Reflecting on Food: From the Stars to a Relationship of Repairing
For a Western middle-class person, food is everywhere. This is easy to prove: You can go into the kitchen, open the fridge, and take what your gut desires. If the fridge is empty, well, it is not a big deal: you can go to the supermarket down the street, and even more options are available for you to satisfy your hunger. Thinking about it, this marks a great milestone in the history of humanity. For most of human history, food was a big deal. For instance, if we look at the world population 2 thousand years ago during the period of the Roman Empire, it is estimated that about 200 million individuals lived. This number stayed stable until the 15th century, when an important increase was registered. One important reason was an increase in calorie flows in the society of the time because of innovation in agriculture and the early European colonisation of the Americas, which introduced new types of food, leading to a diversification of calories for millions of individuals in Europe, while it also introduced diseases causing thousands of fatalities in the colonised communities.
The power of food on demographics can be viewed even more when just looking at the explosion of the population from the 1950s to today. The data in this case are quite accurate, and the world population passed from 2.5 billion to 8 billion. That is huge! Of course, explaining such a big increase in detail is complex, and it is also very important to see the geographies where the population increased while others decreased.
Nevertheless, food has been a crucial factor, especially the use of technology and science, together with an industrialised approach that made the calories percapita explode. In a very real sense, it is most probable without this food explosion, both me, who is writing, and you, who is reading, would not be present today because there would not have been the condition to make us come into this world. However, it is exactly this abundance in high-income countries for affluent individuals that is also the weakness of food in the Western world. It is an everyday fact that when something is always present, people tend to forget its importance: in the Netherlands, electricity is easily accessible, so accessible that we forget how much we depend on it; if one day there is no more, everything cracks down, the same goes for food.
In what follows, there are a couple of things that I want to do. First, I want to contextualise food and make the reader reflect on the amazing journey from the moment that nuclear reactions occur in the Sun to the very end that it comes on your plate. Second, I want to let you see how food is something so deeply embedded in us and our cultures, even though we might not think of it. In this sense, in a very straight way, we are what we eat and how we eat. Third, after having presented the objective and subjective aspects of food, I briefly present a different relationship to it, one that is coherent with the challenges of today’s society, namely food repair.
From the stars to the plate
If we want to appreciate the journey of food, we need to start at the very beginning, and this is not even on planet Earth. We need to account for the nuclear reactions inside the Sun. The energy that our star radiates into the universe that finds our planet after travelling for 150 million km in empty space is the beginning of the first conditions of food production. Indeed, this is quite extreme, and the importance of the Sun applies to all types of energy supplies and life forms that inhabit (and have inhabited the planet).
Food has different geographies, and the reasons for this are multiple, but one important one is the inclination of planet Earth; in fact, the Sun's energy hits the Earth’s surface in different inclinations, thus transferring heterogeneous quantities depending on the location. Of course, other factors are important: climate, morphology, ecosystems, the agency of the living, and social-cultural factors.
In the history of food, the market and trade activity always played a major role. This actively shaped the cultural aspect of it. In ancient times, what made the luxury products was exactly the fact that they were not local products but rather arrived from far away countries. In this sense, the trade of spices that involved Europe and Asia for centuries is a good example. But the market and trade defined not only what was a luxury but also diffused new species to new continents, bringing worlds together and creating new ones. The best example is potatoes, a vegetable that originated in Bolivia and was brought to Europe in the 16th century by early colonisers, and today is deeply a symbol of German cousins.
The above is even more true today: Taking into consideration the world's top food-producing countries, we see that the U.S., China, India, and Brazil are the ones. This is not surprising: they are the result of (colonial)-historical, environmental, and cosmic dances that led to a smash of sociocultural food habits within a global context that demanded calories.
All these complex factors come together in today’s food industries and supply. Moreover, the food industry is a chain of global causes and effects. It is unsurprising that the demographic growth in China led the country to partner with Brazil, resulting in global consequences, or that the war in Ukraine created a crisis in the world supply of wheat.
Transportation needs to be added to production before we (the everyday consumers in high-income countries) can easily pick up the product at the supermarket. Of course, even the logistics is an interesting world made of several processes and components. From the technical knowledge to realise the different modes of transportation to the technological apparatus that makes possible the realisation of the equipment and fuel from the very scratch, the environmental impact of the transportation processes, and the different companies and stakeholders, together with the policy and governmental institutions that deliver and decide the standardised norms of delivery.
The journey ends with the single person opening the fridge, taking pan and pot, a little of Spotify in the background, and a (hopefully) happy meal on the plate after a long day at work.
What can we say about this long journey that started in the very centre of the Sun’s nucleus and ended in your everyday plate? What can be concluded is that food is a very complex subject. The history of the industry is a result of the power trajectories and colonial geographies that deeply shaped and exploited territories and communities. Moreover, even though the injustice of the colonial period has been acknowledged, the intense production of the food industry still raises major issues. Data is tragically clear on the environmental impact of the meat industry or the intense use of pesticides in agriculture that pollutes the soil and the water.
