Towards a Dignified Food Security? Discourses of Dignity, Development and Culture in New York City and Bogotá

Description

In light of a severe, changing and globally implicative New Food Equation, marked perhaps above all else by the dynamics of a new, bimodal food insecurity and the simultaneous rising importance of cities, new approaches to address food security at urban scales suggest promise. But as such efforts are relatively new, the discourses and activities of urban actors are understood to only a limited extent. Moreover, while attention to food security per se is robust and growing, attention to the discursive and narrative dimensions that ultimately construct both the real nutritional achievements and the real experiential implications of such policy is not. In this research, I apply analytical methods informed by the interpretive, critical and ethnographic traditions to understand (some of) the cultural, ideological and philosophical particularities of these new dynamics and contexts, examining the cases of two large cities in the North and South, New York City and Bogotá. Tandem to the empirical work, I explore the philosophical tenets that ground food security efforts in the two studied cities and more generally, and I finally settle upon the purposefully normative appeal for motion towards a new concept: dignified food security. Contents Abbreviated Dissertation Summary .............................................................................................. iv Contents ......................................................................................................................................... v Executive Summary ...................................................................................................................... ix The PUREFOOD Programme .................................................................................................... xiv Author’s preface .......................................................................................................................... xv Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... xvii Chapter 1 ............................................................................................................ 1 Introduction: A new food insecurity .......................................................................... 1 Introduction .............................................................................................................................................................. 2 The context: A global portrait of crisis, cities, and food ......................................................................... 3 Research questions ................................................................................................................................................ 8 The case studies ...................................................................................................................................................... 9 New York City ............................................................................................................................................................ 9 Bogotá ........................................................................................................................................................................ 12 Social and theoretical relevance ..................................................................................................................... 21 The remainder of this study ............................................................................................................................. 25 Chapter 2 .......................................................................................................... 27 Methodological considerations ............................................................................... 27 Opening remarks: The research philosophy ............................................................................................. 28 The interpretivist tradition ............................................................................................................................... 31 Critical realism ....................................................................................................................................................... 32 Research design ..................................................................................................................................................... 33 Global methodology: The case study ............................................................................................................ 33 Data access methods ............................................................................................................................................ 36 Fieldwork: NYC............................................................................................................................... 39 Fieldwork: Bogotá ........................................................................................................................... 40 Analytical methods ............................................................................................................................................... 42 Interpretive methods ........................................................................................................................ 42 Discourse analysis ............................................................................................................................ 43 Anthropology, ethnography and analysis-through-writing .............................................................. 45 On rigor and quality ............................................................................................................................................. 48 Ethics .......................................................................................................................................................................... 50 Summary: The how of this research ............................................................................................................. 50 Chapter 3 .......................................................................................................... 53 Food security: A grand challenge ............................................................................. 53 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................ 54 Food security: A contemporary ‘grand challenge’ .................................................................................. 54 Generalized thematic shifts .............................................................................................................................. 58 From production-side to consumption-side: The shift to ‘access’ .................................................... 59 From quantity to quantity and quality ........................................................................................................ 61 ASHE, L.M. Towards a dignified food security? vi From poor-country to all-country ................................................................................................................. 64 From rural to rural and urban ........................................................................................................................ 65 Summary: Bases for understanding food security ................................................................................. 66 Chapter 4 .......................................................................................................... 68 The contested discourse space ................................................................................ 68 The food security discourse space: Defined by disagreement .......................................................... 69 Prominent discourses: General frameworks for understanding food security ......................... 71 Productivist (or neo-productivist) framework ......................................................................................... 72 ‘Place-based’ or context-dependent framework ...................................................................................... 74 Right To Food (RTF) framework .................................................................................................................... 74 Livelihoods and food security framework .................................................................................................. 80 Food and Nutrition Security (FNS) framework ....................................................................................... 81 The omnipresent pillars: A survey of visual food security representations ............................... 83 Summary: The current food security discourse space ......................................................................... 91 Chapter 5 .......................................................................................................... 93 Perspectives on development .................................................................................. 93 The development literature: An introduction .......................................................................................... 94 Conventional, capitalist, neoliberal or modernization development perspectives ................. 