Category Archives: Geographies

Blog posts by geographical focus

After work family eating

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Chicken home grown

I was talking with a couple of my work colleagues this week about family eating. Putting aside that a number of us do research on food related topics, even those who do not do this kind of work are pretty food aware. There is a member of staff who works on ice fields, but also raises sheep for wool and food (see the post about his lamb here), another member of staff is involved in bee keeping with his local church (he also sells the honey in the department), many of us have small vegetable plots.  I have raised chickens.  An even larger number cook. This provides great opportunities for recipe sharing. Continue reading →

We need to talk about hunger

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Image

If you look through the door of my pantry you will see a window into my world.  My pantry expresses my likes and dislikes and my cultural background by the presence and absence of certain goods. You will also see that in my house, we are not hungry.  I have been hungry in the past.  I plan against this by stocking up for the possibility that there might come a day when I might not have money.  It isn’t an entirely rational approach to domestic food provisioning as it is a practice that produces waste.  But, I always know where my next meal is coming from.  And I also know I am lucky to be able to be so potentially wasteful. My household budget is shaped by my past experience of hunger.  I am sure I am not alone, but for some reason hunger is not a fashionable term these days.  What is that all about?

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Paris, Eating, Books and Promise

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IMG_1956I took my son to paris this week. It was a reward for more than surviving what was a difficult few months.  Eurostar was having a sale; I felt we deserved a treat.  In anticipation of this journey, I did what I usually do.  I looked for guidebooks.  I found a couple of good ones, and one in particular, The little Black Book of Paris (2014, Peter Pauper Press), proved particularly useful.  I have also begun to buy a novel about the places I am visiting before going and this time I purchased a book called Lunch in Paris by Elizabeth Bard.  I was going to Paris, I planned to eat lunch, it seemed a good choice.   Continue reading →

Finding the beginning or where does our food come from?

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03 19 08 Bradford wholesale market 012

I once conducted a research project that examined the consumption practices of middle-class households in the UK.  I was interested in the knowledges they had about what foods to buy and how their own understandings of local fit into this.  As part of that project I went to visit the wholesale market in Bradford, which is where most of the fruit and vegetables one finds in the various corner shops within the region are sourced.  It was both an interesting and illuminating trip at the time, and has informed my reflections on where our food begins its life as food any number of times since then.  What, in particular, it has caused me to consider is not only the socio-cultural relations that inform the origins of our food, but also the contexual usefulness (or uselessness) of the idea of local when we think about whether or not our food is local.  Continue reading →