Tenth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Through an examination of Istanbul’s contemporary food supply chain and alternative provisioning practices, this paper explores various tensions between the right to city and the right to food discourses utilized by different residents of the city. The paper argues that the right to the city discourse became popular among the poor residents and the new migrants making a claim for equal access to the city’s resources, including its social, cultural and gastronomic capitals, while the upper and the upper middle-class residents increasingly turned to the right to food discourse to maintain their power over these. This “clash of discourses” is particularly fierce today as it shapes larger fractures within Istanbul’s foodscape and the Food Movement, particularly with respect to new generation “neo-farmers,” the recently hip alternative food networks (patronized by the upper and the upper-middle class ethical consumers and/or DIY producer-consumers) and the alternative provisioning networks (maintained by the urban poor for self-sustenance).