Taking a lens of migration to trace relationships between food cultural practices and sustainability

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Master’s Thesis, 60 ECTS

Social-ecological Resilience for Sustainable Development Master’s

programme 2018/20, 120 ECTS

The “Tapestries of Practice” conceptual

framework

Taking a lens of migration to trace relationships

between food cultural practices and

sustainability

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2 Supervisor: Jamila Haider

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Abstract

Globalization of food systems is cause and consequence of cultural shifts and has profound effects on the socioecological sustainability of agricultural landscapes. Despite this, empirical studies of culture in food system sustainability are rare. I use migration as a lens through which to explore the interconnected cultural and agroecological dimensions of food practices in the wake of globalization.

I develop a framework for tracing the relationships between food cultures and sustainability by talking, cooking, and eating with people that have migrated to European cities from more agricultural societies. Whilst industrialization of food systems and other top-down processes influence their practices in new places, participants helped me to understand that these practices are also guided by changing threads such as values of community care, knowledge of agricultural livelihoods and reluctant consumption of industrially processed foods.

Taken with the stories of these people, I develop the concept of re-dwelling to arrive at an understanding of changing threads in values, knowledge, and materials as interwoven into ever emerging “Tapestries of Practice”. This conceptual framework encourages us to move away from static, exoticized or overly romanticized views of people, places and practices, towards a more complex, and thereby more realistic, understanding.

The Tapestries of Practice framework contributes to broader efforts in sustainability science to better address culture. Inclusion of migrants in research and practice can heighten sensitivity to cultural sustainability, ensuring that people can maintain their sense of identity through re-dwelling their knowledge in new places.

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Acknowledgements

I thank all research participants who gave their time and expertise to help me on this learning journey, for opening their homes, and sharing their food and experiences.

To my supervisors Jamila Haider and Simon West, it has been incredibly inspiring and rewarding to work with you both and my respect for you has only grown during the process. Thank you for your sincere interest in helping me to craft this contribution.

Thank you to Arfa Khabiri, Arif Suleimani, Anthia Nibitegeka, Mohammed Abdi Osman, Hanna Wernerson, Damir Radovic, Medhat Khalil, and Arvid Skagerlid. Your translations and interpretations were thoughtfully considered and essential.

I thank all the friends that stuck by me, especially Haseeb Iqbal and Hannah Girvan for your attentive assistance.

Thank you to my family for your love and patience, I would not be here without you.

My master’s class, I thank you all for the learning journey you have taken me on – two years ago I did not yet understand the full power of “semantics”! Thank you to those in my thesis group for ongoing support, and for critical feedback on drafts from Taís González, Robin Lindström, Pieter Vullers, and Hanna Wernerson.

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Preface

Romantic encounters: The Bengali Lime

I was browsing the vegetables in a Bengali owned international food shop on Old Kent Road, London. At the checkout the shopkeeper picked up the lime from my basket, which I had selected on a curious whim. “You should not buy this,” he said. I was taken aback by these poor sales tactics.

“It’s not worth it for you,” he continued, “you won’t know what to do with it and it’s very expensive. If it was a Bengali person, they would know how to prepare it with the right food. For you it’s not worth it”. I saw the price flash up on the scales and I had to concede to his logic.

It was not just me that would be wasting my money, but it would also be that the lime, after such a long precious journey here, would be wasted on me. Not appreciated, as it might be by someone who would encounter a taste of home; memories and experiences they are now geographically separated from.

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from everywhere, and food from nowhere. Fruits grown in Holland, Spain, Mexico. Curries we claim to be Indian, yet the word “curry" cannot be directly translated in any Indian language - not to mention the regional difference of food from one Indian state to the next can be taken quite seriously.

So, the notion of a lime that belongs so intensely in one place, appealed to me greatly. I paint romantic visions of this place, but I have no bodily nostalgia for it. If I taste the sweet tangy aromas of this lime, it will not conjure up memories of family or childhood or belonging or orchards. The reason they sell this lime on the Old Kent Road at £2.73 a piece, is because when someone from Bengal tastes it, they will taste the layered meaning. An estrangement and a belonging. It is worth it for them.

Claude McKay communicates the connection between lived memory and meaning making in this poem:

The Tropics in New York

Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root, Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,

And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit, Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs, Set in the window, bringing memories Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills, And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies In benediction over nun-like hills.

My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze; A wave of longing through my body swept, And, hungry for the old, familiar ways, I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.

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1. INTRODUCTION

In thesis I address the intersection of migration, food cultural practices and sustainability. We are living in a world in motion where the impacts of globalization are felt everywhere, but in unequal ways (Massey 1991). In particular, they are felt by international migrants who maintain relations across vast distances (J. A. Klein et al. 2017). Through migration and mass media, cultural food practices are imported and exported just as food products are shipped between countries in a socioecologically1_{unsustainable agri-food system} (Buttel 2006). Across the world there are trends of urbanization, for example internal migration from rural areas of Afghanistan to Kabul. Additionally, there are trends of international migration with people moving from agricultural to post-industrial societies, for example from Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria to Sweden and the UK. I will introduce why the lens of migration is useful in this thesis and give an overview of how culture is studied in food systems.

Migration as a lens highlighting impermanence of place relations

Migration as a lens of enquiry can either act to reinforce categorical assumptions, or to highlight dynamism. In order to simplify understandings of the world, its motion is often ignored in modernity’s framings of national identity, and in romantic searches for cultural authenticity (De Cillia et al. 1999; Mathews 2000). Migrations can reinforce categorical essentialism by facilitating encounters of “other” regional food practices (Keyser 2018) – such as my encounter with an aromatic lime from Bengal. For example, previous studies have critiqued the assumption that migrants from South Asia are inherently “more traditional” than people in the US (Ray 2004). Paradoxically, however, the lens of migration can also challenge categorization by highlighting the impermanence of place relations, and nostalgic attachments that exist

1_{Socioecological(ly) is used here to refer to reciprocally embedded relationships between social and}

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within us (Olwig and Hastrup 1997). It is important to note that categorical labelling of cultures can drive marginalization and discrimination of migrants and therefore it is this latter lens of enquiry that I embrace.

