Sustainable Approaches : Room A214
29 October - 11:15AM-12:50PM CEST Copenhagen (Aarhus University)
Featured The Taste of Sustainability: Global South Perspectives on Sustainable Diets View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mariana Hase Ueta
In the context of the Anthropocene, food production is considered a resource-intensive industry connecting Global Southern countries as important producers and emerging markets. The global agro-food routes that mobilize commodities, such as meat and soy, between Brazil and China are not only crucial for these countries’ economies and food security but also have a massive environmental impact. These issues have been raising awareness from the side of the consumers and pressuring the government and private sector in both countries, making it important to understand the meanings and values involved in the consumption of these foods in both contexts. The young consumers emerge as important actors bringing new environmental values to the table. First-hand ethnographic data was collected between 2017 and 2019 from young consumers who negotiated between personal values and family narratives around their household meat consumption in Shanghai, China and in São Paulo, Brazil. The discussion focuses on how development processes, nutritional transition experiences, and sustainability considerations are entangled in the context of the Global South and how food-products like meat have the power to establish important agro-export strategic partnerships, at the same time as they mobilize memories of deprivation and class mobility as well as dreams of achieving a better life. The understanding of these intergenerational narratives on food and sustainability will allow these two countries to contribute with their Global South perspectives in the construction of a shared future in times of global climate change.
Indigenous Organic Coffee Production: Sustainable Practices and Ways of Knowing and Experiencing Climate Change
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Consuelo Guayara Sanchez
This paper examines the ways of knowing and experiencing climate change, as well as enacting practices in response to its impacts by a set of indigenous organic coffee producers, members of a small, local growers’ association in Colombia. This work centers around two key questions: how do their experiences of the effects of climate variability and change along with their sustainable production practices interact with institutional scientific accounts of climate change within an uneven power dynamics of knowledge production that marginalizes their ways of knowing and acting in nature? How does this evolving indigenous knowledge that reflects an ethics of care remain anchored on ancestral knowledge? I draw upon in-depth, semi-structured interviews I conducted with organic coffee producers, association officials, officials from regional and local organizations in charge of supporting coffee producers, in addition to plot walks, during the summers of 2017, 2018, and 2019.
Sustainable, Healthy Food Systems Training at the University of Malta: A Preliminary Mapping Exercise View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Suzanne Piscopo, Karen Mugliett
The potential role and need for higher education institutions to promote sustainable, healthy food systems (SHFS) has perhaps never been so critical. These institutions are training future workers along the food supply-consumption continuum, as well as those who influence food choice/behaviours commercially, educationally or socially. This study involved a preliminary mapping exercise looking at the different academic entities at the University of Malta (UM) where food is overtly incorporated in their courses. The aims were to identify broadly which entities are taking a lead in addressing aspect/s of SHFS, which aspects of SHFS are being tackled and how these align with the UM vision and Mediterranean SHFS goals. By reviewing course programmes and a selection of study-unit descriptions with an evident food focus, findings were classified using an eco-system framework, looking at individual, communities, policy and physical-natural environments. Results indicate that individual food behaviours and related influences feature primarily in food and health-related courses, and education-related courses. Food production and innovation in agriculture and in industry feature strongly in applied food studies and in agriculture courses. To a lesser extent, food culture and policy feature in education, and in anthropology, applied food studies, dietetics and Maltese studies. These results help highlight gaps in training for potential players in SHFS. They can also inform achievement of the UM’s 2020-25 Strategic Plan for enhancing intercultural understanding through food and acting as a catalyst for valorisation of local agriculture and food production SMEs, as well as the realisation of broader local/regional SHFS goals.
