This morning I was on @BBCSheffield breakfast show with Kat Cowan talking about our upcoming #JustFood19 conference, but also Social Eating, Food surplus, and Food Futures. If you would like to listen, the interview starts at about minute 17. If you would like to attend the open events, here is the detail. Continue reading
Food Ladders: A multi-scaled approach to everyday food security and community resilience
Everyday food insecurity is more than just a lack of access to food based on income. Poverty creates a hole that has emotional and nutritional effects, as well as implications for community cohesion. Food insecurity as it intersects with poverty also materialises in places to produce landscapes where food availability and the social connections it enables are scarce (for an open-access paper see Blake 2019). Poor foodscapes contribute to vulnerabilities to the shocks associated with limited food choices, which in turn reduces the resilience of places and people by producing want, poor health, social isolation, and fear and distrust of one’s neighbours. The Food Ladders approach seeks to overcome these place-based aspects of vulnerability by developing positive engagements through food and ultimately aims to help communities become the places where people want to live, raise their children, and grow old. Continue reading
Link
The following link is to a paper I wrote for a special issue of Europe Now that focused on Waste. Original available here: https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/05/06/the-multiple-ontologies-of-surplus-food/
This paper draws from Mol’s work, and particularly her work on health. And Ontology is the theory of what is real. Because what is real comes before human understanding and sits outside language, humans we can never fully know or describe what is real. Instead we have theories about what it might (ontologies) be and how we can know it (epistemologies).
These theories are based on a metric of good enoughness. Do they work? All sciences are underpinned by this. Knowledge itself is a human construction, although what we seek to know sits beyond that. Understanding different views creates a whole that is rooted in time and place–an ephemeral reality.
Why does this matter? Well, wen we understand this and that what is real in a given time and place, we can seek to und we stand the qualities of a thing that can be called into existence when we shift the configuration. It’s like alchemy. What was in one circumstance waste material can in another configuration become something that produces value.
Another metaphor for this might be the kaleidoscope, where shifting the elements, foregrounding some, changing the juxtapositions changes what we see and what it is.
Living with that oxymoron of being a Dyslexic-Academic and getting help with it.
As an academic, it can be difficult declaring and getting support for a specific learning disability. Here is what I’ve learned so far that helps or that I wish I had known. Continue reading
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