Diversities and Obscurities in the UK food system: Benefits of a Place-Based Approach
A place-based approach, that includes lived experiences, can help articulate the value of the ‘hidden’ interactions needed to enrich food policies and strengthen links in the food system.
Diversities and Obscurities in the UK food system: Benefits of a Place-Based Approach
Food and Network member Omotomilola Ajetunmobi’s recent doctoral research shows how important migrant communities are to place-making across the country.
Diversity of People, Enrichment of Place
While migration remains a contentious issue in politics and the media - with arguments for and against bordering - there is little doubt that migration continues to contribute significantly to the UK food system. The movement of peoples, goods, labour, and ideas, through myriad and complex networks, ensure sufficient and diverse provision, which shape local food experiences. Movements that have produced food cultures, such as the ‘British curry’ or ‘fish and chips’.
The Many Meanings of Place
The precarity of the current food system has exposed unequal food experiences across the country, reinforcing the value of a place-based approach to food systems transformation. Radical geographers like Doreen Massey and Henri Lefebvre emphasised the value of place in shaping the daily routines of ordinary people. In other words, how place mediates the flows of people, ideas and resources, including paid and unpaid labour, at different levels and enable various interactions, practices and experiences.
In recent research on food, migration and place in Hackney and Kinston-upon-Hull, I explored the experience of food places in the (re)production of everyday life through place. This incorporated Massey’s work on ‘relational spaces’ (that integrates collective assets, power dynamics and the movements of ideas, people and resources as described by Sonnino & Marsden, 2022) and Lefebvre’s tripartite ‘representations of space’ (how space is presented), ‘spatial practices’ (how space is navigated), and ‘representational spaces’ (how space is meaningful).
Place-Making, Food Growing, and Hidden Work
The comparative research of Hackney and Kingston-Upon-Hull included a photovoice workshop where participants captured images of foodstuffs and/or food places that were important to them. One of the representations of space that embodied food work was the theme of growing food.
This theme - captured in photos of small potted herbs, vegetable patches, home gardens, community allotments and harvested produce - expressed ‘care’: (good) quality food that was ‘safe’, ‘fresh’, ‘seasonal (and therefore cheap)’ or ‘natural’. It also represented growing relationships (via allotments) and memories of ‘self-sufficiency’. An additional theme highlighted during the workshops was the “hard work” of growing food; a practice enabled (or hindered) by available resources including local, regional and international policies on space allocation and or use; the availability of gardening knowledge/equipment, seedlings and people – family, friends and volunteers – in an often unpaid, ‘labour of love’. Beyond the visible pictures of green leaves and harvested produce were many diverse (and invisible) networks.
The place-based approach provides an opportunity to capture the diversity which shapes the everyday and can highlight the interactions that contribute to the unequal experiences of people in place. Food work is hard work that can be obscure, intangible and difficult to quantify; ‘missing links’ that are often unrecognised and consequently not valued. For example, sustainable rural and urban agriculture require the integration of diverse local, regional and international resources, which build on the communities where they are situated. A place-based approach, that includes lived experiences, can help articulate the value of the ‘hidden’ interactions needed to enrich food policies and strengthen links in the food system.
