Food geographies ‘in’, ‘of’ and ‘for’ the Anthropocene: Introducing the issue and main themes

Abstract

O N F o o d g e o g r a p h i e s ' i n ', ' o f ' a n d ' f o r ' t h e A n t h r o p o c e n e

Metabolic agricultural ethics: Violence and care beyond the gate

“…They furnish the agri-care project as it has so far been imagined with the duty to act in the speculative hope that care can flourish, and violence can be minimized across a broader geographic range. It is, for these reasons, an agenda for agri-food research not just "of" but "for" the Anthropocene (Maye et al 2022).…”

“…While the agricultural care work so far has majored on the more-than-human transformations and interactions that take place within particular farms and food production settings, the notion of metabolism can help draw attention to those materials that come in from elsewhere, and those that leave. Doing so can, I believe, help agri-food scholars gain analytical purchase on the outcomes of food production activities which, although they unfold beyond the farm gate, are nevertheless important for the promotion of care and the mitigation of violence in an ethical food system (Morgan 2010).…”

“…If care ethics is being positioned as part of the salve to agriculture's role in driving contemporary socio-ecological crisis (Krzywoszynska 2019a)-an agri-food proposition not just "in" the Anthropocene, but "for" it (Maye et al 2022)-how can it do so without producing violence elsewhere in the food system? To do so, it needs to be able to see specific food productions contexts in relation to spatial and temporal dynamics of change that are more expansive in character (see Tsing et al 2019 on the "patchy Anthropocene").…”

The broiler chicken and the Anthropocene: Using critical nexus thinking to unpack the geographies of Gallus gallus domesticus

“…When it comes to food geographies in , of , and for the Anthropocene (see Maye et al, 2022), the last 100 years have greatest relevance. As agricultural production shifted to imperial models and industrial regimes (Friedman & McMichael, 1989; Nagavarapu & Kumar, 2022; Oliveira & Hecht, 2016; Patel, 2013), the 20th century witnessed continental‐scale landscape transformations and displacements and consequent declines in biodiversity and ‘agrobiodiversity’ (Zimmerer et al, 2019), as fewer species of plants and animals came to comprise a greater proportion of food production and diet (Jones, 2017; Khoury et al, 2014).…”