The Visible Hands - An Ethnographic Inquiry into the Emergence of Food Collectives as a Social Practice for Exchange

Abstract

Lektioita The rootsWhen I was a little girl, I would spend hours of time at my grandmothers' allotment garden collecting parsley, cilantro and dill, picking up berries and harvesting carrots, among other crops and vegetables. The next day, we would travel to a local marketplace on three different buses to sell what we'd collected during the previous day. I would praise the taste of our herbs, berries and vegetables to people approaching our tiny little stand, learn to bargain, count the change and walk around to compare our produce with that of others' who all seemed like grandmothers to me. In the end of the day, I would come to my grandmother's home exhausted, but happy to count the money and not so happy about knowing that I will have the unsold harvest on my dinner plate again in the evening.This was right before the Soviet Union collapsed and not so long before Finland joined the EU. The allotment garden was called dacha, and the elderly women selling their produce at the local marketplace were called babushki.Some 25 years later, I traveled to a totally different city in Russia and, as part of a research project I was engaged in, I visited a local marketplace. Instead of finding babushki selling their produce, I found men and women selling someone else's produce. We soon discovered that many people felt, that not only when buying food from a grocery store, but also when going to the local marketplace, one did no longer know where the food came from or how it had been produced. Above all, people did not trust the quality and the safety of food.What struck me most, was that in two decades a relatively self-sufficient regional food system, in which local produce was sold in local shops and marketplaces, had disappeared and was replaced by supermarkets with supplies heavily relying on imports. Now, I am not saying that a regulated closed economy is better than a globally open market economy, but what I am saying is that the concerns that people had in Russia due to these changes were not unique but, in fact, an increasing number of people in different countries all over the world shared similar kinds a. Aalto-yliopisto, galina.kallio@aalto.fi

Academic Knowledge Production: Framework of Practical Activity in the Context of Transformative Food Studies

“…In this article, we draw on our experiences in working in academia and conducting ethnographic studies in the context of self-reliant food production and procurement (Houtbeckers, 2018;Kallio, 2018Kallio, , 2020Houtbeckers and Kallio, 2019). We started our academic careers in the late 2000's in the Department of Management Studies in the former Helsinki School of Economics.…”

“…Second, we reflect on our own experiences in academia when doing research in the context of self-reliant food production and procurement practices in Finland. One of the authors has studied food collectives and smallholdings in the field of regenerative agriculture (Kallio, 2018(Kallio, , 2020, for a definition of regenerative agriculture, see e.g., Rodale Institute 2020), while the other has focused on households striving for selfsufficiency (Houtbeckers, 2018). Our ethnographic journeys have included various struggles and decisions, some of which we have articulated in this paper.…”

Hope beyond Hope

“…CSA is an acronym for Community Supported Agriculture. For more information about CSA's in Finland, see e.g (Kallio 2018;Ruralia 2023). 7 NÄKYMÄ is a website that presents research results on the project Invisible work in regenerative agriculture funded by the Kone Foundation.…”