Current understandings of culture in food systems research and practice

Through the lens of migration, I look at food culture and sustainability. Food systems are approached in various research fields with widespread consideration of health, nutrition, and trade. Cultural anthropology also addresses migration, culture, class, and identity (Sutton 2001) while cultural studies adds colonialism, power and sovereignty (McMichael 2000; E. Klein and Murcott 2014; MacRae 2016). By contrast, sustainability science focuses on environmental impact, diets and development (Gordon et al. 2017), and in defining food system resilience (Tendall et al. 2015) the role of culture has been overlooked (Arora-Jonsson 2016). The few ways in which culture is addressed in sustainability science vary in depth. In some cases cultural dimensions are lumped into a discrete category, either as “cultural ecosystem services” (Reyers and Selig 2020), or to be influenced by dietary behaviour change methods (Ranganathan et al. 1992). There is recognition that cultural shifts can be the driving force for deeply scaled societal transformations (Moore et al. 2015), however this comes with little empirical substantiation. In anthropological approaches to sustainability science (aligned with this thesis’ approach) culture is addressed in greater detail through concepts such as biocultural diversity (Elands and van Koppen 2012; Haider et al. 2020), dwelling (Cooke et al. 2016), and relational place-making (Marsden 2013).

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wealth accumulation (Hinrichs 2003). This thesis joins others (e.g. Hinrichs 2003) in responding to oversimplifications of cultural dimensions in re-localization paradigms of food sustainability.

Practical interventions to address food system sustainability in European or global contexts often give mention to culture, diversity and migration, however these initiatives are usually led by Global North practitioners, and it is rare that migrants or ethnic minorities are given space at the discussion table (Grossmann and Creamer 2017; Blackman et al. 2020; Lindgren 2020).

The research gap

To summarize, there is a shortage of empirical studies of culture in sustainability research, a lack of cultural nuance in re-localization discourses, and a scarcity of diverse voices in food system sustainability science and practice. I combine theoretical concepts and approaches from sustainability science, cultural studies and cultural anthropology, with an empirical study exploring the dynamics of migration, food culture and sustainability. The interdisciplinary approach allows for creative tensions to arise. For example, imported foods such as the Bengali lime can be understood by their cultural benefits as ‘food from home’, or they can be understood by their socioecological costs as ‘un-local food’. Perhaps there is a way of reconciling understandings of imported foods and diasporic cultures that embraces nuance and helps to find new questions. My ambition is that this will provide a fertile ground for hypothesizing just, inclusive and realistic interventions that could lead to more sustainable food systems, without undermining deeply rooted cultural dynamics (Brightman and Lewis 2017).

Research question and thesis structure

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a) When people migrate from agricultural to post-industrial societies, and practices related to food are performed in new places, what are the consequences for practices, places and people? b) What might a more nuanced understanding of these relationships contribute to socioecological

sustainability science and practice?

After providing a brief background on the context of migration from agricultural to post-industrial cities, I begin by reviewing theoretical literature on concepts of place and displacement, and develop the concept of “re-dwelling”. In the Research Design and Results I present the empirical work, engaging with expert informants on food cultures in the context of migration: migrants themselves. In the Discussion, I bring these together to develop the “Tapestries of Practice” conceptual framework and explore the implications of this framework for sustainability science.

1.1 Migration from rural to urban and from agricultural to post-industrial societies

Societal industrialization corresponds to a reduction in time and effort spent preparing, cultivating and eating food, and often goes hand in hand with what is widely called progress and development (Brightman and Lewis 2017). Development initiatives often focus on maximizing productivity, to the detriment of biocultural diversity (Haider et al. 2020) and the conflicting ways in which such “progress” affects everyday lives is given minimal consideration. Therefore, by bounding the study to migrants and food practices from agricultural societies to post-industrial cities, I capture a valuable perspective on societal industrialization and associated cultural experiences.

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to developing countries via aid. Despite an industrializing trend, most of the worlds’ population still lives in agricultural societies, which are generally of lower-income (Roser 2013). Variation in economic opportunity is a driver of both internal and international migration (de Haas et al. 2020). Neoclassical theories of migration assume that migration benefits economic development of sending societies due to remittances of money and of “modern ideas and entrepreneurial attitudes” (de Haas et al. 2020). However, this is contested and migrants are often from middle class or more well-off groups in countries of origin (Gatrell 2019). Moving from an agricultural to post-industrial society may represent a shift in lifestyle and economic prosperity, but this is likely to vary amongst individual experiences.

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1. THEORETICAL DEPARTURE POINTS

Prior theorists have reviewed paradoxes within place-oriented discourses of modern environmental movements and compared them with concepts of displacement and mobility from cultural studies (Fig. 1) (Thomashow 2001; Heise 2008; Robertson 2018). I build upon the development of less static ideas of place by cross-fertilizing the concepts of dwelling and disembedding. Dwelling explores the ways in which places are co-constituted with people and practices (West et al. 2018). By contrast, disembedding is used to describe how people and practices are becoming increasingly stretched and detached from places due to, for example, international supply chains and increased mobility (Tomlinson 1999; Giddens 2013). Here I will give a description of each concept, how they interact with discourses of localization, and how together they form the theoretical starting place for this research: re-dwelling.

Fig. 1 In her book “Sense of Place and Sense of Planet”, Ursula Heise reviews the application and politics of various place-oriented

discourses (right circle, p.29-30) in modern environmental movements of North America and Western Europe. She suggests that they can in cases be essentializing, when compared to concepts of displacement from cultural studies (left circle, p.5) (Heise, 2008). I propose a theoretical departure point of re-dwelling, at the intersection of these approaches

place-oriented environmentalist concepts •dwelling •sense of place •localism •agrarianism •bioregionalism

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2.1. Dwelling in the biosphere: a place-oriented concept

Dwelling describes practices as dynamic and ever-emerging in interaction with the environment (Ingold 2000; Cooke et al. 2016). Human-environment relations are formed through not only mental connections, but also material connections that can be maintained by cultural practices (Cooke et al. 2016). Dwelling’s emphasis on embodied lived experiences mirrors mobility studies of migration where the body is described as “a means of experiencing the local and global simultaneously. The body at once occupies the here and now of lived embodiment, but also functions as a carrier of memories and imprints from other times and spaces” (Bond 2018, p. 9). Ingold describes a threaded fabric: “[w]oven like a tapestry from the lives of its inhabitants, the land is not so much a stage for the enactment of history, or a surface on which it is inscribed,…the lives of persons and the histories of their relationships can be traced in the textures of the land.” (Ingold 2000, p.150); we do not practice on or in a place, but instead our practice is the place, and vice versa.

Dwelling can be grouped with other place-oriented concepts applied in relational approaches to socioecological systems (SES) research, such as biocultural diversity and sense of place (Fig. 1) (Masterson et al. 2017; Peçanha Enqvist et al. 2018; Rozzi et al. 2018; Merçon et al. 2019a). Biocultural diversity draws attention to how sustainable cultivation of foods is tightly interlinked with cultural diversity (Merçon et al. 2019b). It is interesting to consider how migration might be impacting cultural diversity’s linkage with biodiversity. Sense of place examines the “meanings, beliefs, symbols, values and feelings that individuals and groups associate with a particular locality” (Williams and Stewart 1998, p. 19). Doreen Massey offers a more dynamic understanding of “A Global Sense of Place” that challenges us to rethink how unequal mobilities affect experiences of place in our rapid and complex world (Massey 1991).

