Janita Grace Van Dyk

Food has become one of primary sites and mediums to address anxieties about climate and environmental change. Food movements are increasingly turning to ecological models to render people’s place in a food ecosystem to “slow down” climate change (Holt-Gimenez and Altieri 2013). However, in Italy turning to modelling food ecosystems is happening at the moment where these very systems of food are considered at risk, endangered, or threatened by climate and landscape change. My research looks at time or temporality as a technique for food actors to help model food as an uncertain or unruly ecosystem. In particular, I study how actors affiliated with central sites in the Slow Food movement — a network which has long mined temporalities of history, tradition, and nostalgia of food — are facing the receding horizons of their agricultural futures. I ask: How do actors make time part of the activity of coordinating or rendering their relationships to food and agriculture as ecological? What are the effects of actors? attempts to craft relations, belonging, and companionship within a food ecosystem?