Affective sustainable landscapes and care ecologies: getting a real feel for alternative food communities

• Published in: Sustainability science Vol. 10; no. 2; pp. 317 - 329
• Main Author: Carolan, Michael
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Tokyo Springer Japan 01.04.2015; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: 20th century; Activism; Climate Change Management and Policy; Consumption; Earth and Environmental Science; Environment; Environmental Economics; Environmental Management; Food; Food systems; Interviews; Landscape Ecology; Manufacturing; Manufacturing industry; Public Health; Research projects; School lunches; Sociology; Special Feature: Original Article; Studies; Sustainability; Sustainable Development; Taste; USA, Illinois, Chicago; USA; Performative; Taste; Alternative food networks; Sustainability; Visceralities; Embodied
• ISSN: 1862-4065; 1862-4057
• DOI: 10.1007/s11625-014-0280-6

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.