2.2. Politicization of the local in discourses of environmentalism and nationalism

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greater localization as a means to return to more environmentally harmonious lifestyles (Naess 1990; Thomashow 2001; Berry 2012). Eating locally, less travel, fewer imports. At the same time, narratives of localization are closely linked to nationalistic political discourses, where they play out in quite different ways, spurring ethnic-discrimination (Muller 2008; Massey 2013). The concept of localization therefore carries semantic weight and we can even observe spillover between these discourses with labels such as ‘invasive alien species’ in ecology, denoting an undesirable and disruptive species entering an ecosystem. Language rooted in localist narratives has been questioned as reductionist (Lidström et al. 2015) and xenophobic (Murray 2005), and bears stark similarity to Donald Trump’s commitment to the dehumanizing word “alien” as he hands out strict anti-immigration policy in the US (The White House 2017). The compatibility of environmental and nationalistic localist narratives presents risks: promoting localization in environmental movements could crossover to promoting nationalistic or regionalistic mindsets (Massey 1991), present even in the philosophy of 19th_{century Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth (Hazucha 2002)} and in Heidegger’s conception of dwelling (Harrison 2007; Heidegger [1954] 1971).

We have a responsibility as SES researchers to take heed of this warning, and to some extent the systems perspective aids in balancing the “tension between defensiveness and diversity in food system localization” (Hinrichs 2003, p.33). I posit that infusing place-based concepts, with concepts that acknowledge loosening of place relations and our global interlinkages would not only help navigate such a risk, but would also bring a more nuanced and realistic understanding of the ways in which people are simultaneously rooted, disconnected and interconnected with ecological landscapes.

2.3. Disembedding of culture: a concept of displacement

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forms and events become correspondingly ‘stretched’”(Giddens 2013, p.64). These “shifting alignments of time and space”, are an important process for social change (Giddens 2013, p. 22). Similar to disembedding, “deterritorialization” describes how globalization has broken the geographical links of cultural processes (Appadurai, 1996; Lull, 2000; Papastergiadis, 2018; as cited in Elden, 2005).

Although it is not the focus of this thesis, there would be great merit in extending ideas of disembedding and deterritorialization to consider not only human interaction, but also interspecies relations. They are useful lenses through which to look at ordinary daily practices that are the focus of ethnographic research, to examine how global connectivity weakens the ties of culture to place (Tomlinson 1999, p. 29).

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2.4. Re-dwelling

Oxymorons have been developed to convene these ideas, for example “glocal” or Thomashow’s (2001) “place-based transience” and “diasporic residency” for considering ways to live in socioecological harmony. However, for this research I define a starting point of re-dwelling: an understanding of the ways in which cultural practices are interactions between mind, body and environments (places) and are thus ever-changing, as places interconnect, as bodies re-make places and as minds remember - and forget - the reenactment of practices.

Taking “travelling” and “dwelling” alongside one another, Carter (2014) used the term re-dwelling in the context of planned settlement of Pacific indigenous climate migrants. I develop an understanding of re-dwelling that encompasses both disembedded re-dwelling (i.e. stretched cultural-geographical relations), and also considering the ways in which people re-embed themselves in places and practices.

Taken with the experiences of migrants this encourages us to look not only at sense of place and ways of being but also at sense of displacement and ways of becoming, in relation to diverse cultural practices.

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3. METHODOLOGY

Theoretical points of departure are useful for orientation with the subject matter, but to better understand the relations between food cultures, migration and sustainability I needed to talk to the experts – those who are moving and have moved from agricultural societies to urbanized cities.

In this section I outline my broad methodological principles, approach to case selection, methods, and approach to data analysis.

3.1. Methodological approach

I start by introducing my approach to incorporating the perspectives of migrants in the development of my conceptual framework. The nature of my research question was exploratory, thus justifying a messy methodology to assist in the comprehension of complex phenomena.

Diverse sources of knowledge are valued

I began from the assumption that people are experts of their own lives and they also have knowledge about external influencing forces of their lives. I incorporated decolonial and postcolonial thinking in my methodology, whereby I did not set out with strictly defined ideas of what I was looking for, but instead was responsive to the perspectives and experiences of the people that I met and talked with.

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subalternizing it, and pushing it down a knowledge hierarchy (Menezes de Souza 2002; Spivak and Riach 2016).

Therefore, whilst this study is grounded in a desire to understand everyday practices, within this I allowed for participants to express expertise at global, local and unbounded scales. Who better to speak on multiscale phenomena than migrants who have lived experience of very different places and worldviews, and have been driven to migrate by complex interacting circumstances, either in abstract or concrete ways? For example, people who are driven by job opportunities, study opportunities, armed conflict, war and climatic stresses (de Haas et al. 2020; Migrationsverket 2020). In reference to climate change migration Arnall and Kothari (2015) say that more dialogue is needed between elite policy makers and non-elite people: such a global, external facing narrative should not be mapped “wholesale onto ordinary people’s lives”. Instead people should be allowed to speak from their experience.

It would not have been possible for me as an outsider to uncover the voices of “the other” without distortion (Spivak and Riach 2016), and my results report only upon segments of people’s experiences, influenced by my own positionality (see Appendix 2: Critical reflections). Although I have heritage in different places, as a mixed British-African-American, my experience of migration has come with the privilege of EU and US citizenship, whereas many participants are refugees or permitted via work and study visas.

Non-linear methodology and onto-epistemology

“Simple clear descriptions don’t work if what they are describing is not itself very coherent. The very attempt to be clear simply increases the mess.”

(Law 2004, p. 2)

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methods and a search for simple answers need not be the foundations of such research, in fact, finding clear questions is challenge enough (Law 2004).

So, whilst there is a sense amongst the mess, I do not pretend to have been guided by a rigid methodological framework. Rather, I used different interpretive methods, where appropriate to allow me to explore the problem field. This approach also allowed for emergent themes of interest to arise from research participants, who then had a role in guiding the direction of the enquiry.

For example, I learned from participants that preparing some traditional dishes requires a long time and thus has significant impact on how often people make them. I then reflexively thought about how I could frame questions or find observation opportunities to explore the phenomenon of time in more detail. Similarly, it is worth noting to the reader that defining different moments of observation as interviews, focus groups or participant observation (see Methods) does not altogether portray the chaotically human nature of such encounters, which might have started with an invitation to a home, followed by the unexpected arrival of further family members, or a spontaneous drive to a favorite restaurant on the other side of town.

Taking slices of different peoples’ everyday experience and deriving conclusions from this, whilst maintaining each slice’s individual integrity is an incomplete picture, yet it provides direction to our understanding of globalized food cultural practices.

