Some emerging themes?

Hi there Ian et al.,

I've now had a chance to flick through the entries to the food blog and have a few comments to help develop a structure/writing plan for the 'afters' paper. Thanks to Alison and Jessica for kicking-off the discussions on Stage 2 - collaborative writing.

The blog contains a diverse range of comments/reflections/examples which is excellent. Retaining a sense of that vibrancy/flavour will be important and also challenging. Will readers of the paper be directed to the blog? I assume so. This has implications for what goes into the paper, of course. The comments below address the three questions Ian asked us to address (about the mechanics of collaborative writing, my own blog experience and any thoughts on what I think we've learned about geogs of food). My response to the third question in particular attempts to draw out some emerging themes/conclusions, although people might disagree with me! Apologies if this seems a little too structured, but i think a few (probably obvious) points have emerged through the entries and these can at least form a platform for discussion/collaborative writing. Here goes:

1]. The mechanics of collaborative writing. I'd favour the second of the two options proposed by Alison and Jessica - the head chef option. If I'm honest, I'd actually prefer the original proposal, with Ian using the blog entries and discussions on structure to help develop an agreed structure from which to write something from. The danger otherwise is that the paper takes quite a while to draft, as different 'authors' work at different paces due to other pressures. Given time pressures, the original proposal might still be the 'best' option? From personal experience, most of the stuff I write is collaborative (because I work on collaborative projects). This usually involves someone taking the lead and others contributing critical comments/edits/re-drafting the thing and maybe adding the odd section (e.g. a conclusion). I've not written (or attempted to write) with so many authors before, or via a blog like this, but it seems inevitable (for it to work) that someone takes the lead in drafting a first draft? The "too many Cooks"(!) analogy could become very apt here otherwise. Terrible pun, i know, but i couldn't resist!

2]. My blog experience. Blumming awful. A complete waste of time and energy...not really! This has thus far been a fascinating exercise. I don't usually bother with blogging - I'm fearful it will get me side-tracked and waste my time! This blog has diverted my attentions a little, but it has been good fun and also very useful. I'm also intrigued by the authorship process and how that might yet work out. More generally, the process has also revealed a range of interesting work under the 'food geographies' umbrella. My initial blog on what we mean by/interpret as food geographies still holds up and might warrant some concluding comment. It has also been interesting to observe how people have approached the papers/the blog: some commenting explicitly on one or two of the papers - or even specific concepts within (e.g. 'rounded people', commodity fetishism, following); others providing more stand-back comments on future directions for food geographies, etc; others providing specific details on their research interests/foci; others providing examples based on research/teaching/personal experience. The entries often transcend more than one of these categories, of course. Collectively they also provide contextual insights into how different contributors take on food geographies and their links to it. That was one of the points and has therefore clearly worked well. The challenge for the 'afters' paper is to make sense of this, as Ian notes.

3]. Emerging themes/silences. Here is my attempt to 'pull out' some themes which emerge across the food blog. Whether or not they figure in the paper is perhaps debatable, but here they are:

* Afters on following/mixing: A number of the comments/entries discuss following as a methodology in terms of: its potentials; its purpose/value/what it offers; what it doesn't offer; how we might 'scale it out' (e.g. Le Heron's 'big business/Fonterra' work; Mather's disease/virus network proposal/work; Roe and Buller's animal welfare work and comments by Hulme, myself and others). Some after-thoughts on this discussion might be useful. A similar discussion on 'mixing' responses could also be drawn out/useful/doable? Certainly after some initial comments on the overall food blogging aim/process (by Ian) a summary of comments/reactions from the first two papers would be sensible/logical. Perhaps that's too logical?

* Doing food geography: This follows on from the above and also takes various guises. One thing that has often struck me is that 'food geographies' (if such a label exists?) tend to be qualitative in nature. This might seem broad-brush, but the majority of responses seem to support this view (echoed also in Ian's first PiHG paper). Relatedly, there seems a preference to build accounts of food from the ground up. In fact some call for more empirical work in key areas (e.g., Mike Goodman's comments on food ethics). Related to this 'doing' issue is wider points about: critical food geography (see my comments and others by Nally, Guthman and Hallett); public food geography/geographies/studies (see comments about 'spaces of interaction' - Putnam; knowledge exchange/transfer - Le Heron, Tucker) and the challenges/opportunities of inter-disciplinarity (including mentions of RELU). In short, comments/reflections on how we do and why we do 'food geography' seems strong in a number of the posts and worth writing about.

* Emergent themes: reading across the blogs some interesting calls for new work/recognition of on-going connected work/themes are made. Here are the obvious ones I highlighted:

- food geographies and animal geographies, esp. animal welfare (Roe/Buller/Philo)
- hunger, scarcity and food prices (Mather/Nally/my good self!)
- disease and biosecurity (Mather)
- the body and food (various refs that substantiate/add to earlier mixing paper)
- viscerality, aesthetics and taste (Kingsbury and Goodman - follows on from the last point)
- moral food geographies (various posts on inter alia ethics of consumption, animal husbandry / welfare, etc)

OK - those are a few cross-cutting themes. You might not agree with them all, but obviously we need to identify these kind of things from which to write something around, hence why I've listed them. The one potentially over-arching theme that intercedes a number of the blogs is relations between morals/ethics and food production/consumption.

Look forward to hearing / reading other peoples thoughts on this phase of the paper.

Feel free to disagree with my ramblings.

Cheers,
Damian
University of Gloucestershire