Shared Lunch: An Ethnography of Food Sovereignty in Whaingaroa and Beyond (my PhD thesis)

Image credit: Elaine Casap, Unspash

It has been a while since I've posted here. I completed my PhD in 2017 and I'm pleased to report that the examiners loved it! The final exam was a wonderful experience and it was great to have the support of close friends and family with me for the process.

Here are the quotes from the examiners:

Thank you for devoting you time and energy into this timely, relevant and enlightening thesis...This is a rare find.

Once I found time to devote to it, I could not put it down. It is practical, professional, personal and political. It calls for action without being a ‘biased activist’ type of thesis.

It simply needs to be published and shared with wider audiences as it provides a useful template for researching community development and grassroots actions…

Local focus is balanced with a bigger picture and current global issues in the world which makes this thesis timely and relevant. 

Ksenija Napan  -  Associate Professor, Massey University

Let me first aknowlege that this is one of the best-written dissertations I have ever read in over 30 years at this!

I was skeptical at first about Ritchie’s ability to “draw together the threads” and had to read quite far into the document to begin to see it – but then it was there!

In this way, the reader was able to slowly integrate the bits, possibly much like the researcher had sone, and it worked beautifully. It almost reads like a novel, it is so interesting, and I very much enjoyed reading it!

Grace Ann Rosile,  -  Professor, New Mexico State University

And here is the beginning of the abstract:

Food presents complex interconnectedness between inner and outer; social and political; culture and biochemistry; values and practices; tradition and innovation; wealth and poverty; the global, local and highly personal. Amid this multifaceted intersection vast bodies of contemporary academic literature have emerged. This study is an ethnography of alternative food networks; of food sovereignty and social economics. More specifically it is an ethnography of a community of small-scale local food providers in Whaingaroa, a small coastal township in Aotearoa [New Zealand]. Through the lenses provided by perspectives of these food providers, the global corporate food system is critiqued. Through their everyday practices, alternatives have been developed which offer potential solutions to widely recognised problems associated with environmental and social exploitation. These problems are largely attributed to the current dominant global systems of corporate capitalism, including the dominant systems of food production, consumption and disposal.

You can read the full thesis here.

Thank you for following my research journey on this blog. It has really helped to shape my thinking around my Masters and PhD research.

What's next?
I've just published my second novel, Fishing for Māui, which has themes around food, family and mental illness. I drew a lot from my Masters research in writing this novel and I'm so pleased to finally be publishing it! You can read more about it on my website. It is available from the distributor, on Amazon, MeBooks, Bookdepository, Smashwords, and all good bookstores and libraries in New Zealand!

Is 'Food Sovereignty' Relevant in New Zealand?

This is one of the major questions I'm currently pondering in my thesis looking at food sovereignty in New Zealand: Is the term relevant here, and how is it relevant?  It is rarely used here, even among food activists, local food producers and people involved in community food initiatives, but the people who have heard of it, who I have spoken to, resonate with it, and the people who haven't heard of it are interested to find out more.

The term 'food sovereignty' came out of the Via Campensina conferences in 1993 and 1996. Via Campesina are an  international peasant movement representing small farmers, migrant workers and indigenous people who want to have/protect the right to grow food. They were disillusioned with 'food security' (a term that is commonly used here) because the United Nations was working with big corporations like Monsanto to grow many tonnes of genetically modified corn for 'food security'. These big companies tend to push indigenous people off their land, exploit migrant workers and sue small farmers for saving seeds which are contaminated with the corporation's patented DNA. Not food security at all, just mass production.

Via Campesina deliberately constructed 'food sovereignty' to be about people and communities having the access to land to grow food. It is constructed so as to avoid being co-opted by corporations or other large, powerful organisations. It embodies principles of both social and environmental justice, check them out here.