3.2. Case Selection

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Table 1 Share of labour force employed in agriculture in countries connected to the participants in this study, showing a change

between the years 1991 and 2017

Country Share of labour force employed in agriculture in 1991 (%)

Share of labour force employed in agriculture in 2017 (%)

Somalia 86.84 86.21

Democratic Republic of the Congo 85.80 81.93

Rwanda 88.62 66.46 Afghanistan 71.27 62.19 Sierra-Leone 63.41 60.57 Pakistan 42.02 47.47 India 63.59 42.74 Bangladesh 69.51 39.07

Syrian Arab Republic (Syria)2 28.21 22.86

Iraq 34.22 18.72

Iran 26.86 17.14

Sweden 3.22 1.87

United Kingdom (UK) 2.26 1.11

Cultural differences between these countries are significant, and the aim was not to derive spurious generalizations. My theoretical starting place was informed by a less bounded understanding of identity formation that does not center national borders (Schiller 2008) and many informants had lived in, or are connected to, multiple of these countries throughout their lives, further emphasizing the complexity of culture and identity (Appendix 4: Participant Demographics).

Also taken into consideration was a representation of countries with high levels of migration to Sweden and the UK. This study consisted of interactions with migrants in Stockholm and Uppsala in Sweden and London in the UK, all of which experience high international immigration.

Within the broader case described above, numerous informants are people migrating from Afghanistan to Sweden. Although people arriving from Afghanistan to Europe will have taken diverse paths and originated in diverse regions of the country, there are still many similarities in the food and agricultural practices

2_{Data for Syria are limited, but there have been significant drops in Agriculture in the past 50 years, in part}

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across the country’s rural areas. Many people arriving in Europe were living in Kabul when they left Afghanistan. But this influx to the capital has often been relatively recent, so many people still have memories of living in rural agricultural areas, or family ties to rural areas. In the last five years Afghanistan has experienced huge internal migration (1.1 million people) and internationally (1.7 million people); they conclude that people move due to unemployment and fear of terror in rural places, and are also attracted to Kabul, the world’s fifth fastest growing city, due to better human and women’s rights (Ahad Hakim and Boz 2020). The ongoing war in Afghanistan drives high levels of immigration to Europe.

3.3. Methods

In keeping with the outlined decolonial messy methodological approach, I make use of “food as method” (Haider 2015), relational interviewing and participant observation. Similar to Tuomainen’s (2009) study of West-Africans in London, these methods invite participants to bring forward their memories of food practices in both their country of origin as well as their current food practices.

Food as method

Using food as not only an object of inquiry but also as a method aligns well with both a decolonial and messy research approach (Oudenhoven and Haider 2015; Haider and van Oudenhoven 2018). It is a way to bring to the surface ideas that have been left out of mainstream narratives but are central to people’s everyday life. Food provides a mirror for the way that we live, and the history we have come from. It can bring researcher and researched to an equal table and helps to “break down” or “circumvent power imbalances”: it places high value on the perspectives of ordinary people’s food knowledge, and it is easy to create shared language around food – everybody eats (Haider and van Oudenhoven, 2018, p.4).

Relational interviewing and participant observation

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cultures through mutual discussion. For example, “why don’t you come and help in my kitchen?”, “Why don’t we go and eat food here?”, and “you should visit my community garden!”. Allowing participants agency in the process of inquiry helped give rise to ways of seeing things that I would not have seen if I had attempted to strictly guide the process. In some instances, however, it was clear that participants preferred a more structured questions and answers interview, and in those cases I adopted a more traditional approach to interviewing.

Interviews were conducted either as part of participant observation – for example in the participants home whilst cooking and eating – or via online video call due to Covid-19 restrictions3_{. Often this was a group} interview (i.e. group dinner), where multiple people were present and discussing questions simultaneously. I took a relational approach to interviewing, with a desire to minimize the transactional element of such an encounter and instead explored topics through mutually interesting conversation. The nature of such an interview was relatively informal. However, it was not the aim to coax people into divulging vulnerable information from this position of comfort. It was important that I could distinguish at what point an interview ended and friendly conversation continued.

A relational approach to interviewing advocates sharing information regarding your research interests, so that you might agonize together – as opposed to withholding information for fear that it might influence the responses too strongly (Dempsey et al. 2016). So, both researcher and researched are working together, with different expertise, to answer the research questions (Wagenaar, 2011). Since I also wanted respondents to guide the direction of conversations, I compromised – usually starting with more open questions, and later gradually introducing some more of my own interests, through questions or reflections upon what they were saying, and always asking if there was something else they would like to say, or ask.

3_{Due to the outbreak of a global pandemic of the novel coronavirus in March 2020, numerous adaptations}

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Participant observation, where I was a moderately active participant – for example cooking or eating a meal together - allowed for the observation of tacit knowledge and behavior that is difficult to articulate (Slutskaya et al. 2012). For all participants, material food items that we were eating or preparing, acted as prompts for elicitation. In addition, when interviewing participants from Afghanistan, part way into an interview I often showed images and text from the ethnographic recipe book “With Our Own Hands” (Oudenhoven and Haider 2015), which in some ways evokes photo elicitation techniques. Additionally, I carried out passive participant observation by spending time in different neighborhoods with high immigrant populations, visiting shops, walking through streets and experiencing the everyday banalities; listening, seeing, smelling and noticing, to immerse myself more fully in my research topic. Participant observation allows the researcher to observe “knowledge” about different food practices that cannot be communicated verbally, and are important to the unravelling, affective and ever emerging nature of practices (Carolan 2015).

Interviews and participant observation were recorded in part or in full, and field notes were taken either during or immediately after visits. The complete data corpus consisted of 14 occasions and 25 people. From this a dataset of 12 occasions and 21 people was analyzed (11 Female (4 with Afghan heritage), 10 Male (5 with Afghan heritage)). (See Table 4, Appendix 4 for more detailed demographics).

Language Limitations

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interpretation. So, language was in all instances a compromise. The difference was of importance when interested in biocultural diversity, as practices, foods and crop varieties often have local vernacular.

3.4. Data analysis

Recordings from interviews and participant observation were transcribed and coded along with field memos. A first round of open coding employed no theoretical framework to allow for the potential of surprising new findings that do not fit the prior favored theoretical concepts (Timmermans and Tavory 2012). These codes were then categorized into emergent themes which were then related back to the research question.

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4. RESULTS

4.1. Threads of changing practices and external structures of influence

Open coding of the data, followed by theme searching, revealed categories of values, knowledge and materials that are maintained, dropped or incorporated in food practices performed in different places. These are represented as ‘threads’ interwoven within changing practices that can also be understood as relations.

