BIO:

Dr. Esther Veen's main field is food in urban environments. She is researching how the 'foodscape', the landscap of food, is encouraging a healthier and more sustainable lifestyle. Her personel interest are human routines and habits and how these habits changes, and the role of growing food in a city.

Esther Veen has been educated as a rural sociologist at Wageningen University. After a brief period as a consultant, she started at the Wageningen Plant Research, where she studied multifunctional agriculture and city agriculture as a pratical reseacher. As part of this position she received her PhD, researching neighborhood food gardens, social cohesion and alternative food chains. After obtaining her doctorate she started working as university professor at Wageningen UR on rural sociology. 

As of july 2021 Esther Veen started as Lector for urban food research at Aeres university of applied sciences. In this role she will be attempting to establish a network of knowledge between food and the city of Almere, research and education and the Aeres university of applied sciences and the Flevocampus.

Iva Peša: Urban Agriculture: Crisis Response or Food for All on the Central African Copperbelt?

BIO: 

Iva Peša is an Assistant Professor in Contemporary History at the University of Groningen. From 2017-2019 she was a Research Associate in Environmental History at the University of Oxford, within an ERC-funded project entitled ‘Comparing the Copperbelt: Political Culture and Knowledge Production in Central Africa.’ Iva has carried out extensive archival and oral history research in Zambia and the D.R. Congo. Her publications from this project include: ‘Crops and Copper: Agriculture and Urbanism on the Central African Copperbelt, 1950-2000’, Journal of Southern African Studies 69:3 (2020) and ‘Mining, Waste and Environmental Thought on the Central African Copperbelt, 1950-2000’, Environment and History. Together with Miles Larmer, Enid Guene, Benoît Henriet and Rachel Taylor, Iva is also working on an edited volume, entitled Across the Copperbelt to be published with Boydell and Brewer in 2021. This book explores the social and cultural creativity of Copperbelt history.  

ABSTRACT

In the new millennium, urban agriculture has been rediscovered in European and American cities as part of the ‘circular economy’. By growing mushrooms in barrels or by making green spaces on the roofs of apartment buildings, Amsterdam and New York hipsters feed the local restaurant scene and supply ‘green consumers’. Narratives of ‘sustainability’ equally dominate conceptualisations of urban agriculture on the African continent. In burgeoning urban centres from Lagos to Kinshasa, NGOs, donors and governments have been promoting urban agriculture as a means to ascertain ‘food for all’. Importantly, urban agriculture has a long history. Before 2000, agricultural production in African cities was negatively dismissed as a misplaced ‘rural remnant’, a sign of imperfect urbanisation or a crisis response among ‘thrifty housewives’ at best. This paper focuses on the reconceptualisation of urban agriculture from a negative survival mechanism to a far more positive assessment of the activity today.  

This paper examines the history of urban agriculture on the Central African Copperbelt in the twentieth century. It distances itself from both the narratives of ‘crisis response’ and optimistic predictions of ‘food for all’, by interpreting urban agriculture instead as an inherent part of urbanism. Why did agricultural production gain such prominence in an industrialised urban setting, even among wage earning mineworkers? Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories in the D.R. Congo and Zambia – considering mineworkers, women, teachers and traders – I examine the lived experiences of agricultural producers in Copperbelt urban centres. By looking at case studies of beer brewing, maize cultivation and the varieties of locally marketed vegetables, this paper traces changing patterns of food and production on the Central African Copperbelt. By better comprehending how practices of urban agriculture evolved historically, we can assess its potential to contribute to sustainable urbanism. 

Peter van Dam: Small is beautiful? The rise of sustainability in fair trade activism 

BIO

Dr. Peter van Dam is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the ways in which people translate their hopes and fears into civic initiatives such as humanitarian campaigns, consumer activism and religious movements. He is currently working on a monograph on the history of the transnational fair trade movement. See www.uva.nl/profile/p.h.vandam for a list of publications. 