So there is a bunch of academic research on food sovereignty in all sorts of places from disenfranchised indigenous people in South America to the ethnic minorities in the United States, from the anti GE movement in the EU to food struggles Malawi. This is a global movement so it makes sense that it would be relevant in Aotearoa, although there is very little literature. I have come across one publication looking at the term in New Zealand, so far, which focuses on Te Waka Kai Ora, the Maori organics organisation, and there are a bunch of non-academic references including Facebook groups and websites.  The question of privilege arises because some of the academic criticism of food sovereignty complains that the movement glorifies people's empowerment over food rather than addressing the reality that most of the world's rural poor don't have a choice outside of subsistence living.  In 'developed' countries it is more clearly a choice. I want to have a discussion about this, what do you think:

• Is food sovereignty relevant in New Zealand? 
• Do we have a food sovereignty movement?
• What does food sovereignty mean in NZ and what does it look like?
• How is it relevant?
• How do we deal with the uncomfortable issues around privilege? 
• In using the term are we co-opting a peasant movement to suit our relatively privileged ethics?
• We do have real poverty in New Zealand and it often comes with social alienation. How can the food sovereignty movement (if there is one) address this? 

Please join in the discussion by posting a comment below.

The Personal is Political

The personal is political, according to the second-wave feminist slogan.  It is something that comes up in my mind from time to time as I am constantly navigating between public and private, as a writer and a researcher, choosing when to voice things and when to keep my discomforts to myself.  My masters research is an example of this.  I chose to leave criticism to the voices of others, between the lines, rather than taking it on myself.

The recent controversy over comments made by Summer Burstyn about a kiwi soldier killed in Afghanistan that lead to a 20,000 strong facebook lynch mob/hate group are a pretty obvious example of why moderating one's private thoughts can be a bloody good idea.  Sometimes sensitivity is more important than having an opinion, but this example frightened me because I relate to Burstyn's anti-war sentiments (if not to personally attacking dead people).

Robyn Morgan is explicitly personal in her memoirs.  I would be terrified of doing that myself.  I'm particularly uncomfortable about being public about 'private' things - notably sexuality and spirituality.  I have been wondering recently if my own discomforts are a product of social pathology; the dregs of repressed Victorian culture.  Probably.  Although I fear becoming one of those embarrassingly public people, if I overcome my discomforts I will still have a choice to disclose or not, navigated consciously rather than as an automatic reaction to discomfort.  After all, feminism is all about choice.

Lately I have been journaling binary existences - mapping my research in one notebook beside my bed and my personal writing in another.  Writing is always a process of externalising the internal and to some extent, making public the private, whether it is a fantasy world, deep dark secrets or documenting one's perception of events (bearing in mind that nothing coming from human beings is truly objective). So, in this blog post I am allowing the private and public to converge in an open way, crossing my two, normally separate blogs.

Writing fiction is, in some ways, safer than writing 'fact'.  Revealing personal facts can make us vulnerable to judgement.  We put ourselves on the line - hoping that people care enough to read it and that they don't criticize us too harshly.  Impersonal journalism or academic writing, is a safe way of writing 'fact': Play the game, follow the rules, and no one gets hurt.  It can be challenging in an academic system that's constantly changing; challenging itself, acutely insecure, reacting to criticism in precisely the way that fundamentalist religious groups do not.  My recent experiences of academics is that every time a theory is challenged they instantly agree and abandon it.  Perhaps that is one take on the meaning of my new word: reflexivity.

I write and research because I feel compelled to do something important (but don't necessarily know how).  Hence my PhD research topic exploring food sovereignty, and also the allegorical nature of my fiction.  I am often challenged by the thought that it won't attract a great deal of attention unless I really screw up and get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time like Summers.

In this globalised world anything we do can be looked at as either very significant or almost completely insignificant.  That is how I feel about my PhD, I alternate between the two.  I like to think that the interconnectedness of people means that one person's actions have a ripple effect, like some Zen Buddhist proverb, that a bunch of people growing fresh vegetables in a garden can contribute to greater positive change.  After all, we are not in isolation.  The things we do always have some effect.  Growing carrots may just be the most radical thing we can do.

