforms to communicate ideas and challenge convention. Food security thus symbolizes one ‘at large’ debate where geographers can creatively collaborate in future with social and political organizations, journalists and activists to inform public discourse.

In recent years, critiques of global agribusiness have proliferated in the new media ecology of web 2.0. More critiques are now more widely accessible than ever before. Researchers can quickly gain a sense of the reactions that they provoke. And an explosion of user-generated content has, to a significant extent, democratised debate (see Graham & Haarstad 2011). These critiques have pressured corporations to develop more ethical trading practices, and generated new kinds of ‘affective pull’ to engage wider publics in food justice campaigns. Seeds of their activist potential can be traced to the early 2000s, when researchers found UK food industry interviewees admitting that a relentless stream of media exposés of poor pay and working conditions had been “‘the driving force’ behind the adoption of ethical trade standards by supermarkets” (Friedberg 2004: 516; Hughes 2004). Exposés continue to be produced, but their critics have argued that by repeatedly “showing how crappy and messed up our world is, how exploitative and degenerative its ruling class, [and] how grotesque its economic system” (Merrifield 2009: 382) they produce a disempowering fatalism among both activists and potentially concerned consumers. New forms of cultural activism have since emerged that aim both to shame corporations into action, and to imaginatively engage consumers in trade justice campaigning in visceral, affective, playful ways (Cook & Woodyer 2012).

Many examples of food-based cultural activism are showcased in the grocery department of Ian Cook et al’s followthethings.com, a “complex and elaborately composed research centre” designed to resemble an online store (Kneip 2009: 177). Click its bag of ‘Mixed nuts’, for example, and you can watch and read about a short, animated film called “The luckiest nut in the world” which left children humming a song performed by an animated, guitar-playing American peanut about the WTO’s role in the unfair international nut trade (Cook 2011). Click its oven-ready chicken and you can find and read about a TV series documenting the efforts of a celebrity chef to convert low income consumers and big UK supermarkets to both the taste and ethics of organicically-raised chickens (Beattie et al 2011). Both pages document these example’s impacts on viewers, corporations and/or food policy, and the effects of both their subversive and deployment of TV genres (e.g. eccentric kids’ cartoons and reality TV) and their subsequent deployment in NGOs’ trade justice and animal welfare campaigns. followthethings.com is one of a number of experiments that draw upon the public, collaborative potentials of web 2.0 to both document and encourage new forms of food (and wider commodity) activism for progressive eco-social change. [i]

These arguments take us full circle to a body of research that adopts performative understandings of ‘diverse economic’ relations, in which researchers recognise and take responsibility for “their constitutive role in the worlds that exist, and their power to [help] bring new worlds into being”  (Gibson-Graham 2008: 614; Cameron 2011). This literature is critical of both realist understandings of research as truth-finding, and of theoretical understandings of Capitalism as a single monolithic system. It argues that what we might call ‘alternative economic geographies’ are not an alternative to this monolithic system, but are internal to it, fracture it, exist in abundance, can be researched and made public and, as such, can inspire and show others how to bring new diverse economic worlds into being. It employs theory less to confirm what we already know about domination and oppression, and more to “help us see openings, to provide a space of freedom and possibility” in an approach “that welcomes surprise, tolerates coexistence, and cares for the new” (J-K Gibson-Graham 2008: 619). And, it bypasses the individualized consumer at the centre of so much research and policy, to concentrate on the ‘we’ of community members and their/our collective necessities and responsibilities (DeLind 2011, Hill 2011).

Within this body of work, considerable efforts have been made to research and make public ‘possible food economies’ outside of agribusiness-driven production-consumption relations, economies that are cultivated through ethical concerns over how to survive well with others and how to generate and re-distribute social surplus (Holloway et al 2007; Gibson-Graham et al forthcoming). It has also begun to draw on a hybrid research collective (HRC) approach in which the researcher identifies as but one actant in the research process working with other actants to bring about transformative change (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009; Roelvink 2008). As Hill (forthcoming) demonstrates in her research on communal gardening projects in the Philippines, for example, HRC actants may include community or lay-researchers, YouTube films, songs, web-based training tools, gardens, community groups and whatever gathers around particular concerns such as malnutrition or broadening the economy. What this body of research suggests is that understandings of texture, creativity and activism are not only what we should take into our research if we want to make a positive difference in the world. They are also what we should look for when choosing what to study in the first place.

<– Creativity —  Conclusions –>