Ninth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Riffing off a paper by Julie Guthman (2010) about the raced and classed politics of food knowledges, in this paper I draw on ethnographic research of a food partnership based in Tower Hamlets, London, ‘hosted’ by the Women’s Environment network (WEN), a 30 year old UK national, feminist, environmental not-for-profit organisation which seeks to inform women about environmental issues, especially connected to food production, consumption and waste. Although food studies and geography have researched council, NGO and community led food growing, waste avoidance and sustainability, less attention has been given to the raced and gendered politics of knowledge involved. As a feminist organisation, WEN is interested in food knowledge production and sharing along feminist lines. Because the population of London is racially and ethnically mixed, the ‘transnational experienced based knowing’ of Bangladeshi and Caribbean gardening has ‘produced communally situated knowledge’, supported by WEN’s practices’ (Vehviläinen, 2017). But to date, such feminist, racialised and transnational food and health knowledges are marginalised in food policy making, and food studies. Indeed, much of the food health knowledge promulgates narrow white nutritionalist understandings of food- health. Accordingly, I focus on British Bangladeshi women because British Bangladeshi people make up 30% of Tower Hamlets and argue that their expertise in food growing, food sustainability, and food health; and their aesthetics and creativity have been routinely neglected. As Krishnendu Ray (2016) writes social scientists assume that dreams, and aesthetics are marginal to minoritised migrants because their lives are seen to be structured by poverty and suffering.