The real Planeteers: Food Sovereignty and La Via Campesina

If you grew up in my generation you probably watched Captain Planet and wanted to be a planeteer.  It wasn't just the magic rings, it was because saving our planet is the thing to do.  The more I look into the global politics of food, the harder it is to separate 'saving the planet' from saving ourselves as a species.  The struggle between the strangely named villains in the Captain Planet cartoon and those they attempted to exploit is parallel to the struggle between all-too-powerful corporate agribusinesses and the small farmers and peasants who produce most of the worlds food.  

“The global food crisis of 2007-2008, marked by skyrocketing food prices, urban food riots and the continued displacement of the rural poor, was a clear indication that the dominant model of agricultural development has not succeeded in eradicating poverty or world hunger.  In desperation, in Haiti, Bangladesh, Egypt, West and Central Africa and countless other locations, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets demanding affordable food.  Behind these highly visible events lurks the very real and ongoing human suffering caused by the lack of what key necessity for all human life – food.” (Wittman et al, 2010, p.1)

I've recently been reading about food sovereignty, a concept I wasn't too familiar with, but was more and more inspired by.  The UN has long promoted 'food security' which has been used as an excuse by large corporations to further dominate global food production - food sovereignty, on the other hand is a concept developed by La Via Campesina, the international peasant movement.  It is a direct challenge to the dominant agricultural model.  I must admit, before getting into the literature I had never heard about La Via Campesina.  But now I can't stop thinking about how awesome they are:

 “As an alternative model, peasants, small-scale farmers, farm workers and indigenous communities organized in the transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina argue that the current, and linked, food, economic and environmental crises are in fact a result of decades of destructive economic policies based on the globalization of a neoliberal, industrial, capital-intensive and corporate-led model of agriculture.  La Via Campesina formed in 1993 and now representing 148 organisations from sixty nine countries, has become of the strongest voices of radical opposition to the globalization of an industrial and neoliberal model of agriculture, claiming that “the time for food sovereignty has come” (Wittman et al, 2010, p.2)

In 1996 at their second international conference LVC’s peasant and farm leaders no longer saw any potential in the 'food security' concept or the 'access to sufficient and nutritious food' that the concept promotes (maximum production) does not specify where said food originates, how and by whom. :

“Governments and agri-business have pursued  food security in promoting increased agricultural trade liberalisation and the concentration of food production in the hands of fewer, and larger, agri-business corporations… these contemporary policies aimed at food security offer no real possibility for changing the existing, inequitable, social, political and economic structures and policies that peasant movements believe are the very causes of the social and environmental destruction in the countryside in both the North and South.  To counter these … LVC proposed a radical alternative, one “directly linked to democracy and justice”, that put the control of productive resources (land, water, seeds and natural resources) in the hands of those who produce food.”(Wittman et al, 2010, p.3)

Food is political - despite your views of your own dinner plate.  You can't look at the global issues surrounding food production and scarcity (despite the masses produced) without making the connection to the failings of neoliberal ideology.  This is what has gotten us into the terrible mess we are in globally - there exist some universal truths - corporations are in it for the money and do not (as non-human profit-driven entities) care who gets exploited or who starves unless they can use the social awareness around a tragedy to further line their pockets. I have just read about at least a dozen examples of such underhanded manipulation.  Despite the obvious flaws here, supporters of the neoliberal ideology (or devout followers of neo-liberal religions) seem to think that the worlds food problems can be solved by exactly the same bullshit free-market theories that caused them in the first place:

“Some proponents of neoliberal globalization would have us believe that the crisis is the result of shortages and market failures… that the best way to keep up with a growing population is to prevent national governments from intervening in the market…”   (Wittman et al, 2010, p.1)