Abstract
This paper examines some of the more-than-representational knowledge that underpins food systems. As argued, it is not enough to know what sustainability is. We have to, literally, be able to feel (care for, taste, practice…) it. The author begins by drawing upon interviews with food scientists, food advertisers and marketers, and executives from the food industry. Interviews with individuals from the food manufacturing industry reveal numerous tensions routinely grappled with by those actors as they attempted to make the industrial food system appear unproblematic and its wares desirable. The value of these data becomes particularly clear when triangulated with those presented in the paper’s second half, where the author discusses some of the findings of research projects still underway—case studies of food-based community activism in Chicago and Denver (USA). The data collectively suggest the existence of a class of “barriers” that the literature—and many activists and practitioners—miss but which must be overcome if we hope to see a diversification of foodscapes. These constraints speak specifically to more-than-representational visceralities that buttress industrial food and the system from whence they come—what the author calls “affective barriers”. The paper argues (social) bodies need to be “retuned” to the tastes, cares, textures, and practices associated with alternatives to the (food) status quo and offers examples of how this is already being done.
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Notes
An extensive sociological literature critically unpacks taste/distinction by way of the writings of Pierre Bourdieu (e.g., 1984), though arguably the intellectual lineage of that argument can be traced even further back to the work of Norbert Elias (2000 [1939]) with his discussion of manners in the context of the “civilizing process”. The argument that taste distinctions emerge around, and help perpetuate, class distinctions has been applied extensively to the subject of food (see e.g., Johnston et al. 2011; Wright et al. 2001). This paper builds upon these works that show how phenomena such as taste and preference, which are often assumed to be objective and natural, are in fact deeply sociological.
The concept of “affect” has a long intellectual tradition. The great seventeenth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza discussed at length the phenomena of affect. More recently, theorists such as Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway have built on the concept, taking it further than Spinoza by distinguishing clearly between affect and what are conventionally called emotions. Unlike emotion, which is individuated and individuating, affect can be taken to refer to a force or an intensity (to use a term Whitehead evoked often) that can belie the movement of the subject.
“Food manufacturing sector” here refers to food processing firms and does not include, say, crop scientists or those engaged in the so-called “biotech sciences”.
Many cereals start as grains mixed with water—what is called grain slurry. This slurry is then put through a machine called an extruder. The extruder forces the grain slurry out through a tiny hole at high temperature and pressure. The shape of the hole determines the slurry’s ultimate hardened state, such as little o's (Cheerios), big colorful O’s (Froot Loops), hexagon-shaped discs punctuated with little o’s (Honeycomb), shreds (Shredded Wheat), or puffs (Corn Pops). From the extruder cereal is then shuttled over to a nozzle and sprayed with a coating of oil and sugar to postpone the inevitable sogginess that follows contact with milk. Extrusion, however, strips grains of their nutrients, which explains why so many commercial cereals are fortified.
A food desert is generally understood as a community where residents lack access to affordable nutritious food. While agencies such as the United States Department of Agriculture have more specific definitions those definitions need not be reviewed here.
The fact that these spaces can be created and have an actual effect (and affect) on individuals gives weight to the argument that these barriers can effectively be called “structures”. Think about so-called controlled experiments, which are repeatable. That repeatability is the result of actors (e.g., scientists, nonscientists, and perhaps even the occasional non-human; Haraway 1997) intervening, closing off competing, contradicting, and virtual relationalities to produce relatively stable outcomes (Bhaskar 1997; Deleuze 1966). If affective structures do indeed exist, we ought to be able to create similar conditions, which is to say we ought to be able insulate (or perhaps a better metaphor is inoculate) individuals from their effects.
This is not to say that everyone’s experiences of these structures are identical. But do we not all experience social structures differently, depending upon our social location and embeddedness within social networks? We live in an open world where event regularities are far from the norm; a complex world populated with countervailing relationalities. So we should not expect either the subjective experience of affective structures or their material manifestations by way of practice to be identical and monolithic.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Ruth Irene Beilin and Iris Bohnet for their support and constructive comments. Thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers, whose suggestions contributed greatly to the final product. Some of the arguments of this paper were delivered during a Keynote Address at the International Association of Critical Realism’s annual meetings at the University of London, July 18th–21st, 2014. This paper was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2013S1A3A2055243).
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Handled by Ruth Beilin, The University of Melbourne, Australia.
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Carolan, M. Affective sustainable landscapes and care ecologies: getting a real feel for alternative food communities. Sustain Sci 10, 317–329 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-014-0280-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-014-0280-6