ABSTRACT

What is the relation between ecological and  social considerations in attempts to make the production, distribution, and consumption of food 'fair'? Stressing the need for sustainability, the movement for fair trade has often presented both as irreducibly intertwined especially since the 1990s. At the same time, people promoting more equitable global trade have regularly been at odds about which should take precedent. Exploring this tension around 'fair' coffee in particular, this paper presents a remarkable difference between local activism and national and international contestation around the issue of fair trade coffee. Locally, fair trade supporters often combined ecological and social motives in their activities as early as the 1970s. In national and transnational arenas, however, their relation caused considerable tension. This discrepancy can be explained by examining differences in organisation, ideology and temporal horizon of actors. Everyday life apparently offers people a chance to dedifferentiate causes which are differentiated in translocal contexts. The introduction of the notion of sustainability in national and international contestation since the 1980s indicates to what extent such 'ideologies of everyday life' can serve as model for a similar dedifferentiation in translocal settings. 

Amber Striekwold: Citizens of the planet – the Dutch Alternative Food Movement (1968-1984) 

BIO

Amber Striekwold is a teaching assistant to the research group Modernity and Society at KU Leuven. In 2020 she graduated cum laude from the RMA History at Utrecht University. In 2021 she started a network for young and early-career historians who are working on the subject of food and agricultural history of the Low Countries between 1500-2000. In her research, she is interested in the history of food, agriculture, the body and animal history. Amber is currently working on writing a PhD-proposal on the socio-political ideas of the alternative food movement in the Netherlands and Belgium between 1970-1990.  

ABSTRACT

The Dutch alternative food movement of the seventies held revolutionary ideas about reforming the food system into an organic and small-scale system based on solidarity. The movement addressed concerns about the post-war food system such as the detrimental environmental effects of agricultural intensification. Their ideas also reached beyond the food system: members of the movement formulated and experimented with new ways of living together in an alternative society. This paper will investigate how the movement articulated and practiced solidarity with the natural or non-human world in the new social, political and economic constellations.   

The alternative food movement in the Netherlands has received little attention from historians. Studies on these movements in other countries have generally characterised them as countercultural or consumer movements rooted in individualism. These scholars tend to contrast individualism with civic engagement or solidarity. However, proponents of the movement constantly navigated and explored the connections and tensions between individualism and acts of solidarity. They constructed new cosmologies which centred individuality (self-actualisation), unity (human and non-human), and solidarity (with ‘Mother Earth’). Within the alternative food movement, consumption and production were perceived to be means through which connection with other humans, animals, and nature could be reinstated and harmonised. Thus, individualism and solidarity did not necessarily oppose one another. 

Because the movement stressed the importance of individual action, I will focus on practices and materiality of solidarity. Through Alternative Food Networks the movements produced, distributed and consumed produce according to their ethical standards. In so doing, they encouraged other citizens to also adhere to an ‘alternative lifestyle’. Eating ‘alternative’ was considered an essential step in transforming individuals into ‘planetary citizens’. As will be argued, the movements’ understanding of planetary citizenship can be seen as a predecessor to the concepts of ecological and food citizenship. Particularly ecological citizenship will be helpful to understand ideas and practices of solidarity formulated by the groups of the movement. For instance, ecological citizenship has extended citizen practices to the private realm and underlines a cross-species understanding of solidarity. Proponents of the movement, for example, propagated and practiced vegetarianism, or advocated the concept of ‘true price’. However, fostering solidarity with the non-human world was challenging. To illustrate: when the demand for products from alternative communities rose, it became more difficult to adhere to standards of production in harmony with nature.  

The objective of this paper is threefold. First, to gain insight into the diversity of ideas and practices of the understated history of the Dutch alternative food movement. Second, to add to the scholarship on ecological and food citizenship by historicising the concepts. Debates on these concepts generally take place within the social sciences. While social scientists have located the emergence of these concepts in the 1990s, this paper will show that similar ideas were already practiced in the seventies. Finally, the paper aims to grasp how the movements related individual food practices to global environmental concerns, better understand their articulations of solidarity with the natural world and identify and the tensions that emerged when these ideas were put into practice.