Embodied geographies of kangaroo meat

A growing body of work in social and cultural geography is concerned with examining food to explore ethical, civic and social concerns. I build on the critiques by engaging with the visceral. Drawing on the theoretical work of Elspeth Probyn, I argue that eating reveals the fundamental ambiguity of embodiment, allowing us to attend to visceralities of difference as understood within the context of power geometries that shape and reshape food politics. This analysis is promoted by the Australian Commonwealth Government's endorsement of suggestions by environmental scientists that households' meals should substitute kangaroo for farmed livestock to lower greenhouse gas emissions. I investigate appetites for kangaroo as discussed while plating-up, and sometimes digested, by white bodies in kitchens and dining rooms within thirty households in Wollongong, New South Wales. To explain where kangaroo is rendered inedible, or edible, I use the recognition that the visceral realm—narrated through the aromas, tastes and touch—offers insights to place, subjectivity, embodied skills and food politics.     

Foodscapes and the Geographies of Poverty: Sustenance,Strategy, and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood

This paper argues that food should be a more central focus of critical geographical research into urban poverty and that the concept of “foodscape” can contribute to this literature. We utilize the concept in a study of the daily practices of accessing food among low‐income residents of the Downtown Eastside neighborhood of Vancouver, BC. We highlight how food access for the urban poor involves a complex and contradictory negotiation of both sites of encounter and care and also exclusion and regulation. Focusing on foodscapes emphasizes the social, relational, and political construction of food and thus highlights not simply food provision but also questions of existing power structures and potentialities for future change. Therefore, we discuss efforts to question the existing food system in Vancouver, to resist the gentrification processes that threaten the Downtown Eastside's food resources, and to build alternative strategies for urban food justice.     

Sexualized violence and the gendered commodification of the animal body in Pacific Northwest US dairy production

This article draws on a case study of bovine life in the US dairy industry to observe the power relations and violent networks of commodification involved. I use the terms gendered commodification and sexualized violence to understand the lives of animals in the industry and the discourses that are employed to reproduce its practices. Focusing on sex and gender, concepts which have long been classic in feminist geography, this article explores the sexually violent commodification of both female and male animals in dairy production. In addition to the ways in which both are exploited for their productive and reproductive capacities, male animals are also discursively conceptualized as perpetrators of the violence against the females. This article engages with geographies of the body and animal geographies in order to extend geographies of the body to other-than-human bodies and in order to feature the body more prevalently in animal geographies. This attention to the animal body ultimately reveals the pervasiveness of sexual violence and the consequences of gendered commodification for both nonhuman and human others.     

美国华人餐饮业及其文化认同

通过对1965年前后两个阶段美国中餐业的变迁,蒙特利尔公园市中餐业的兴起及影响,圣盖博谷地区中餐业更深刻、更广泛变化的阐述,本文分析了新一代华人移民在多元文化背景和与主流社会的磨合中,所追求的生活方式和包括饮食习惯在内的文化认同。     

Inside and outside the school lunchbox: themes and reflections

We examine here the discourses surrounding the lunchbox taken to school by children: aspects both of the contents and of how children consume and understand these.1 The observations presented here form part of the preliminary stages of a broader project examining ‘Men, Children and Food’. The project itself is part of a large research programme – ‘Changing Families, Changing Food’ – funded by the Leverhulme Trust (award number F/00118/AQ) from 2006 to 2008, and situated at the University of Sheffield, working in collaboration with colleagues at Royal Holloway University of London. Our aims, in ‘Men, Children and Food’, are to explore the experiences of fathers (and other male figures in the household) and of children, in relation to food practices, including ways in which the two interconnect. View all notes Examples within and beyond the UK suggest that the lunchbox is a container for various aspects of the private and public. What traces can be found inside of wider social relations, including processes of care and surveillance? We argue that the lunchbox consists of intersecting spatialities, within which children constitute a public face, and create identities, relationships and subjectivities; this perspective frames opportunities for priorities in future empirical research with children.     

