Food, feeding and eating in and out of Asia banner

Food, Feeding, and Eating In and Out of Asia

7th Annual International ADI Conference
24-26 June 2015
Asian Dynamics Initiative - University of Copenhagen

The conference took place over three days and featured distinguished keynote speakers as well as interdisciplinary panels.

Food, feeding, and eating activities are as old as life itself, but recently there has been a heightened interest in such issues within policy-making, international relations, and academic scholarship ranging from the bio-medical, philosophical, historical, and political to the social, cultural, economic, and religious. Food is both global and local: while foods, cuisines, recipes, people, and culinary cosmopolitanisms have been in global circuits of flows and circulations through various periods of history, the smells, sights, sounds, textures, and tastes of local foodscapes may evoke memories of ‘home’ and imaginations of travel alike. Moreover, with increasing numbers of people concentrated in large cities and urban agglomerations, the challenges of feeding people are becoming ever more complex. Against the backdrop of globalisation of Asia and Asian foods, this conference focuses on the wide-ranging aspects of production, consumption, distribution, disposal, and circulation of foods in and out of Asia.

Keynote Speakers

  • Professor Paul Freedman, History, Yale University
  • Professor Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology, Harvard University 
  • Dr. Madhusree Mukerjee, Independent Author and Science Journalist   

 

Food, feeding, and eating activities are as old as life itself, but recently there has been a heightened interest in such issues within policy-making, international relations, and academic scholarship ranging from the bio-medical, philosophical, historical, and political to the social, cultural, economic, and religious. Food is both global and local: while foods, cuisines, recipes, people, and culinary cosmopolitanisms have been in global circuits of flows and circulations through various periods of history, the smells, sights, sounds, textures, and tastes of local foodscapes may evoke memories of ‘home’ and imaginations of travel alike. Moreover, with increasing numbers of people concentrated in large cities and urban agglomerations, the challenges of feeding people are becoming ever more complex. Against the backdrop of globalisation of Asia and Asian foods, this conference focuses on the wide-ranging aspects of production, consumption, distribution, disposal, and circulation of foods in and out of Asia.

Food security and securitization, demand and supply chains, global agribusinesses, industrially farmed and processed foods, branding and patenting of seeds, food crops as biofuels, genetically modified foods, and concerns with consumer trust, food safety, food anxieties, scares (e.g. the 2005 formaldehyde scare in Indonesia) and scandals (e.g. the contaminated baby milk scandal in China in 2008) have figured prominently in various international, national, and local debates. Questions have been raised about whether there is ‘enough’ food to feed the world now and in the future, with issues of food availability, access, ‘right to food’ (e.g. the Right to Food Campaign in India which began in 2001 and the Food Security Act 2013 which makes the right to food legal and justiciable), and sustainability being brought to the forefront.

The need to address food poverty and inequalities, hunger and malnutrition (under-nutrition, micronutrient deficiency, and over-nutrition) has been highlighted by the rapid rise in non-communicable diseases such as anaemia, obesity, and various food intolerances (e.g. to High Fructose Corn Syrup added to innumerable industrially produced foods) and communicable diseases such as various respiratory infections. Public health interventions, public food assistance, distribution and feeding programmes (e.g. the Midday Meal Scheme in schools in India, the world’s largest feeding programme of its kind), and food aid policies have been formulated to attempt to address these issues with varying degrees of success and failure. Moreover, as urbanised populations become ever more removed from the origins of the food they consume, potential contamination, adulteration, and decay threaten the quality and safety of food on a daily basis, with governments seeking to ameliorate these threats through regulations and control practices. 

Different forms of food inequality, insecurity, and conflict also draw further attention to the interconnectedness of food and eating with other domains. Historical attention to production, consumption, and distribution practices reveals the circulation of foods such as sugar, spices, and tea through empire-building, capitalist labour and land exploitation, and global trade networks. Anthropological, sociological, gender, and religious studies have drawn attention to the significance of food in negotiating distinctions of class, caste, ethnicity, race, religious, gender or kinship groups, forms of identity and belonging whether in rural or urban formations at ‘home’ or ‘abroad’, the role of food in political processes (e.g. gastro-nationalism, gastro-diplomacy, food as ‘intangible heritage’, culinary colonialism), the socio-religious, political and ethical dimensions of eating and abstinence, feasting and fasting, and diverse food norms, prohibitions, and health ‘traditions’. The prominence of food and its sensory dimensions, eating and feeding in the fabric of life in Asia has also been reflected in the visual arts, literature, poetry and music – one only has to think of the Japanese film Tampopo, the poignant sketches of the Bengal Famine of 1943-44 by the Bangladeshi painter Zainul Abedin, Nicole Mones’s novel The Last Chinese Chef, Anita Desai’s novel Fasting, Feasting, and Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt.  

