At one level, to ask ‘whose food knowledge counts?’ is a political question. But at another, it also concerns about what kind of knowledge we need and why and how, so much is related to what a life we want to live really (A PhD student at SOAS Food Studies).
During my fieldwork the words ‘knowledge’, ‘learning’, ‘knowing’ and ‘sharing knowledge or learning’ appeared in almost every conversation I had. From an early stage, I also noticed that the word ‘knowledge’ was used in different contexts, with different definitions and for different reasons. Some of those taking part in my study indicated selective claims to knowledge and demonstrated that the concept of it is one of plurality. In what follows, I begin with a discussion of what counts as food knowledge, and then move to introduce two dimensions of ‘whose food knowledge counts’: first, ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’ dealing with agenda-setting of knowledge production; second, ‘matters of trust and care’ revealing what role trust and care played in food knowledge, not only as an abstract concept but as a practical and moral matter. Finally, I will discuss what values underpinned suggested by participants as being good ‘knowledge governance’.
What counts as food knowledge?
Before we can discuss whose food knowledge counts, we have to first consider what counts as food knowledge. I acknowledge that there are many ways of slicing the idea of ‘knowledge’ and problems associated with any over-simplified distinctions. Most knowledge in the real world is a combination of many forms. However, in order to capture what was significant, I discuss three perspectives of food knowledge revealed from my investigation: first, from a disciplinary perspective; second, the contribution from food activism; and third, the complex web of food knowledge.
First, from a disciplinary perspective, ‘food studies’, as an umbrella term, covers a wide range of disciplinary, conceptual and methodological paradigms both within and across disciplines. As a fast growing intellectual and academic field, ‘food studies’ includes food culture and food systems in their broadest sense, exploring the ways individuals, communities, and societies relate to food within social, political, economic, cultural and historical contexts. For the last four years, I have met hundreds of researchers and students working on food in one way or another at community food initiatives and other occasions in London.
Food Policy at City University and SOAS Food Studies are two institutions which act as hubs within and beyond academia. While the former has strong links with public health, nutrition and active involvement in London food policy, as well as NGOs such as Sustain, which is itself a key hub for organisations working on food and farming, the latter is a hub for knowledge exchange and experience sharing through conferences, seminars, lectures, and fostering collaborative research. In addition, a postgraduate module of ‘Urban Agriculture’, provided by my own department at UCL, the Development Planning Unit is aimed at integration of conceptual and practical understanding of urban agriculture, from an interdisciplinary and international perspective. However, one intriguing aspect was that very few students had formal agricultural degrees, let alone academic training related to agriculture in urban spaces despite the current popularity of urban agriculture in London. While for some, this is
111 a worrying sign as they thought food productivity should be increased to challenge
London’s food insecurity, for others, London’s food production is only one part of the complex situation, and many strands of knowledge do not necessarily have to come from academia.
Second, food activism has also contributed to an important part of food knowledge in London. It is important to note that not all participants regarded themselves as activists. This is based on my own interpretation given that, to a large extent, the initiatives and research participants represented an attempt to put forward an ‘alternative’ understanding and practice of relationship to food. I find Jamison’s (2003) work on the contribution from activism in the making of green knowledge useful. Thus, I borrow the same four ‘ideal-typical’ categories of activism – community, professional, militant, and personal – to capture some distinct characteristics of food knowledge generated by these community food initiatives. Community and professional food activism considered a secular, instrumental orientation, aimed at changing policies and political actions and privileged factual and scientific knowledge production. Militant and personal food activism focused on changing people’s beliefs and value systems and tended to favour normative and moral philosophy.
More specifically, one of the major differences between community and professional food activism is that the former has a more amateur, temporal, and popular approach, and the latter is more professional and permanent as their career. On the other hand, the distinction between militant and personal, was made to highlight the fundamental contrast between those who advocated and promoted a new kind of morality and ethics in public, and those who did it more privately. While local or lay knowledge reserved and produced by Spa Hill Allotment, Transition Town Brixton, Friends’ of Queen’s Market and guerrilla gardening networks were examples of community food activism, Greenwich Cooperative Development Agency, Capital Growth, Women’s Environmental Network and UK Food Sovereignty Movement tended to win a broader public interest in food issues and sometimes served as agenda-setter and formulated strategies and policies from local, to a national and international scale. Slow Food London and Hare Krishna were two initiatives that belonged more likely to a militant category, advocating alternative moral and spiritual perspectives. However, most participants interviewed were found to be personal food ‘activists’ practising their own moral and ethical principles and reluctant to preach or impose their own ideas on others.