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Table 2 List of the interchanging threads of practices coded in analysis, as well as external structures of influence. Some threads appear twice, where there is a particularly strong overlap between categories. (See Appendix 5 for expanded table).

Threads of changing practices Examples from participants Changing

values

Valuing diversity

Showing community care and solidarity “helping [young girls in our community] to be supportive and leading them in the right direction” Aisha Showing hospitality “when someone comes you feed them like eat eat! And they're like, please I'm full!” Marie

Caring for the family “[grandma grows vegetables because it] produces her part of providing for the family with the food” Mado Viewing pesticides and fertilizers as harmful “the strategy I use to buy [good] tomatoes from home in local market: I go and I look at the tomatoes on which

you can find insects, because I know if the tomato has been sprayed, any insect that can attack and the tomato immediately dies.” Emmanuel

Changing values between places

Conflicting values between places “it's like they're not in this world”. Rouba Valuing quantity and sustenance “just to sustain my family” Emmanuel

Valuing Western health knowledge “I think me being health professional and having a great interest in raising diabetes awareness” Aisha Valuing self-sufficiency “we can't live without food. But we still don't want to do [farming]. We want someone else to do it.” Richard Considering ethics and health when

shopping

“when I go to market I don't think about the environment” Cedric

Changing pace in lifestyle “I have a child. And he likes to eat food from Afghanistan. But I don't have the time to cook.” Meena Observing religious food practices

Knowing ceremonial value of food “it's like a pumpkin, so they cut it in half and clean, they remove all the seed inside and leave this to dry…. this is what they used to put everything for marriage rights.” Aisha .

Changing gender relations Changing

knowledge

Holding agricultural knowledge and experience

“when you pick them, it's four people holding a big blanket and then two people, are on the tree…so they fall down.” Marie

Using agricultural knowledge and experience

Valuing Western health knowledge

Knowing medicinal food properties “every food practice which we had in the olden days, it had medicinal values” Richard Knowing traditional varieties

Knowing food origins The father of the family from Parwan knows which oils are used in each region of Afghanistan

Knowing ceremonial value of food Aisha’s husband does not remember the ceremonial difference between Kola nuts, so Aisha explains to me. Exchanging knowledge between generations

Learning to cook “I don't know how to cook. No, but now I am learning” Jane Learning via YouTube and Instagram Rouba watches videos to learn recipes from around the world Memorizing recipes

Connecting to place through knowledge of culture

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experience

“because they are also from Africa, so they know what tradition is.” Aisha Changing

materials Changing ingredients and materials

Living restricted by class and wealth “those who stay they don't have the capacity to go to the city.” Emmanuel

Cooking with fire Meena would previously cook in a tandoor clay oven in Afghanistan or Iran, over fire. Cooking in bulk

Cooking from scratch A dried green chili spice mix made by Marie’s aunt in Kabul, where she grew the chilis from scratch, holds prime position in her cupboard in Stockholm.

Informally importing food

Visiting international food shops If Ahmad visits an “oriental shop” it feels more like a culture he knows, it gives a feeling of belongingness and recognition. At the same time his Swedish mentality doesn’t like the mess.

Buying food in Western supermarkets

Buying food in open markets Ece says that usually the quality is better at the Pazar (marketplace) in Turkey and there is less GMO, and it’s more local.

Consuming processed foods

Eating animals “my father [said if] …your relatives in Afghanistan they're gonna laugh at you, and I [said] "Dad, they eat vegetarian all the time because they don't have the money enough to buy the meat." Marie

Preferring certain tastes For Afghan minors arriving in Sweden one of the major challenges is food “spaghetti or rice in Sweden is usually cooked in very simple way…they don't put any sauce, or any spice, it looks boring” Ahmad

Connecting to home through material food items

Talking of her calabash Aisha explains “I always remember those good memories”

…for examples for all threads see Appendix 5

External structures of influence

Industrialization of food systems “if we don't go to the factories or industry for processing, then you reduce the harm you may cause to the farmer.” Emmanuel

Urbanization “they leave for the city, because they feel that reaching the city will help them to have more jobs” Emmanuel Climate change

International food supply chains During Covid-19 many international shops imported fresh goods, but with significant impact on price. International development initiatives In Somalia, Fadumo describes how UN development aid has caused many problems.

Challenges in places of origin and arrival “I know many unaccompanied minors Afghan, who came here but also others that left Sweden went to, Paris - France. I don't know if it's really better in France, the same. Some of them get residency” Ahmad

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4.1. Common thread: holding (and using) agricultural knowledge and experience

Everyone I spoke to from Afghanistan talked about the importance of rice (Fig. 2). One older man who had grown up in the rural Wakhan province reeled off a list of five different cultivars of rice he knew to be grown in Afghanistan when he lived there. Likewise, even those that had lived in the large capital city, Kabul, still had strong ties to rural villages where their family have land that they visit each year, and harvest mulberries, walnuts, apricots and apples. I observed that many migrants in London and Stockholm continue to grow in community gardens and allotments, and I also came across stories of people fishing in urban waters.

People were well aware that if this knowledge is not practiced, then it will not be passed down to future generations. Yet there are significant hurdles to practicing agricultural knowledge in a non-agricultural country. Emmanuel (Box 1) was one of several participants with direct knowledge and experience of cultivation, whilst now living in a context where he is not easily able to use or share that knowledge due to a lack of access to land, and insufficient time.

The practice of cooking also contains knowledge and experience that would alter between generations, if not passed down. In an Afghan restaurant, the chef showed me how to prepare the flatbreads by hand and flattened and pressed it with graceful dexterity. Bollywood music blasted

Fig. 2 For people who eat rice as a staple grain, it makes

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loudly as he sang along and explained “cooking is my love story”. He encouraged me to have a go at making the bread, and my attempts were clumsy by comparison. Knowledge of how to make flatbreads (or how to press oils, grind flour, harvest fruit and rear animals) is not just a matter of information – it is physical knowledge, for example how one should hold one’s hand a certain way to apply pressure.

4.2. Common thread: changing pace in lifestyle

Many participants reflected upon the time required for cooking, especially for preparing traditional foods from scratch that their schedules of work or study no longer allowed for. For example grains and pulses that require soaking or fermentation over days. A student from Tamil Nadu, India, made a weekly batch of fermented rice-based dosa batter; working night shifts for a fast food app-delivery company he found ways to fit this slow food preparation into his routine. Meena (Fig. 3) (Box 2) described that some Afghan food is something that you prepare on the weekend, or on special occasions but there are also simple dishes she prepared regularly.

Box 1. Emmanuel longs for his family farm Route: Rwanda→ Uppsala, Sweden

For Emmanuel, growing food has been part of his life from a young age. When he was small, his mother gave him and his siblings each a partition of the small holding they had, in a rural part of Rwanda. They could try and grow whatever they wanted and sell it at the market. The intention was to allow for them to learn how to solve problems for themselves, so that they would be able to handle whatever life threw at them.