We invite panels and papers from those working in a range of relevant fields from food history, economics, anthropology, and political science to social policy, literary studies, and bio-medical and health sciences to explore such issues and beyond. We elicit fresh engagements and exciting interdisciplinary discussions addressing topics such as (but are not limited to):

  • the ways in which through different periods in history foods - such as spices valued for their culinary, medicinal, and cosmetic properties – have travelled in and out of Asia, have been incorporated into ‘national cuisines’ and ‘authentic’ recipes, and have fuelled the engines of trade, commerce, and colonial expansion;

  • the shifts towards ‘sustainable diets’ and how these can re-configure land use and supply chains to deliver ‘sustainable food security’; the tensions between more ‘localised’ food systems, ‘alternative food networks’ and more ‘global’ ‘technologically’ grounded approaches to food security;

  • how different forms of food provisioning, approaches to ‘food security’ and ‘food sovereignty’, and modes of food governance raise questions about civil society, states, and political legitimacy;

  • how sacrificing, sharing, and consuming food forge bonds between the living and the dead or establish and strengthen economic and political relationships between elites and non-elites alike;

  • the cultural politics of transactions in taste and the ways in which food practices are used as strategic markers of identity and inclusion/exclusion in ‘multicultural’ societies e.g. ‘vegetarian only’ housing complexes, prohibitions on cooking certain foods in public spaces, consumption of prohibited foods as subversive practice, or the significance of diasporic foods;

  • how and why artisanal foods, celebrity chefs and ‘ethnic’ restaurants, ‘organic’ and ‘fair-trade’ foods, different modalities of producing and selling food (e.g. food cooperatives), food and environmental activism, ‘vegetarianism’ and discourses of the ‘ethical consumer’, ‘traditional’ medicines and health practices have become new sources of cultural, economic, religious and political values;

  •  how urbanised eating is entangled in increasing concerns with a lack of trust, with food safety, regulation and ‘quality’, the ways in which shifting definitions of ‘healthy’ and ‘risky’ foods, and the politics of feeding and nurturing contribute to the emergence of various nutritional policies and practices, definitions and economics of ‘healthy publics’, and food ‘scarcity’ and ‘waste’;

  • the role of different media – the press, films, literature, the visual arts and poetry – in the emergence of various understandings of a ‘proper meal’, family, domesticity and hospitality, of forms of personhood, agency, affect and emotions.

Through such discussions and conversations we look forward to exploring and re-visiting together what might be conceived of as ‘eating’ and ‘not-eating’ ‘foods’ and ‘non-foods’.

 

 

 

 

A History of Milk in AsiaConvenor: Natasha Pairaudeau
The market for milk and milk products in Southeast Asia– in the view of both international business and the FAO - is on the rise and is expected to outstrip consumption in many areas of the world in the coming decade …

Politics of Vegetarianism - Identities between the individual and the community
Convenors: Ravinder Kaur and Maansi Parpiani
Food habits, cultures and choices are at once individual and collective. They define communities vis-à-vis others’ ideas of food but also reflect a highly subjective stance over one’s own body and consumption …

Alternative approaches to food security in Asia: what are the effects and at what cost?
Convenors: Wusheng Yu and Jakob Roland Munch 
Following recent world food price spikes, food security has been re-emphasized by governments in many countries, including those in Asia 

When Foods TravelConvenor: Manpreet K. Janeja
What happens when foods travel, entangled in local, national, and transnational circuits of flows and circulations in and out of Asia? What are the relations, connections, networks, linkages and stoppages that are forged, contested, ruptured, re-formed, or negotiated? 

