comparative phenomenology

Dear Ian and others

Thanks for the invitation to join this forum and for sending me your Progress papers ‘following’ and ‘mixing.’ I learnt a great deal from these reports and I look forward to using them in my teaching and research.

I’d like to begin by very briefly sketching my own background, if only because I am not sure the label ‘food geographer’ describes what I do in my own work! My PhD examined the Great Irish Famine (1845-52), from a Foucauldian “biopolitical” approach. Developing from this I now teach a final year undergraduate course on the historical geography of famine. The course goes beyond European case studies and the nineteenth century, inviting students to consider diverse experiences of hunger from a range of perspectives.

I found designing this kind of course very instructive. Originally I pooled together all the literature I could find that dealt with hunger and famine in a direct way. As the course developed, however, I quickly realised that “hunger” and “famine” defy discrete modes of analysis. They require what David Arnold has called a “comparative phenomenology of famine” [1].

I also felt very strongly that a course on the geography of hunger ought to provide students with a vocabulary and a way of thinking that connects seemingly disparate places and experiences. I wanted the course to encourage empathy. Susan Sontag put this well when she talks about the need to draw maps that place privilege and suffering on the same page [2].

I therefore fully subscribe to Ian’s exhortation, “We have to understand research that might allow ourselves and our readers – as much as possible – vividly to appreciate the lives that others live partly because of us.” Exploring the connections (as opposed to parallels) between peoples and places is what Edward Said meant by the term contrapuntal geography [3].

At any rate, the more I read about hunger and famine the more I saw that it connects to other concerns for example, disease ecologies, state and corporate food control, development strategies, population management, colonialism, market capitalism, representational economies, labour rights, environmental degradation, etc. So, in a way (and despite my designs) I was already ‘following’ and ‘mixing,’ if a little unknowingly.

Please excuse this extended introduction. I wanted to say something about my background, because it might help contextualise my reasons for selecting certain issues to comment on over others. There is much to debate here, but I feel I can address certain food issues more competently. For the moment I want to confine myself to two points raised in the reports. The first relates to efforts to re-connect producers and consumers. The second concerns the politics of liberation struggles around food.

As you know food is big in the news at the moment. I receive daily emails from friends and colleagues (a hearty thanks to them all…) who attach an academic article or a link to a newspaper report that I simply “have to read”. We are daily reminded, for instance, that the U.S. market for biofuels coupled with demand for a meat-based diets in India and China mean that ‘we’ (in the minority world) face increased food costs while ‘they’ (in the majority world) face so-called food shortages. Gordan Brown even interrupted the G8 summit to tell us to be less wasteful (the UK throws away 4.1m tonnes of edible goods every year, the equivalent of £420 for every home) and no doubt the poor will (again) be asked to “tighten their belts” for the storm ahead[4]. The analysis is quite crude of course, but it has increased popular concern and led to more questions being asked about the industrialisation of our diets and who really controls food supplies.

In this context consumers are even more concerned about “the processes of consumption” and I have been asked more than once about “best practice” in terms of consumer behaviour. My answer (as much as I have formulated one) is that I am deeply sceptical of consumer-based answers to these problems. I don’t want to be misunderstood. I am very much in favour of Fair Trade. I also think shopping locally is crucial if we are to tackle the power of the big supermarkets. Likewise the organic movement is certainly a step in the right direction.

But I do agree with Louise Crewe’s sentiments cited in Ian’s ‘following’ piece. Crewe points out that consumer-based responses can be “socially divisive,” demarcating those who can afford to act ethically from those who are more constrained. Felicity Lawrence puts this very well in her excellent new book Eat Your Heart Out:

“Ethical consumption cannot be left to personal choice, as politicians, supermarkets and agribusiness would have us believe. So often the reality is that there is no real choice anyway, just an illusion of it, but even were there [is] a choice, if we are not careful, we shall find the burden of behaving decently has been thrown back to the disempowered shopper. We will be offered a choice of one shelf full of more expensive goods for those affluent enough to take their morals and eco-fears shopping and a far larger shelf next door of bargain goods produced without regard for the planet or for the rights of its peoples, for those who don’t care or simply can’t afford to care. Then the supermarkets will be able to say: ‘Ethics? We just do what our consumers want’” [5].


I worry also that many consumer responses are naively business friendly. Like Susan George I feel that CSR (Corporate Social Responsibly) too often means Corporate Self-Regulation [7]. I worry that these sorts of solutions hand power back to the corporations that have done so much damage in the first place. In a nutshell: “The politics of food is … not the art of shopping” [6] and I can’t see corporations helping in the way that some consumer models often imply. Turkeys will never vote in Christmas.

Finally, Ian’s rhetorical question (“what about those people whose memories of foods from elsewhere are memories of hunger, war, trauma, death, for instance?”) hones in on my own unease about focusing heavily on consumption practices. The poor who suffer seasonal hunger or famine usually produce some or all of the foods they consume. But the ethics of shopping only partly explains the “structural violence” that affects their lives. Thus, for me a politics of consumption must be (as Ian writes elsewhere) “part of wider, connected liberation struggles” that tackle the root causes of inequality and systematic deprivation.

This leads me to my last point. Like many geographers I am concerned that critical analysis goes beyond the present and speaks in some way to normative concerns about building a more inclusive and fair future. Of course this challenge contains a thousand hidden dangers, but it is one that has to be met I think. To that end I wonder what more progressive projects might look like? Ian mentions the possibilities opened through “alternative economic spaces” as well as research that “exposes consumers to the hidden exploitations in the food that they buy.” I would like to hear from others about different projects (their successes, failures, ongoing challenges)either at the local or the global level – or preferably both as that’s what ‘following’ seems to be all about…

David Nally

[1] David Arnold. Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1988, p. 3.
[2] Susan Sontag. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004, p. 92
[3] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993, p. 67. See also Derek Gregory. Geographies, Publics and Politics. http://geography.berkeley.edu/ProgramCourses/CoursePagesFA2006/Geog123_GregoryArticle.pdf
[4] Patrick Wintour, Larry Elliott and Hélène Mulholland. “Brown urges Britons to cut food waste.” The Guardian. July 7, 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/07/food.waste1
[5] Felicity Lawrence. Eat Your Heart Out: Why the food Business is Bad for Your Health and the Planet. London: Penguin, 2008, p 298.
[6] Felicity Lawrence. Eat Your Heart Out: Why the food Business is Bad for Your Health and the Planet. London: Penguin, 2008, pp 297-298.
[7]Susan George. Another World is Possible If… London: Verso, 2004, p. 84