Seed Swaps and Sunday Sauce: Lessons About Sharing Food in Hard Times pp. 43-65

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Roshni Caputo-Nimbark

Abstract

In times of crisis, which may include perennial poverty and environmental hurdles, unattainable myths and racial stigmatization, or climate change and postmodern anxieties, food sharing stands out as an important source of community resilience. In this article, I argue that by reframing the capitalocentric narrative, one perceives a world of food sharing economies essential for resisting those myriad and often supralocal forces that threaten livelihoods. Personal experience narratives of rural peasants in Gujarat, India and Italian immigrants in Brooklyn, New York from the 1940s through the 1960s exemplify how informal food economies operate in hard times. Anecdotes about culinary resourcefulness, mutual aid networks, and food-centred festivities illustrate the significance of economic practices unacknowledged or undervalued in capitalocentric discourse but central to the fostering of community and sustainability, then and now. Furthermore, following the diverse economies framework and weak theory, the academic subject is implicated in a politics of prefiguration.

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Lead Essays