95 Common alternative visions ............................................................................................................................ 98 Radical critique and the postdevelopment perspective ................................................................... 100 Special place of hunger, nutrition and food security in development ........................................ 106 Summary: The variable ideation of development ............................................................................... 109 Chapter 6 ........................................................................................................ 110 The discourse package of food security .................................................................. 110 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................... 111 The ‘discourse package’ of food security ................................................................................................. 112 The analysis .......................................................................................................................................................... 113 Looking ahead ..................................................................................................................................................... 114 Chapter 7 ........................................................................................................ 117 The capitalist development discourse ..................................................................... 117 The capitalist development discourse and its dominance in NYC ................................................ 118 Credence in the market ..................................................................................................................................... 122 The food system as economic generator ................................................................................................... 127 Faith in technology, science and expert knowledge ............................................................................. 131 Summary: Capitalist ideology’s firm hold on NYC ............................................................................... 135 Chapter 8 ........................................................................................................ 138 The human development discourse ........................................................................ 138 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................... 139 The express human priority .......................................................................................................................... 140 ASHE, L.M. Towards a dignified food security? vii Preferentiality or prioritarianism .............................................................................................................. 144 Dignity .................................................................................................................................................................... 146 Summary: The permeation of human development discourse in Bogotá ................................. 157 Chapter 9 ........................................................................................................ 158 Development and human rights ............................................................................. 158 Introduction: The transformative power of rights ............................................................................. 159 Human rights in Bogotá: The big picture ................................................................................................ 159 The right to food ................................................................................................................................................. 162 Agency, participation, democracy and empowerment ...................................................................... 169 Summary: Visions of the right to food ...................................................................................................... 172 Chapter 10 ...................................................................................................... 174 Two developments at once? ................................................................................... 174 The co-existence of development discourses in Bogotá ................................................................... 175 Ambiguity of the discursive co-existence ................................................................................................ 180 An example of ambiguity: The PMA ........................................................................................................... 184 Summary: Negotiating development .......................................................................................................... 188 Chapter 11 ...................................................................................................... 190 Culture and food security: An introduction ............................................................. 190 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................... 191 Culture and food security ............................................................................................................................... 191 Food culture or foodways ............................................................................................................................... 195 The bogotano particularity ............................................................................................................................ 197 Summary: Culturally particular food securities, Part I ..................................................................... 208 Chapter 12 ...................................................................................................... 209 A culture of anomies .............................................................................................. 209 New York City and the obstinacy of anomie .......................................................................................... 210 Reconnecting and reeducating .................................................................................................................... 215 Rewarding ‘good behaviour’ ......................................................................................................................... 217 Summary: Culturally particular food securities, Part II .................................................................... 219 Chapter 13 ...................................................................................................... 220 The cultural construction of food policy ................................................................. 220 Food-health narratives: Culture’s glaring incursion into policy ................................................... 221 Beyond food itself: Culture that ‘goes all the way down’ ................................................................. 226 Summary: Framing the cultural dimension of food security .......................................................... 228 ASHE, L.M. Towards a dignified food security? viii Chapter 14 ...................................................................................................... 229 Towards dignified food security? ............................................................................ 229 A renewed invitation to philosophy and normativity ....................................................................... 232 Human rights and dignity: Sublime substance, controversial arguments ................................ 233 A focus on human dignity ................................................................................................................................ 237 Dignity and the Catholic intellectual tradition ...................................................................................... 241 Dignified food security .................................................................................................................................... 243 Making dignity real ............................................................................................................................................ 245 The agentic priority ........................................................................................................................................... 248 Articulating a new vision of food security ................................................................................................ 249 Summary: A new construct for food security ........................................................................................ 251 Chapter 15 ...................................................................................................... 252 Final thoughts ........................................................................................................ 252 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................... 253 Limitations of this project .............................................................................................................................. 254 Value of this project and recommendations for ulterior research ............................................... 255 References ............................................................................................................. 259