Of course these four categories are not mutually exclusive and in fact, the picture revealed from my empirical investigation suggested an even more complex and fluid state than Jamison’s (2003). Initiatives such as Growing Communities, Organiclea and FoodCycle were derived from community food activism, but since they were established as a community food enterprise, they shared many of professional attributes as well. For instance, the concept of ‘Food Zones’ (Figure 3.2) developed by Growing Communities, estimates that urban agriculture in London could only meet approximately 2.5% of the demand for food in London. Thus, instead of focusing solely on the production of food in London, it used trade to link sustainable production and consumption within and beyond London’s spatial boundaries. Another example, Organiclea has developed an inclusive and participatory design process, for gaining collective knowledge on land survey, organisational infrastructure and translating vision into practice. These concepts and methods have been known and shared by some but only adopted in a few other community initiatives I investigated (e.g. Transition Town Brixton and Good Food Partnership).
? Increasing carbon intensity of transport/distribution Bigger plots available Decreasing of produce perishability ? Soil/land type/climate
Infrastructure Spices,coffee,tea,chocolate,tropical fruit Fruit and hungry-gap veg Mainly arable and livestock
Mainly field-scale and some arable, some livestock
Fruit and veg, horticulture,some
field scale
Increasing mechanisation Salads and leafy
green, fruit URBAN DOMESTIC 2.5% URBAN TRADED 5% PERI-URBAN LAND 17.5% RURAL HINTERLAND With 100miles 35% REST OF UK 20% REST OF EUROPE 15% FURTHER AFIELD 5%
Figure 3�3 Food Zones (adapted from Growing Communities, 2011)(1)
Although Capital Growth and UK Food Sovereignty Movement exhibited typical attributes of conventional and professional NGOs, due to their networked and
coalition infrastructure, their long-term development and permanence were still unclear. Moreover, actual boundaries that marked secular and spiritual divisions between community/professional and militant/personal also became blurred and problematic. For example, both Transition Town Brixton and Slow Food London put equal emphasis on scientific arguments and moral, aesthetic and spiritual sentiments. Many participants interviewed were not only concerned about food knowledge, such as food culture and food systems, but also addressed how to recognise the importance of a broader scope and incorporate more diverse forms and sources of knowledge.
This leads to the third perspective of food knowledge. For some, it was problematic in our higher education that the knowledge produced from the universities was not always useful for communities. They would know more about practical knowledge than theories. Others questioned the role of ‘popular knowledge’ in the current local food in London. For example, how could or should we judge or make good use of those celebrity chefs such as Jamie Oliver, in their contribution to knowledge. Still many emphasised the importance of broadening our ways and sites of learning. Additionally, there was concern about a kind of ‘tacit knowledge’, coming from communities working together observing and imitating each other, drawing in apprentices, to further this unspoken knowledge about the world. As one participant said, “you can’t get it unless you are doing it and learning it at the same time”. Additionally, some participants stated that a huge amount of food knowledge was specifically tied with immigrants, even mythical knowledge in London should not be ignored.
113 It was interesting to note that quite a few participants talked about the infinity and
openness of knowledge around food. There was an echo of Freire’s call for “openness to approaching and being approached, to questioning and being questioned, to agreeing and disagreeing” (Freire, 1998:119). One study participant from the Bonnington Café even tried to recall a quote marked on the Wall outside the British Library to support his argument when he was asked about what he understood about food knowledge. He assumed that knowledge is infinite – no one can know everything, nor can one always be right so it is important to broaden our scope of inquiry to critically embrace other dimensions of an open orientation to ourselves, others and the wider world. He commented:
No one can know everything. The other day I passed the British Library, I saw a big banner saying that knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it…If you ask me what food knowledge is, I would say it’s like a complex web, well, perhaps a web is not the best word to describe it...a sort of web in motion, like a wiki where people can add on new stuff and have a forum to discuss things…we need to learn how to get knowledge we need….but at the same time, we also need to learn to be critical about all kinds of knowledge as the world is undergoing constant change…It’s about care of fellow human beings as well as our commitment to them, and always willing to learn new ways of understanding the world.
However, another participant emphasised that food knowledge was different in that it is something people eat. Thus, food knowledge exemplified a kind of embodied and intimate knowledge through our body. She said:
Food is different, you can discuss a topic on a virtual space but you can’t smell, touch and eat it…food knowledge is a bit like that, people must feel real in their mouth and that it’s trustworthy to put it into your mouth…To learn knowledge about food is also to learn how to take care of ourselves and others, from the basic act of eating food, growing food and sharing food (A member at Women’s Environmental Network). So far, I have discussed three perspectives of what counts as food knowledge raised from my empirical investigation. Although participants in the discussion asserted that the statement ‘whose food knowledge counts?’ broadly reflected their own work and concerns, two important themes stood out. First, for some, they put more emphasis on the imbalance of power in the food system as well as our knowledge system, and they expressed this with the phrase ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’. Second, for others, it seemed to be a matter of trust and care, which was not only seen as an abstract concept but as a practical and moral issue.
He who pays the piper calls the tune?
