Not yet at the table: The absence of food culture and tradition in agroecology literature

Abstract

This review of agroecology’s current work on culture and food traditions—a principle of the field and one of the FAO’s 10 Elements of Agroecology—reveals two things. First, although culture and tradition are frequently mentioned in passing, there is little published literature detailing how they intersect with agroecology. Second, mentions of tradition and culture in this corpus reveal scholarly assumptions that practicing agroecology or food sovereignty will naturally result in unspecified healthy, diversified, community-driven food choices. But consumption practices shape production practices at least as much as the reverse. Food cultures are complex, shifting, and geographically and historically informed, and must be considered within their rich contexts. Agroecology needs to critically engage with the kitchen and the table in order to achieve the holistic and multi-faceted agricultural transformations imagined by the FAO and others.

The Social Ecology of Food: Where Agroecology and Heritage Meet

“…Agroecology has been proposed as a way to integrate social and natural science approaches. However, little work has been done to demonstrate how culture and food traditions intersect with agroecology [9]. This paper proposes three (out of the ten) of the FAO's elements of agroecologynamely the co-creation and sharing of knowledge, culture and food traditions, and human and social values-as entry points to transformative change towards sustainable food and agricultural systems.…”

“…Overall, food sovereignty supports bottom-up approaches to the promotion of traditional diets and the empowerment of people in terms of what they eat [9] (p. 6) in the same way that heritage discourses promote the democratisation of cultural heritage through public and/or stakeholder participation [69]. A growing number of agroecology researchers have embraced community-based and participatory action research in an attempt to bring forward the expertise of non-researchers, and in order to generate knowledge that has been co-created and that is actionable [70].…”

“…However, it has been pointed out that despite some sporadic empirical research that connects cultural food traditions and agroecology, little work has been done to illustrate how the two intersect [9]. This has been observed despite the recognition that, for agroecology, the problem of the food system cannot be separated from the study of human communities [47], even though agroecology should seek to consciously "combine the experiential knowledge of farmers and indigenous peoples with the latest insights from the science of ecology" [48] (pp.…”

“…Despite agroecology's pledge to bring interactions between plants, animals, humans, and the environment, as well as traditional and local knowledge, to the core of the food system [6], many scholars have commented on the detachment of social science from agroecology [7][8][9]. Mendez et al [10] found that many agroecological approaches are grounded in natural science and, hence, risk disarticulating many contributions of non-Western knowledge and traditional practices.…”

“…Mendez et al [10] found that many agroecological approaches are grounded in natural science and, hence, risk disarticulating many contributions of non-Western knowledge and traditional practices. At the same time, Morgan and Trubek [9] highlighted the absence of food culture and tradition in the existing agroecology literature. Taking these observations even further, this paper emphasises the importance of an intersection between the agroecological literature and the literature that addresses the notion of food as cultural heritage.…”