Session: Metabolic food geographies as transformational: safeguarding communities, animals and environments from harms.
Deadline: 26.02.2025
Abstract:
In his book, Diet For A Large Planet, Chris Otter (2020) traces ‘Britain’s radical nineteenth-century dietary transition’ and the combination of systems that ultimately made food cheap and plentiful. It shows how global food systems create imbalances between, for example, developed and underdeveloped regions and between men’s and women’s diets (i.e., gender as social metabolism). The harmful consequences of this ‘big food’, ‘large-planet philosophy’ and ‘expanded metabolism’ are very real in contemporary Britain and the wider world today, especially if we consider the way food systems now overstep several ‘planetary boundaries’. Therefore, these imbalances and their consequences evidence a lack of regulatory safeguards to reduce transformational harms to and through the metabolic capacities of, and social consequences on, communities, animals and environments.
Metabolism is thus rightly attracting increasing attention across the social sciences (e.g. Mol, 2021; Landecker, 2023), including within geography (Barua, 2023; Cusworth, 2023; Searle et al., 2024), with papers tracing the transforming impacts of dietary and industrial food relations on wider environments, particularly river systems (Caffyn, 2021a/b; Read, 2024) and animal lives (Oliver 2024), and thereby revealing underlying links between (bio)power, politics, (neo-)colonialism, the growth of (over- and under-nourished) bodies, (fragile) ecologies, violence, (metabolic) crisis AND the Anthropocene in the ‘administration of life’ (Barua, 2023). This work on metabolism in history, anthropology and geography now garners a range of perspectives, from forms of industrial ecology (material flows), to radical political economy (metabolic rift), to biochemical forms of nutrient use and conversion / transformation. Each offers important insights for food geographies (Howard, 2021; Kneafsey et al., 2021; Maye et al., 2022) by re/making food environment circulations. The question is how does this work develop a ‘socio-metabolic ethics of care’ that can safeguard human, animal environmental life from metabolic harms in the contemporary and future UK/Global food system?
Inspired by this work, the session invites interventions that engage with metabolism to re/scale food system geographies – this might be a conventional research paper but could also be in the form of short films, participatory data, visual artistic summaries, or voice recordings. We welcome different formats. In particular, the session aims to:
- Assess and contextualise metabolism in the making at different levels of the food system and as ‘lively’ agri-food commodity types (e.g. meat, dairy, sugar, cereals), including inter-connections between and across categories, systems and associated harms and benefits.
- Examine the interconnecting of metabolism at different scales, from the microbe, to the human non-human more-than-human animal body, and ultimately the planet, as well as differentiated metabolisms within societies.
- Consider how metabolism remakes and rescales foundational concepts such as food system, resilience, transformation, governance and politics.
- Explore different methods to creatively engage and research metabolism in ways sensitive to the politics, ethics and complexity of growing and eating ‘large-planet foods’.
We welcome papers from geographers and others working with metabolism and agri-food. As well as research paper proposals we are open to receiving other creative submission ideas, if more suitable, with the collective aim to build a set of responses organised at different metabolic (bodily) scales.
Submission information: Please send your title, abstract (max. 300 words) and author details to Damian Maye (dmaye@glos.ac.uk) by 26th February. Authors will be notified of accepted papers by 28th February.
Session organisers: Damian Maye, University of Gloucestershire (dmaye@glos.ac.uk), Emma Roe, University of Southampton (E.J.Roe@soton.ac.uk), Theo Stanley, University of Southampton (T.Stanley@soton.ac.uk), Philippa Simmonds, University of Gloucestershire (psimmonds1@glos.ac.uk), Paul Hurley, University of Southampton (P.D.Hurley@soton.ac.uk)
Sponsoring group: Food Geographies Research Group
(Author: Abstract by Damian May)
