Food Sovereignty through Traditional Foodways: Kitchen Gardens and Agrobiodiversity Conservation

Abstract (English)

The importance of maintaining traditional ecological relationships with ancestral lands—such as those involving plants used for food and medicine—is well documented in the literature on language preservation and cultural continuity (Harmon, 1996; Arquette et al. 2002; Brave Heart 2003; Nazarea, 2005; La Duke 2005; Maffi, 2005; Gone 2021). In this context, we align with a growing body of anthropological and ecological scholarship that explores the role of ecological relationships in the construction and maintenance of health cosmologies, as well as experiences of health and sovereignty. To this end, we will focus on contemporary re-articulations of agri-food heritage within rural sectors.

Agriculture has been defined as the expression of a mutualist co-evolution between humans and plants (Rindos, 1980), mediated through sensory engagement and proximity. However, the modern agrifood system has exchanged "mutualism" for domination through uniformity (e.g., monocrops), and "co-evolution" for long-distance relationships between those who grow plants and those who solely consume them. This shift has led to an increase in food production and consumption, while simultaneously degrading the health of both soils and the bodies living within this system, from growers to consumers (Patel, 2007; Galvez, 2018). The changing dynamics between people and food have significant health, cultural preservation, and climate justice implications for peasant campesinos and smallholder subsistence farmers.

Skeptical of the solutions proposed by liberal and progress-oriented frameworks, peasant and subsistence farming communities around the world are re-enacting their own situated and ancestral ecological knowledge, combining scientific and traditional wisdom, technical measurements, and attuned senses to restore soils, rescue seeds, and to heal their bodies. Principles of reciprocity, social capital, and collective capacity continue to be foundational to local agrifood systems, even as these undergo liberalization.

This panel emphasizes the importance of recognizing alternative epistemologies in co-imagining the intertwining of health, culture, and traditional food systems, and looks to the health experiences of campesinos, smallholder subsistence farmer collectives, and their families to understand the roles of agrobiodiversity, food sovereignty, and cultural preservation in these farmers’ narratives of health and healing, and how these are connected to farming, and to the land.