3.3 RESEARCH QUESTION

Why food as care?

The focus of our preliminary research was to understand how ‘food can support and connect the socio-spatial structures of care within SADACCA and the City of Sheffield.’ Through our inquiry of the infrastructure of care, it was important to highlight the capacity to care, the capacity to connect, the capacity to repair and maintain of the African-Caribbean diaspora community.

This intersectional praxis is similar to Dowler et. al., (2019) analysis of an otherwise traditional system can allow a more radical review of care through the intimacy of food cultures that have emerged within the hybrid collective identities. That is, a diaspora of members identifying as Black, African and/ or Caribbean, but equally diverse due to a plethora of synthetic ethnicities and diaspora experiences. This ‘counter-claim’ of care informs a vision of movement, in which attention is placed on the system that defines the practices and logistics of food systems. Infrastructures of care “materializes primarily in the request for welfare, health services, and social safety nets but brings with it the possibility of a politicization of social reproduction as a field of contention for the rethinking of society itself as a whole” (Bianchetti et. al., 2020 p. 301-306). It has led us to produce this research question:

How can food support and connect the sociospatial infrastructures of care within SADACCA and the City of Sheffield?

Themes of Analysis: Food Security, Climate Change, Wellness

Broadly, reading care through food ensures the unravelling of the present systematic practices for the researcher to find gaps and enact changes through affirmative design practices. From the seed that is intended to grow into a raw consumable form; supplied through a chain of food markets (ethnic); prepared in able to make profound changes to the way we live with food and the spaces in which we live with it. Reading foods to understand space and politics can seed (pun intended) immediate, albeit often small-scale changes in our personal and collective food politics. Whether it’s by dissuading the purchase of certain products, encouraging

Fig 6. Conceptual Framework of Food as an Infrastructure of Care.

kitchens using recipes passed down through generations as a living heritage; consumed at tables that serve as a central point of understanding the fragility; materiality of the body and how it is affected by space; and finally, waste - to be composted back to the Earth where the cycle begins again. Food resonates in storytelling and reading, whereby the positionality of the storyteller determines how collective identities are carved. ScafeSmith (2020) describes reading food as an important process of understanding diasporic spaces by thinking of space through our mouths (and all the ways food ends up in them). Researchers, practitioners, professionals, activists, and denizens across the world have been the cultivation of others, prompting conversations about recipes, rituals, histories, and identities, or merely providing the sustenance for those conversations and others, framing space through food posits change at the tip of our tongues (Scafe-Smith 2020).

“We care through food”

– Rob Cotterell