Now studying in Sweden, he wants to continue growing but doesn’t have the land. He fears that it would not be allowed by his landlord, and he would need to spend time learning about the soil and local varieties. Back in Rwanda, where his wife and children live, he still has cultivated land where they grow without chemical fertilizers or pesticides. He is suspicious of cheap food in the supermarket – why is it so cheap? They must have cut some costs in the production to get the price so low. He would rather buy food that has not been processed, but that rarely seems to be an option living here in Sweden. Religion plays a role in Emmanuel’s eating practices, as a Christian, he regularly fasts for spiritual reasons.

The food from Rwanda is simple, mostly boiled potatoes and beans. We share a dish of “Igitoki” - cooking banana. There are few spices, and he likes it that way. Contrastingly, his friend and roommate from Rwanda has taken a strong liking to the spices and flavors of India and teaches himself new recipes.

threads of changing practices: holding and using agricultural knowledge and experience, preferring certain tastes, consuming processed foods, valuing self-sufficiency, observing religious food practices.

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Box 2. Meena shows how she bakes bread

Route: Iran → Stockholm, Sweden; with parents from Afghanistan

As Meena makes bread and bolani (bread filled with leeks or potato) (Fig. 4) she reflects upon how this would be done differently in Iran where she grew up, and where her mother taught her to cook. For she knows and has experienced that cooking in tandoor (clay oven over fire) is not the same.

Now that she lives in Stockholm, cooking is still a family affair, as she cooks often with her daughter. However, her daughter has not experienced cooking with a tandoor. As she flattens out the bread, she begins with her hands, and they know what to do with seemingly little conscious guidance. She occasionally switches for the rolling pin – she would never have used it in the past, but it is faster. Meena would usually cook something faster and easier to fit with her studies and childcare, perhaps a simple afghan noodle yoghurt soup or afghan pea soup, which have high nutritional value.

Despite that only a few of us will be eating, enough food is prepared to feed many more, and as the evening progresses others are invited to dine with us.

threads of changing practices: Changing pace in lifestyle, exchanging knowledge between generations, changing ingredients and materials, showing hospitality, caring for the family

external structures of influence: industrialization of food systems

Fig. 4 Meena presses the dough for bolani using her hands, also

aided by the rolling pin

Fig.3 Favourite dishes like Quabeli Rice (centre table) are

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4.3. Common thread: showing community care and solidarity

As was evident in Fadumo’s story (Box 3; Fig. 5), care for the community and neighborhood environment guides her actions. The Covid-19 pandemic made these values of care particularly prominent amongst participants. For example, a Sierra Leonian woman was cooking and delivering food to people shielding in her local community in London, and another participant from Afghanistan organized a Covid-19 relief fundraiser, in order to buy essential supplies for poor families living in Kabul that would usually live hand-to-mouth, unable to stock up on supplies for a quarantine period.

Another example of community care was the way in which some people prepared food in large batches, inviting family and neighbors to join (Fig. 6), and many had a strong dislike for eating alone.

Fig. 5 Vegetables and herbs grow in Fadumo’s

community garden in Stockholm. Fenced to keep out rats and hares.

Fig. 6 Rice is often cooked in large pots because it is a popular

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4.4. Common thread: consuming processed foods

Many participants ate more processed food than they had done in their country of origin. However, many observed this trend was also occurring within their countries of origin.

Buying food in London, Aisha comments that “most of the [Sierra Leonean] foods have been frozen for months and years, so it doesn't give me that interest …in cooking my cultural food here anymore like when I was back home.”

Box 3. Fadumo takes care of her community Route: Somalia → Stockholm, Sweden.

Fadumo likes nature and runs a community garden by her apartment block. She feels good to do things for her community, where Somalis and migrants of other backgrounds live, such as organizing a petition to get rid of cockroaches and rats.

There is no particular food from Somalia that Fadumo longs for; most things are available in the international food shops and she quickly learned to make new things, like pizza dough, when she moved to Sweden. Similarly, she accepts the preferences of her children for European food as natural and it does not bother her so much. Her concerns are related to more pressing matters, such as creating a safe living environment for her family and neighbours.

She arrived in Sweden 18 years ago. Her nomadic family in Somalia had sheep and camels, moving with the herd, but now her family is living in the city. Fadumo describes the problems in Somalia brought about by climate change: the land is becoming drier, it is difficult to grow, and to have enough food for the herd. She notices it also in Sweden: “Where is the snow?” She attributes this to a rise in technology, where we have been burning fuels to feed mass production, polluting the air. “It's like a doomsday, it's written in the Quran”.

In Somalia when some of the animals in the herd started to die, her family moved to a small village with a well, but at this point she had already left for Sweden. Then her mother and father left for the city. Later the rest followed.

She describes medicinal properties of camel milk and how the Americans and others are starting to industrialise camel farming in Somalia. Camel farming now occurs more in the villages and towns, because that is where they are building water wells. Some people have become rich from this.

She describes how most food is imported in Somalia: oats, dried milk, maize. The UN are a big problem: if farmers are growing your crops and then the UN comes with free maize, then they cannot sell their crops, and have a lot of problems. The UN are feeding people straight into the mouth. It means people are not growing their land anymore, because the market is flooded. “The younger generation expects to be fed like baby birds. And they don't want to farm. They have lost contact with land.”

threads of changing practices: showing community care and solidarity, knowing medicinal food properties, preferring certain tastes, holding and using agricultural experience and knowledge,

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There is a sense for some that when they process foods themselves, or they know who processed the foods, the linkage between people and where food comes from is strengthened, for example the green chili spice sent by Marie’s aunt from Afghanistan: “So I think it's because I know this is from scratch, she grew them and made them and it has a different smell and taste. The taste is original.”

4.5. Common thread: changing ingredients and materials

When I visited the vegetable aisle of “Matvärlden” (“Food World”) in Stockholm, a huddle of women stood over two large piles of beans. They chattered in a language that was difficult for me to place, carefully selecting the superior beans from the pile, filling plastic bags. In my interviews, a participant from India described how he feels that the practice of selecting produce like this has been robbed from him by supermarkets that present vegetables in prepacked wrappings.

For those living in cities, many ingredients can be sourced at international food markets (Fig. 7) that usually cater for the demographics of the local neighborhood’s immigrant population. However, the costs are always drastically heightened due to import taxes, and so many people bring back delicacies and dried spices when they take trips to their country of origin, where prices are significantly cheaper. A participant, Mado, describes how, some dried shrimp her mother had brought back from DR Congo mysteriously went missing, “mum was heartbroken!” They all laughed later when the “Swedish” family dog, appeared with one little dried shrimp on her nose.

