Biological Economies: Experimentation and the politics of agri-food frontiers (Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment) by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781317551027
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-01-21T16:00:00+00:00

Twenty-first-century food fantasies

Scholars have recognized that we are operating in a period of late liberalism (Berlant 2011; Povinelli 2011), reflexive modernity (Giddens 1990; Beck 1992), or meta-modernism (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2015). This ambivalence can be seen in emerging food industries that strive for authenticity and embeddedness, while also being driven towards mainstream commodity forms and aesthetics. Vermeulen and van den Akker (2015) suggest that emerging craft industries serve as a vehicle for a ‘utopia, sort of’. A state of utopia is realized in the freedom gained through its immateriality and lack of structure. Similar forms of utopianism have been developing in food (see Stock et al. 2015).

In this cultural sphere, the promises of modern utopia have been rejected, the post-modern relativism has also been rejected, and what remains is an ambivalent engagement with modernist visions, and a new use of idealism as a reference point. In food, the case of the red apple can be telling. The ideal exists, it’s critiqued, but not discarded, and what remains is the management of idealism in practice. The development of grower cooperatives in apples to manage the aesthetic qualities of varieties indicates that institutional organization is happening in this space (Legun 2015). New forms of semi-modern engagement, reliant on those infrastructures of industrial idealism, but managing them, can be seen in the produce aisle. Plants and other living matter, in some ways, can be seen as a perfect pivot point for these types of economic engagement, because their potential for wildness generates a space characteristically ambivalent. The apple tree is never fully committed to the commodity project, and perhaps this positions it as a perfect character of our contemporary economic moment.

The vision of the perfect aesthetic commodity, and the wilfulness of a world that fails to produce it, illuminates the role that biological materials play in betraying modernist projects, and the work that is generated through that betrayal. Money is made in managing the spaces between what is desired and what can be produced, and living vibrancy facilitates the opening of those spaces. This management of unattainable commodity aesthetics, and particularly the ways that perfection is pursued but destructive and derided, features in the culture of late liberal capitalism and its anxious modernism. These trends can help us make sense of new food movements that stock grocery shelves with a wider variety of produce, and new mosaics of botanically etched aesthetics.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.