| Popis: |
Food and place are linked at a basic level, for food must be produced somewhere, and consumed in the same place, or circulated for consumption elsewhere. However, this basic process becomes entangled in judgments about whether it was produced in the appropriate location and manner, if it is being consumed in a culturally sanctioned way, and whether the “right” inhabitants of a place are consuming it. Furthermore, the contemporary world is organized around nation-states, which has given rise to national eating cultures. These national practices coexist with more global eating phenomena, be they long standing such as the widespread consumption of sugar or more recent fast food phenomena like McDonaldization. The concept of space spans many disciplines and goes beyond a reference to a physical location. Space can be physical, subjective, or affective; it can refer to a geographical location or be a way to speak of mental and emotional landscapes. Economic systems change the way spaces look and are used by humans. Abstract anonymous space can become a place, imbued with meaning for the user. Henri Lefebvre, one of the leading theorists of space, argues that every society or culture is generative of spatial practices, but that the practices themselves are generative of space. Space is both a launching pad for action and a framework in which to act. Scholars of space have argued that if reality consists of time and space, too much attention has gone to thinking about time. The main framing device to understand the world has been processual – what happened when, how it was affected by earlier events, and how it might impact the future. On the other hand, how human experience is spatialized and the ways in which spatial arrangements both enable and constrain people’s lives have received comparatively less attention. Space is an analytical category to think about the ways in which people organize, produce, and make sense of the foods around them. Space is an entry point to think about how flavors and regions come together, how people evaluate those connections, who benefits and who loses from the spatial arrangements under which foods are produced, and how capitalist practices generate spatial arrangements and their resulting inequities. Space is a lens with which to analyze a wide range of phenomena involving food and to think of the ways in which power operates through food networks. In particular, the spatialization of power and its effects opens up ways of thinking about ethics, justice, and food. |