Fig. 8 Aisha's husband shows me two kola nuts. Used

ceremonially, medicinally and recreationally, they come in many varieties. In weddings they symbolize fertility and “for better or for worse” due to the bitter taste and sweet aftertaste that some varieties have

Fig. 7 An international food market in a Stockholm

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For some people, for example Aisha (Box 4), food from home was communicated as something they cannot live without, rather than a mild preference. During the pandemic, prices of imported fresh food in the food markets on Peckham High Street rocketed. A man selecting young coconuts was tapping on them to check for water, the price had gone from £2.00 to £2.50, but there was still a long queue of people wanting them, for the water’s taste and health benefits. Yellow yams usually costing 2.99 per kilo went up to £9.99 per kilo. In one West African shop, the shelves were virtually bare, save some sacks of black beans and “garri” (cassava flour). They had all but stopped trading due to the impossible prices. Other shops relied on peoples’ strong need for these cultural food items and kept importing despite the costs.

Box 4. Aisha finds cultural belonging in her calabash Route: Sierra Leone→London, UK

This summer, on top of her work as a health practitioner, Aisha is part of a Covid-19 rapid relief team, delivering food and taking care of at-risk people in her local community, many from African countries like herself. Due to import restrictions, she’s not able source all the ingredients for the rich cassava leaf “plasas” (green leaf stew) that people crave, so she makes simple fried rice dishes. These use a different oil that is better for cholesterol anyway; as a diabetes nurse, she thinks about the different fats in the food she prepares for her family and community. “You have to adapt things.” So now she uses less palm oil.

Aisha’s children prefer the British food they eat in school, but she still has kept cooking Sierra Leonian food, and they like her “sticky soup” the best – a slippery okra stew. She wants them to have a taste for this spicy rich food, and knowledge of how to prepare it. If her daughter marries another African in the future, she will need to know how to cook, or the mother-in-law may think badly of Aisha.

A large calabash – a bowl carved from a large gourd – was given to Aisha and Henry on their wedding day in Sierra Leone, containing the bride price and ceremonial kola nuts (Fig. 8). Aisha still uses the bowl to prepare rice on special occasions, as it gives her a feeling of belonging.

Aisha used to be an agronomist and grew food for her family. Now in central London, she still experiments on her balcony with growing maize seeds from varieties she has brought back from Sierra Leone, showing her children how to plant and tend to them.

threads of changing practices: changing ingredients and materials, visiting international food shops, showing community care and solidarity, knowing ceremonial value of food, preferring certain tastes, holding and using agricultural knowledge and experience, valuing Western health knowledge

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4.6. Common thread: changing and conflicting values in place of origin and arrival

Three out of the six younger female participants that had been raised in Sweden reported that they had, to varying extents, reduced meat consumption in their diet due to ethical considerations. Some described themselves as “vegetarian” but expressed this was at odds with how relatives perceived meat-eating. For example, Rouba (Box 5) having grown up in Stockholm, with concerns about meat consumption reflects that her relatives and friends in Syria “don't have these interests. It's like they're not in this world”.

Value conflicts between mothers and daughters raised in different places were evident. For Congolese-Swedish Mado, her mother said she needed “to know how to cook for [her] husband… because [she’s] a woman.” Instead, she explains, “I rebelled, and I would not cook, I would not be in the kitchen.” It was not until some years later, after leaving and feeling she was “not eating properly” that she started “to see what she taught me before. I'm using it now and actually like it.”

Box 5. Rouba dismisses macho culture

Route: Born in Sweden to Syrian mother and Iraqi father

Rouba has conflicting feelings for Syria, a country that she is deeply entangled with but where she witnesses values and a culture that does not match her own. She questions the uncritical pride of many Syrians and thinks there are many problems arising from the macho culture that is promoted by the government in both men and women, to benefit the mentality of war. For example, some of her cousins living in Damascus think nothing of throwing a plastic bottle in the street, and they don’t understand why anyone would not eat meat. They say the environment is not their responsibility. She remembers traumatic scenes at the chicken market, and watching her cousin catching a dove and breaking the neck. “Why did you do that?!” she asked. “Because I can” he responded.

Although there are redeeming parts of the culture, like the food, she does not celebrate this with unrestrained enthusiasm. She practices Islam and reads a lot about why certain practices are carried out, whereas her cousins will just follow the rules without thinking.

Rouba grew up in a multicultural suburb of Stockholm, where she was exposed to a variety of cultures and world views. Her husband spent his early years in Damascus, and they have two young children. She learnt to cook from her parents, and watches videos to learn delicious new recipes from around the world. Her mum only learnt to cook after arriving in Sweden in her thirties so knows only the basics of Syrian cooking, whilst it is her dad who has all the secret cooking tricks.

On the weekend the family spend time together, cooking, eating, playing with the kids. For the children Grandma prepares a large platter of fruit and a Ukrainian black wheat dish, which she learnt from someone that used to rent a room with her.

threads of changing practices: conflicting values between places, learning via YouTube and Instagram, exchanging knowledge between generations, caring for the family, learning to cook, changing gender relations

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5. DISCUSSION

5.1. Towards a framework: Tapestries of Practice

Informed by the theoretical points of departure and the lived empirical experiences of participants, I develop a conceptual framework of ever emerging “Tapestries of Practice”, for understanding changing food practices. At its core, this recognizes places, people and practices as unfixed and interwoven, and helps to unpack and apply the concept of re-dwelling. After introducing the metaphor of this framework, it will then act as a guide through the discussion.

Threads and weaving are often employed as metaphor heuristics to ease understanding of complex co-constituted phenomena (see for instance Ingold 2000 on dwelling; Law 2004 on social science research; Phillips 2017 on ghost fishing gear; Tengö et al. 2017 on knowledge systems; West et al. 2018 on care agency and knowledge in stewardship). It is then fitting to develop these metaphors to understand food cultural practices in relation to migration and sustainability.

Engaging in practice (food practice, in this case) can be metaphorically represented as weaving together different threads. Every time a practice is repeated, threads are woven together into a tapestry, but never in precisely the same way: practices are dynamic and must be lived for threads and relations to be maintained. There may be small changes between tapestries of practice - or large ones. When a practice is performed in an environment different to where it evolved historically, this weaving of threads persists, but we can expect a different tapestry due to the affordances of this new environment. This does not necessarily mean that the “out of place” tapestries become threadbare; threads of values, knowledge and materials from other places are picked up and woven in. Of course, we can question, is this practice really “out of place”? A dynamic view of place would posit that it is exactly where it belongs (Massey, 1991).