Kyoto as Japan’s Ancient Kitchen: Feeding Tradition, Quenching Anxiety
Convenors: Greg de St. Maurice and Takeshi Watanabe
Feelings about food in post-WWII, affluent Japan straddle an uncomfortable spectrum. On the one hand, chefs on television dazzle viewers with elaborate dishes featuring special ingredients. On the other, consumers’ pursuit of wholesome foods signals an anxiety with routine excess, waste and commodification 

Dangerous eating in Asia
Convenors: Mikkel Bunkenborg and Ayo Wahlberg
Eating is crucial to the production of individual and social wellbeing and the significance of eating well is particularly evident in parts of Asia where so-called traditional medical systems blur the boundaries between medicine and foods. But where food is regarded as a key to well-being, it also poses a significant danger 

The political economy of food production in emerging Asia: Exploring the possibilities for a labor-centered developmentConvenor: Luisa Steur
In liberal discourse, Asia’s “emerging markets” are celebrated as the potential harbingers of middle-class formation, democratization and above all, of course, economic prosperity. A focus on the political economy of food production in contemporary Asia allows us to study these processes of capitalist restructuring in more critical detail 

Media Food In and Out of Contemporary Asian Food Cultures
Convenors: Anders Riel Müller and Jonatan Leer
Like everywhere in the world, media plays an increasingly important role for contemporary Asian foodways. Furthermore, food and media are combined in new ways and in new medias across the Asian nations 

Pedagogies of the Alimentary: Taste, Memory and Identity in and out of Asia
Convenor: Francis Maravillas
This panel will present a series of papers concerned with food as an object, medium and technology of sensory learning and remembering across a range of sites in and out of Asia 

Governing Food Security and Safety in Asia
Convenors: Chunrong Liu and Kai He
Food security is widely considered a fundamental aspect of human rights and a basis of social cohesion. In any country, inadequate access to sufficient food supply due to shortage of financial means and other resources can be consequential. Equally important is a state's capacity to regulate food safety, namely, to ensure that the public
food supply is safe from disease or deliberative contamination 

Dialectics of belonging and othering - The significance of food in multicultural urban contexts
Convenor: Pablo Holwitt
This panel interrogates the meaning of food and food practices for the complex modalities of conviviality in urban environments. Cities are not only home to people from vastly different socioeconomic, regional and religious backgrounds, but also to a variety of food-habits, contexts and protocols of food-consumption as well as regional, transregional and transnational cuisines 

Producing food sovereignty: Reclaiming healthy, tasty and local foodways in AsiaConvenors: Saee Haldule, Daniel Münster and Julia Poerting
Mainstream debates about the future of feeding and eating in Asia tend to frame the issue through the lens of food security. Operating at the scale of the nation-state, food security is entrenched in geopolitics and focuses uni-dimensionally on the quantitative availability of calories for populations

Making Muslims: Food, Halal, and community in the Restaurant
Convenor: Aparna Nair
Food is a very tangible route through which individuals and groups articulate and negotiate religious, ethical and moral selves. This panel seeks to explore the ways in which religion can and does shape how humans cook, eat, feast and fast. In particular, this panel focuses on how Muslim communities engage with ideas of selfhood and 'Islamic' morality through everyday food practice …

Asian foodways in and out of the Nordic region
Convenor: Josh Evans, Nordic Food Lab (NFL)
Since its founding, NFL has gained much inspiration from the cuisines of Asia – its culinary techniques and raw materials help us reconsider our own edible landscape and broaden our use of otherwise neglected and underutilised edible resources. This session will share examples of NFL’s encounters with Asian foodways to stimulate discussion on processes of culinary translation, the material and conceptual aspects of gastronomic exchange, and how concepts of ‘the traditional’, ‘the regional’, and ‘the global’ function in these processes.

 

 

 

 

Photo: thisnomad @ flickr

Watch the keynote lectures here.

24 June 2015

"Asian Restaurants in London and New York"


25 June 2015

"The Imperial Roots of Hunger"


26 June 2015

"When is Food Ethnic and What does that Imply? Reproducing Inequalities in the Framing of Asian Cuisines"

 

Organising Committee

Manpreet K. Janeja, Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies

Cynthia Chou, Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies

Kai He, Dept. of Political Science

Ravinder Kaur, Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies

Jakob Roland Munch, Dept. of Economics

Marie Roesgaard, Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies

Oscar Salemink, Dept. of Anthropology

Per Torp Sangild, Dept. of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports

Luisa Steur, Dept. of Anthropology

Ayo Wahlberg, Dept. of Anthropology

Marie Yoshida, Asian Dynamics Initiative