Introduction

Dynamic Foods:
The Production of Culture
through agricultural change

Wim Van Daele
Editor of this Issue

Food is central to our life, as we have the biological need to feed ourselves. It gives us the ability to secure and produce more food for the future, to transmit life to our progeny and to sustain it. Unsurprisingly, food features centrally in our daily activities, whether as an economic activity or as leisure. Contrary to popular approaches to food, it is more than just a commodity on which economic prosperity depends. It enables us to become who we are by actualising various human, social, religious and cultural potentials. Food is at the same time something very material as well as a dense knot of meanings. It enters into the centre of the fabric of social life, politics, economics and culture. A subject so diverse is impossible to be covered completely in this theme issue. However we will present a variety of articles which do not represent, but point at the multi-facetedness and the dynamic aspects of food, especially with regard to its agricultural production. Food is something which is at the same time embedded within culture as well as a vehicle of socio-cultural change, contestation and creativity. We hope that the dynamics of food is clarified throughout the various contributions in this theme issue.

The structure of this issue is three-fold. The first part is devoted to the academic contributions, whereas the second allows activists to show their approaches to food and, finally, the third part gives voice to people who are or have been very much implicated in the production of food, but from a personal perspective.

In the first part, Robert Lawless starts off with a very rich ethnographic discussion of the various aspects of subsistence among the Kalingas in the Philippines. This includes a detailed description of food production, preparation, rites and other aspects, thereby opening up the possibility for further comparative research, something which is necessary in order to transcend the merely local aspects of food. My contribution focuses on the interweave of one staple-food in Sri Lanka, rice, with other aspects of social and religious life, such as life-cycle rituals, relations with non-human beings, and social change through the green revolution. In the second part, Sarath Fernando, director of the Movement for national Land and Agricultural Reform (MONLAR) from Sri Lanka, develops his vision on the current changes in agriculture and proposes a way to construct an alternative to the current form of globalisation. Jonas Vanreusel explains the human rights approach to food adopted by the Foodfirst Information Action Network (FIAN) with regard to various cases in the world. His contribution opens up engaging issues regarding the universality of human rights and more formalist approaches to food in social activism. In the third part, we can read the story of Tom Troonbeeckx and how he came to be the first farmer in Belgium that implements a new model of agriculture: Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Kimberly Trathen, a US citizen who has lived 5years in Belgium, describes how her migration and subsequent experiences have altered her relationship to food. 

Wim Van Daele, October 2008