Food, Agriculture and Social Change The Everyday Vitality of Latin America

In recent years, food studies scholarship has tended to focus on a number of increasingly abstract, largely unquestioned concepts with regard to how capital, markets and states organize and operate. This has led to a gulf between public policy and people’s realities with food as experienced in homes and on the streets. Through grounded case studies in seven Latin American countries, this book explores how development and social change in food and agricultureare fundamentally experiential, contingent and unpredictable. In viewing development in food as a socio-political-material experience, the authors find new objects, intersubjectivities and associations. These reveal a multiplicity of processes,effects and affects largely absent in current academic literature and public policy debates. In their attention to the contingency and creativity found in households, neighbourhoods and social networks, as well as at the borders of human–nonhuman experience, the book explores how people diversely meet their food needs and passions while confronting the region’s most pressing social, health and environmental concerns.

Introduction: Food Embodiments, Assemblages and Intersubjectivities in Latin America – Ebbs and Flows of Critical Food Studies Alberto Arce, Stephen Sherwood and Myriam Paredes 1. Embodiment and Reflexivity: Gaining Insight into Food Lifeways through the Chili Cook-off in Ajijic, Mexico Eleanor Fisher, Alberto Arce and Vladimir Diaz Copado 2. Creating Healthy Bodies in Rural Ecuador at a Time of Dietary Shift Joan Gross, Carla Guerrón-Montero, Michaela Hammer and Peter Berti 3. Finding the Food by Hiding the Gold: Andoque Abundance, Mining, and Food in the Colombian Amazon Camilo Torres and Gerard Verschoor 4. Encounters with the Brazilian Soybean Boom: Transnational Farmers and theCerrado Andrew Ofstehage 5. Affective Struggles in the Desert: Bringing to Bear Water on Agriculture and Food Horacio Narváez-Mena 6. People, Cows and Milking Machines: Public Policy and New Inter-subjectivities in Ecuador Nicolas Vasconcellos 7. Forgive Me for Being Human: Wirikuta Nomadism and Rebellious Peyote Oscar F. Reyna 8. Feeding Paradise? Corporeal Food Citizenship in the Galapagos Christine Franke, Jessica Duncan, and Stephen Sherwood 9. Unfolding Agencies and Associations of Agroecology Networks in Brazil Flávia Charão-Marques, Claudia Schmitt and Daniela Oliveira 10. Deepening Relationships through Bio-intensive Food: AgroSano in Oaxaca Charlynne Curiel 11. Public Good: Wheat Assemblages and the Revalorization of Culinary and Handicraft in Bio-Bio, Chile Paola Silva, Maruja Cortés and Alberto Arce 12. Affectivity in Public Procurement: The Case of New Dawn Cooperative and the Elderly in Argentina María Laura Viteri 13. Assembling Responsible Food Markets: The Case of Cooperativa La Manzana in Southern Chile Gustavo Blanco, Jilles van Gastel and Andrés Lagarrigue 14. 250 Thousand Families Campaign: The Existence of Flavor and Taste Stephen Sherwood, Ana Deaconu and Myriam Paredes 15. Conclusion: The Vitality of Every Day Food Stephen Sherwood, Eleanor Fisher and Alberto Arce

Stephen Sherwood is Lecturer and Researcher in Knowledge, Technology and Innovation at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Alberto Arce is Associate Professor ofSociology of Development and Change at Wageningen University,the Netherlands, and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Agronomy at the Universidad de Chile. Myriam Paredes is Professor in Rural Territorial Development at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Ecuador.