Valentine’s project reflections

motivations

Based on my interests and experience exploring and facilitating contests between competing land uses (the motives for which were often invisible or silenced, and that could be much better engaged by being made more explicit), I felt that I could help facilitate dialogue between people who had a lot of interest in and a lot of knowledge about (and personal investment in) different parts of the food system, but who tended not to engage well, either because they don’t have opportunities to encounter each others’ perspectives or because their stances on changes needed in the food system tend to set them against each other without necessarily having good tools to engage in dialogue despite differences. (I’ve noticed that food’s personal *availability* appears to make everyone an expert, and especially around issues that people may not have known much about until they became concerned, they often bring tremendous moral fervor, which is both awesomely passionate and also often really challenging to keep engaged with competing fervors, which are also fanned and distorted by powerful interests who wield food and feeding moral metaphors and power relations very skillfully.) I was particularly interested in the contrasts between personal interests in asserting more varied *values* (e.g. social, environmental) via the food system and infrastructural aspects of large scale food provisioning systems – two levels of analysis and experience of food systems that tend to clash and not account well for each other.

expectations

Because this project was very self-consciously and assertively “citizen-led,” I expected to be able to collaborate with the public partners who invited me into the project (in ways that have been difficult to maintain momentum for – we’ve ended up moving very slowly). I also hoped that we might be able to collectively move somewhat beyond repeatedly complaining about and cataloguing food system problems to focusing on potential change points and places where we could muster power – and assess what is being done and has been done in ways people are satisfied with.

modes of engagement

  • Regular group learning sessions (4-6 per year over the past two+ years, in which core members of project from academic and community plus interested members of public go over project progress, consider next steps, integration of various parts, etc.),
  • survey (including an interview and a q-sort where people prioritize 44 components of, first, the current food system, and then the ideal food system) of 50+ people from wide range of positions in the food system,
  • focus groups (primarily with different ethnic groups about their food priorities: Hmong, Latina, and Somali women’s groups),
  • development of working groups to take on food planning tasks (mostly as part of those regular group sessions),
  • work with academics who are part of project to evaluate ongoing project progress, particularly around questions of cross-disciplinary and community-university collaboration, and around making our research outputs usable.

unforeseen implications or ramifications

  • My personal bugaboo at the moment is figuring out how to *represent* the incredibly rich information we’ve collected about what people do and want to do with food and feeding (which exceeds my best efforts so far, despite hyperlinked diagrams, etc.) – I’m dying to see how this all gets graphically represented, because graphical representations obviously have so much potential for building systemic understanding and communicative practices around food!
  • More interest from more “mainstream” perspectives (than the original alt ag core that initiated the project) has perhaps made original “stakeholders” less enthusiastic and more uncertain.
  • Attempts by community-university liasons to not overburden public participants has perhaps led to them feeling under-empowered and to not having much ownership.
  • Opening up the conversation about food planning to a wider range of participants than “the usual suspects” has made the goals and social fabric of the project fairly uncertain.
  • Finally, we’re getting interesting pushback from some key supporters about sympathetically engaging with people in different parts of the food system; they appear to feel that this weakens their critical perspective, and seem resistant, for example, to pulling back from polemical stances (“we need zero carbon agriculture!”) to what their academic partners, particularly, feel would be more legitimate stances (particularly in engaging policy and industry critics – which these particular stakeholders are eager and likely to do). In other words, some people are attached to their sound bite versions of food system activism, and irritated by academic attempts to complicate what they see as simple and elegant solutions (via, e.g., beautiful, local food produced by relatively affluent white people) – and it’s a challenge to figure out the balance of coalitional work with these folks and how much it’s legitimate for academics to decide what needs to be central in this work (e.g. social justice for food workers and food access for all vs. focus more narrowly on producer livelihoods)