Nevertheless, the abundance of food in our society deceives us, showing it apparently simple and making us barely aware of the industry's impact.
Because food is so complex, we need to respect it and account for what it is, and for this reason, in what follows, I want to introduce the concept of food repair.
Reflections on Throwaway Societies and Food Repair
In this short article, I am advocating for a responsible relationship with food because of the complex interactions that must occur in order to produce it, but before continuing, let’s pose a question for contextualisation: What does research suggest of today's behaviour towards food?
Approximately 33% of the food intended for human consumption is ultimately discarded. Within Europe, assessments vary, with figures averaging between 95 and 115 kilograms per individual annually. Some suggest that a reason for this waste is consumers' social and geographical disconnection from production. They are not interested in the farmer or the farm. In a sense, food is just another product that can be disposed of once it is not useful. Another reason is that people do not know what to do with food in safe ways. In this sense, the knowledge of how to handle food that is going bad or might go bad is lost.
Considering the Western context, other reasons include the amount of food that is produced exceeds demand and need, advertisements and marketing campaigns encourage consumers to buy more than they need, and lack of technology or infrastructure to preserve and keep food fresh. It is suggested that food waste is a product of conflicting interests and everyday life demands. People are encouraged to eat fresh because it is good for the health of the body and the environment; however, canned and non-organic foods live longer and are less likely to go bad and perish.
Between these struggles, an unnoticed and invisible set of practices that play with the edibility of foods is ‘food repair’. Food repair is a concept that aims to change the dynamics between food and consumers. When mediators (food producers, supermarkets, or the state) do not interfere, individuals and communities are compelled to personally engage with, modify, and mend their food. Food repair is essentially practices and skills of saving food and experimenting with how we relate to food (growing and eating). The repair techniques and skills become exposed to the public, the ethnographer, as the object of experimentation and negotiation. However, what is crucial here is that food repair produces different, not better, ways of valuing food.
I remember how my parents saved vegetables and fruits from going bad here. Firstly, I want to outline that food is considered sacred in where I am from. For example, when I was a child, it was common to kiss a piece of bread and put it on your forehead three times before throwing it away. My parents would either make juices or jam from fruits. To save vegetables, they dry them up on our balcony or garden. However, after moving away from my hometown to a bigger city, I realised how these things became forgotten. The ways I was relating to food previously were no longer available to me because my relationship with food drastically changed.
I was used to collecting white cherries or apples from trees and picking up tomatoes and cucumbers from farms. Yet, in a bigger city, I became a gatherer of supermarket sales. Everything I needed was packaged and canned. Back Home, there was fresh food, and the taste was always different. I used to eat according to the season, I would wait impatiently for summer so I could eat fresh watermelons. Now, everything I want is available 24/7 at a nearby Jumbo, packaged for my delight. And I don’t know what to do with it, I don’t even know how to eat it.
Looking at throwaway societies, the disconnection with food and the anxiety surrounding keeping it fresh is very understandable. It is important to repair our relationship with food and allow ourselves and communities to create their own set of skills and techniques for food repair.
Conclusion
In this brief article, I wanted to highlight the complexity behind food and why we should not take it for granted. We started by connecting the obvious: food with population demography and how the increased flow of calories in the last century was fundamental for us to be here. From this point, I tried to unfold the complexity of food production, starting from the beginning with the energy that our star delivers to the planet every day. This was then contextualised with environmental, geographical, and socio-cultural factors, taking into consideration the historical(-colonial) dimensions and the connection with other industries.
Food is complex, but the continuous flow that is present in Western society makes it apparently easy. It is to acknowledge the complexity of food that I have introduced the concept of food repair and the cultural values of it. Because of its vitality, we need to be very conscious of the complexity that is hidden behind it. What is crucial is that, as consumers, we try to build a relationship of respect and care towards the food that we buy.
Further engagement
“What the Health” and “Poisoned”: Netflix documentaries on food in relation to health and the lobbying activity in the US
Cowspiracy: Netflix documentary on the impact of the meat industry on the environment
Seaspiracy: Netflix documentary on the impact of the fish industry on the environment
The Omnivore's Dilemma: Book by Michael Pollan explores the complex web of food production, examining the impact of industrial agriculture, organic farming, and foraging on our modern food choices.
Fast Food Nation: Book by Eric Schlosser delves into the hidden realities of the fast-food industry, shedding light on its impact on food production, workers, and our health.
The Third Plate: Book by Dan Barber takes readers on a culinary journey to uncover sustainable and regenerative approaches to food production, highlighting the interconnectedness of agriculture, ecology, and gastronomy.
The Wizard and the Prophet: Book by Charles Mann explores the connection between the environmental movement and the green revolution in agriculture with controversial effects.
References
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Stuart, T. (2009) Waste: Uncovering the global food scandal. London: Penguin.
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Freidberg, S. (2009) Fresh: A perishable history. Cambridge: Harvard University Press
Evans, D., H. Campbell and A. Murcott (2013) Waste matters: New perspectives of food and society. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Evans, D. (2014) Food waste: Home consumption, material culture and everyday life. London: Bloomsbury.