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!

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.