Call for papers for SCORAI Conference: Edibility, Changing Foodways and Sustainable Consumption

Things becoming (sustainable) food: edibility, changing foodways and sustainable consumption

How can novel ‘alternative proteins’ become accepted and popularised as Western foods? How can Western diets adapt to include species ‘arriving’ following climate change or exclude those disappearing? How can edible things usually seen as waste become part of Western diets? Such questions are vital to achieve sustainability in Western food systems, which have been widely critiqued for their negative impacts on planetary and public health – including over-consumption of animal protein (i.e. meat and milk), food loss and waste, and ecosystem pollution. A unifying theme across such questions is the need to eat differently, a major issue that any changes to Western food systems must address.

Central to efforts to understand and govern eating differently is the process that Emma Roe (2006) calls ‘things becoming food’: how potential foodstuffs become transformed, culturally and practically, into something recognised as food. Recent debates around ‘edibility’ have begun to explore this issue, investigating how the categorisation of things as food is established, maintained and changes (Beacham and Evans 2023, Fuentes and Fuentes 2023, Lien 2023). However, there is much still to learn about the topic. Questions remain, for example, about the processes through which things become – or cease to become – categorised as food, and the relationship between people recognising things as ‘edible’ and actually wanting to eat them. Given that research in the area has often focused on novel alternative protein sources in the West (e.g. House 2018, Sexton 2018), a richer and more diverse empirical basis is also clearly needed.  

For inquiries

Jonas House, KTH Royal Institute of Technology – jhouse@kth.se

Mike Foden, University of Bristol – mike.foden@bristol.ac.uk

Alexandra E Sexton, University of Sheffield – a.sexton@sheffield.ac.uk  

References

Beacham, J. D., & Evans, D. M. (2023). Production and consumption in agri-food transformations: Rethinking integrative perspectives. Sociologia Ruralis, 63(2), 309–327.

Fuentes, C., & Fuentes, M. (2023). Making alternative proteins edible: Market devices and the qualification of plant-based substitutes. Consumption and Society, 2(2), 200–219.

House, J. (2018). Insects as food in the Netherlands: Production networks and the geographies of edibility. Geoforum, 94, 82–93.

Lien, M. (2023). Becoming food: Edibility as threshold in Arctic Norway. In H. Paxson (Ed.), Eating Beside Ourselves: Thresholds of Foods and Bodies (pp. 114–136). Duke University Press.

Roe, E. J. (2006). Things becoming food and the embodied, material practices of an organic food consumer. Sociologia Ruralis, 46(2), 104–121.

Sexton, A. E. (2018). Eating for the post-Anthropocene: Alternative proteins and the biopolitics of edibility. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 43(4), 586–600.