From time to time, I could hear study participants talking about the significance of the person who sets the agenda for ‘appropriate’ and ‘necessary’ food knowledge. For some, what was needed was a ‘sustained’ conversation about what we should know and what to prioritise in research and development in agro-food related issues. Many participants, especially those from campaigning groups and academia, considered this kind of conversation a significant but achievable challenge. However, they were also aware that this was only going to be realized if their narratives could catch everyone’s attention and people were able to focus on the fundamental questions, as one member at UK Food
Sovereignty Movement, rightly pointed out: “Where does food come from? How is it produced and by whom? How do its production, delivery and consumption affect us and other people? Who makes choices for us? Who controls the food system – from seed to sewer?”
Pursuing many of the issues mentioned above would demand long-lasting support from government and grant providers. It is clear that there was a cynical but also worrying tone expressed by certain participants, especially towards large corporations and technological enterprises, as well as the government food policy and strategy from the national to the local scale. Many participants explicitly opposed the idea of technological fixes and the biotechnology approach. While my investigation was done before the Conservative Coalition’s election in May 2010, for some, those interviewed already expected a dramatic shift in the Government’s food strategy. The fact that the Coalition’s rise saw the disbandment of the Sustainable Development Commission, a more progressive national voice, represented only one of many examples of this shift. Others included the promotion of a sustainable growth strategy underpinned by sound scientific evidence, and calls for (1) building the green economy; (2) Big Society (i.e. giving people more responsibility and accountability for, though not necessarily power over, sustainable behaviour); and (3) encouragement of local and sustainable food procurement (assuming no cost increase). Here is an example of how a study participant explained “he who pays the piper calls the tune!’
These days, some progressive NGOs have been weakened by their dependence on government’s funding. They tend to be a service provider rather than campaigner. This weakens any radicalism they might have had. The government is clever, they give you some projects to run and then you don’t have time to do more fundamental research or they just don’t give you any funding…what is most needed is what is the most difficult, that is, to get a grant…that’s very sad (A volunteer at Organiclea). However, when I spoke with another participant, she offered me a different perspective on ‘He who pays the piper sets the tune’, which suggested citizen’s rights of knowing and knowledge. There’s an obvious imbalance of power in the making of food knowledge in current systems. According to her, it was a problem not limited to London. The absence of cross-sector research collaboration to set food policy as well as urban policy towards sustainability was yet another example of the need to deal with the problem for the sake of our future. As one participant at SOAS Food Studies shared:
I’m quite interested in Toronto’s food council and Oaxaca’s public assembly model…I think it’s time to foster a grassroots food council with representation for a more inclusive and participatory research process…the point is that it’s embedded in a local context, what is discussed is relevant to people’s life…But it takes time to develop such an understanding and process…but I believe it is a valuable experiment…Communities in London, I think, are good places to start for people to learn to be engaged…This is challenging, especially at a time when we are seen as passive consumers rather than citizens…We need to engage with public policy, but we also have to be careful not to fall into government’s policy rhetoric…One thing I find particularly important, perhaps because I’m an academic, is to have meaningful and purposeful social learning…what I mean by meaningful and purposeful learning is that we have clear objectives, and to clarify whose objectives, and how we are going to achieve these objectives, I mean, the process…we need to make ourselves clearly understood why community food sector matters, or how we can learn from each other.
115 This view was supported by other participants. For some, it was a question of whether citizens were given priority over consumers; whether consumers really had sovereignty over their food choice and whether consumers really knew fully what they wanted to have. A couple of participants highlighted the urgency of exploring how we can move from individual to collective knowledge, empower communities by increasing their capacity to demand, conduct and evaluate any knowledge generated so that people have a voice and are fairly involved in the production, transfer, dissemination and utilisation of food knowledge. As both citizens and tax payers, one participant at Organiclea said, “shouldn’t the piper be calling the tune?”
Matters of trust and care
Through my investigation, the saying “whose food knowledge counts?” also seemed to be related to matters of trust and care, which can be identified in three recurring themes: first, social capital and word of mouth; second, authority and morality; and third, beyond expert vs. lay knowledge divisions. First, my investigation lent support to the wider findings that social relations had significant roles in the ways knowledge was imparted and used. This was especially true when participants were overloaded by information, for example, where to buy fresher but less costly organic food, how to set up community garden initiatives and why a vegetarian diet is good for your body and mind as well as the planet. While I found that those community food initiatives committed to building their capacity in terms of knowledge and skills towards their goals or particular needs, ‘who you know’ was widespread among many initiatives. For some, social relations brought together what they knew, how they knew and why something was understood in certain ways. For most participants, trust and care were implied in their relationships to knowledgeable community members. These had expertise in a variety of knowledge and skills in food production, preparation, and health diet, food culture and rituals, or identifying which wild plants were edible in an urban forage tour.
However, they also show a slightly more nuanced picture in that the empirical materials showed some contradictions among participants’ food knowledge. For example, while many were concerned about food safety issues and attention was paid to the labels on produce they consumed in the supermarkets, the quality of vegetable box schemes or farmers’ markets, the same level of caution was absent when they decided to buy vegetable and fruits from a local ‘one pound a bowl’ stand or having free lunch at the Hare Krishna stall. This was in part due to economic considerations but also related