About

The project Post-development geographies of Local Food Systems: Community-based networks addressing food insecurity (shortly: Food Communities Empowerment - Fo.C.E.) investigates food and its relationship to place and community in Jordan, Morocco and Tanzania. Embracing food in its material, cultural, spiritual dimensions, the project explores Food Community Networks, Food Commoning experiences, Conviviality, More-than-human food entanglements, Pluriversal Knowledges around food.

Food is a geographical subject: eating connects people with ecosystems in their complexity. Food systems emerge from social, political, economic, environmental and cultural relationships that are built and intersected across different scales. The ways in which food is produced, processed, distributed and consumed are closely connected to the geographic specificities of places and ecosystems, and their changes due to political economies and environmental dynamics affecting places. At the same time, food creates new geographies with its mobility, signifying territories and landscapes, in some cases sustaining particular spatial relationships and identities, in other cases modifying them. Besides being consumed, food is experienced and embodied in places and through relationships. Food creates spaces of conviviality and conflict, tracing pathways through the gut, domestic spaces, city streets and the political agendas of national and transnational institutions. It shapes individual and collective experience in both material and symbolic ways. Different practices, knowledge and beliefs around food can coexist in certain spaces, often generating friction and conflict.

This project, thus, investigate local foodways, food systems, food cycles (production, transformation, protection, distribution, consumption, reuse), food knowledges, including myths and rituals around food as a form of relationality between human, non-human, more-than-human agents. The research, grounded in fieldwork conducted in Morocco, Jordan, and Tanzania, combines theoretical analysis with action-oriented approaches to socio-ecological transformations involving ancestral knowledge, access to land and resources, environmental degradation, and the potential for regenerative practices. Focusing on the relationship across food, territory, and place, Fo.C.E. explores local economies and alternative food systems in relation to the right to sufficient, safe and nutritious food for all and rooted in relational, informal, and cultural practices of food production, distribution, and consumption. The research project develops in multiple and different contexts, both urban and rural, with the aim of exploring common processes and different practices across spaces and levels, from the local to the transnational. While we look at and interact with different experiences, relationships, materialities and communities, we aim to listen to both resonances and differences between the communities we engage with and to support their efforts of practicing and imagining the world as a more just and ecologically responsible place. 

This project is funded under the PRIN PNRR 2022 (MUR: P20223SFMN; CUP: D53D23020000001).