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Weaving starts with the “Warp” strings: the theoretical understandings of how practices are re-dwelt. It is into the Warp that the lateral threads create the cloth, the “Weft”: the threads of changing practices (Table 2, Results). This old English word means “that which is woven”– as opposed to that which is “Left” (compare weave and leave). Thus, I also give reflections on threads that have been Left from practices. The way in which the threads are inter-woven will also affect the characteristics of the “Tapestry”: the practice itself (Collier 1974). All of this takes place upon a small, simple or large, complicated “Loom”: the external structures of influence.

I will then contemplate how the elements of the framework help to understand practical implications of this research, considering agency, care and ethics. Finally, I will present how the Tapestries of Practice framework brings us to an image of dynamic, ever-emerging practices that opens up space for a plurality of perspectives to co-exist in society and in research.

5.2. The Warp meets the Weft

How theory helps make sense of lived experience

:

Re-dwelling through food practice

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Fig. 9 Tapestries of Practice are woven from Weft threads or practice: changing values, knowledge and materials. The Warp is

the theoretical concept that helps us to make sense of these threads: re-dwelling. (Image made by author).

Firstly, to remind ourselves, re-dwelling is an understanding of the ways in which cultural practices are interactions between mind, body and environments (places) and are thus ever changing, as a) places interconnect, b) as bodies re-make places, and c) as minds remember - and forget - the re-enactment of practices. I will describe here how this concept, which incorporates the ideas of re-embedding and disembedding, helps us to understand the experiences of participants.

a) places interconnect

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The disembedded dwelt environment is not only global and stretched, it is also digital and compressed in time-space (Giddens 2013), so that the practice of cooking a particular dish might be learnt through YouTube rather than elders and practiced using ingredients that are not connected to the place the dish comes from.

b) bodies re-make places

Perhaps in reaction to feeling this stretching, which sparks challenges in orienting oneself in the world, people materially and bodily re-weave a sense of belonging through practice: dwelt re-embedding.

Marie, who moved to Stockholm aged three but has Afghan heritage, suffered an internal conflict. The more strength that was given to her “Swedishness”, the more she was estranged from her Afghan roots, giving a greater need to assert this connection. She does this through her and her family’s love for Afghan food. Marie is known for her rice dishes, an absolute staple in Afghanistan.

The preservation of food practices from ‘home’ is a way of maintaining cultural identity (Vallianatos and Raine 2008; Chapman and Beagan 2013) and through food practices, people situate themselves in the world, as food “links the land to the hearth to the heart through the mediation of produce” (Ray 2004, p. 132).

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c) minds remember – and forget – the re-enactment of practices

Remembering food practices from home is also a process of dwelt re-embedding, as it evokes nostalgia and a sense of cultural belonging. By contrast, as threads of practices are forgotten, either from individual or collective memory, they disappear from the tapestry of practice. I will elaborate upon forgotten threads in the next section (the Left).

The threads of practice relating to remembering are the threads of changing knowledge, for example, learning to cook, memorizing recipes, learning recipes via YouTube and Instagram and learning between generations.

A dynamic Tapestry

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5.3. The Left

Fig. 10 In this framework, the threads that are not maintained through re-dwelt practices are called "the Left". (Image made by

author).

Diminishing intergenerational exchange

The threads of practice from one’s homeland would become less frequently incorporated into the daily practices of later generations. Although strong desires to re-embed belonging mean that people find creative ways to learn food practices of elder generations, as practices are re-enacted, certain threads might be more likely to be left out - the values and affordances of the re-dwelt landscape change.

In some instances, participants and I had limited knowledge of traditional food practices in the places they had come from, so it was not always obvious to identify Left threads as people and food practices change. Therefore, in this section I draw on an existing ethnographic study of the traditional food practices of people living in the Pamir Mountains of rural Afghanistan (Oudenhoven and Haider 2015) to hypothesize the Left threads from an Afghan participants’ practice of eating ‘qurut’ (dried fermented whey curd balls) in Stockholm.

Connection and disconnection: mountain pastures in Stockholm suburbs

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I was offered such a qurut whilst having dinner at the home of an Afghan family in Stockholm. Rather than pleasure or distaste, my primary sensation was confusion, as it was unlike anything I had ever known. I learnt that for everyone else there, the crumbly, sour tartness conjured feelings of nostalgic happiness. These dried balls can be bought in international food shops and are often mixed into savory dishes. Whilst the parents of the family, who have roots in the Wakhan and Parwan provinces, may have had direct experience making the dried balls from scratch, from sheep and goats milk, this is clearly not a practice that they carry out any longer. They eat this food that was developed in mountain pastures, out of the need to preserve fats for winter when animals produce less milk, despite now living in a modern industrialized city which does not necessitate such a practice. We can expect that the relations to place and ecology of such a food, are Left threads from the practice of eating qurut in Stockholm, especially for the children and myself, who have never churned buttermilk, dried whey, or milked a goat in a mountain pasture. Furthermore, our diets have probably never been short of essential nutrients or calories that people in the Pamirs obtain from qurut. This disembedding resembles disembedded paradoxes around processing dairy in the Pamirs. In Khuf village for example, “people send to the market the dairy products they have made during the summer and in the winter they use the money to buy industrial butter or margarine from Iran or China” of lower nutritional value (Oudenhoven and Haider 2015, p.434). Throughout this ethnography are anecdotes of how globalization is acting as a force of influence, eroding traditional practices in remote areas.

Taking a lens of migration to trace relationships between food cultural practices and sustainability

Master’s Thesis, 60 ECTS

Social-ecological Resilience for Sustainable Development Master’s

programme 2018/20, 120 ECTS

The “Tapestries of Practice” conceptual

framework

Taking a lens of migration to trace relationships

between food cultural practices and

sustainability

Abstract

Acknowledgements

Contents

Preface

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Migration from rural to urban and from agricultural to post-industrial societies

1. THEORETICAL DEPARTURE POINTS

2.1.

Dwelling in the biosphere: a place-oriented concept

2.2.

Politicization of the local in discourses of environmentalism and nationalism

2.3.

Disembedding of culture: a concept of displacement

2.4.

Re-dwelling

3. METHODOLOGY

3.1.

Methodological approach

3.2.

Case Selection

3.3.

Methods

3.4.

Data analysis

4. RESULTS

4.1.

Threads of changing practices and external structures of influence

4.1.

Common thread: holding (and using) agricultural knowledge and experience

4.2.

Common thread: changing pace in lifestyle

4.3.

Common thread: showing community care and solidarity

4.4.

Common thread: consuming processed foods

4.5.

Common thread: changing ingredients and materials

4.6.

Common thread: changing and conflicting values in place of origin and arrival

5. DISCUSSION

5.1.

Towards a framework: Tapestries of Practice

5.2.

The Warp meets the Weft

:

5.3.

The Left