A Portrait of Hunger,the Social Safety Net,and the Working Poor

In a study at the largest northeastern Iowa food pantry between 2004 and 2006, we found that neither working nor accessing government benefits has a meaningful impact on lessening the odds that a person will need long‐term food assistance. In other words, the working poor are at greater risk for making recurrent visits to the food pantry than those who do not work. Pantry clients who work are more likely to have sacrificed food to pay for other life necessities. Moreover, government benefits do not seem to provide an adequate food safety net. As a result, nonprofits are experiencing increased pressure to fill the gap. If we wish to maintain the government responsibility to alleviate hunger in our country, benefits for eligible citizens must be increased or food assistance nonprofits need more government support. Otherwise we should face the fact that as an undeclared public policy, our society tolerates hunger.     

Frogs as a part of the Eneolithic diet. Archaeozoological records from the Czech Republic (Kutná Hora-Denemark site, Řivnáč Culture)

Within the site of Kutná Hora-Denemark (Kutná Hora distr., central Bohemia – Eneolithic, ?ivná? Culture, 3000–2800 BC), 893 frog bones or bone fragments were present in five archaeological features. All identified specimens are of the Common Frog (Rana temporaria Linnaeus, 1758). Males predominate, according to humeral morphology, and only adult individuals are present. The most important findings come from feature 36, where an accumulation of 739 frog bones (MNI = 123) were found, of which 10% (NISP) were burned. This and other contextual evidence indicates that they relate to activity of the Eneolithic people in the settlement. The predominance of hind leg bones and other circumstantial evidence suggest that the frogs were part of the human diet. Behavioural studies of this species suggest that the frogs were gathered from small ponds during the months of March or April. Similar findings are rare.     

The impact of Russian food security policy on the performance of the food system

Abstract

Food security has guided Russia’s food policy since 2010. The article examines the impact of food security policy on the food system. The Russian model of food security combines government intervention in the form of assistance for domestic production while simultaneously restricting market access. Food security does not appear to have a deleterious impact on the food system. We measure impact on four dimensions. Financial support for agriculture continues to increase in nominal rubles. In food production, the beef and dairy branches continue to lag, but increased grain production has made Russia a global leader in grain exports. Average per capita food consumption improved, although the poor consume much less, and the decline of the ruble affects the way Russians shop. The largest impact of food security has been on food trade. Food security policy has brought food to the forefront as an instrument of foreign policy. Food trade is politicized, witnessed by the food embargo against the West and food import bans against Turkey and Ukraine.     

改革开放以后北京城镇居民食品消费生活的变化

改革开放以后的20年,北京城镇居民的食品消费生活经历了从勉强温饱到温饱再到小康状态的转变。在前一阶段,居民主要是追求吃的数量的扩充,主要特点是实现了从以“主食”消费为主向以“副食”消费为主的转化;在后一阶段,居民开始追求吃的质量的提高,营养、新鲜、方便、快捷的食品受到普遍欢迎。北京城镇居民食品消费生活的这种变化在某种程度上是中国居民生活水平普遍提高的反映,而中国绝大多数人的生活能够不断地得到改善,这一看似简单的现象正是中国渐进的社会主义改革不断取得成功的社会基础。     

Eating,serving, and self-realisation: food and modern identities in contemporary Indian women's writing

The ‘new Indian woman’ is often invoked in popular and academic discourse as the embodiment of a modern nation—the ‘new India’. Feminist studies of this figure typically focus on the body of the imagined ‘new woman’ as a site upon which modernity is inscribed, allowing little room for the agency of women who actively contest imposed identities and roles in the quintessentially modern project of self-determination. In this article I argue that narratives of food in contemporary fiction and fictionalised autobiographical writing by Indian women challenge both dominant feminist critiques of the ‘new woman’, and influential accounts of modernity as ‘rupture’ in masculinist theoretical literature. In these texts food, and particularly the practice of serving food to others, is used by women as a tool for gaining independence, as a weapon to combat oppression, and as a means of negotiating migrant identities, among other things. The texts thus demonstrate the importance of appreciating the gendered nature of modernity, recognising women's modernities to be genuinely transformative of the individual, as well as continuous with traditional and conventionally feminine practices rather than necessarily opposed to them.