Recently I came across an interesting news item from Russian Internet sources where social capital concept has been applied to blogging. Popular, among Russian Internet users, blog hosting LiveJournal (“Живой журнал, ЖЖ”) started a new system of calculating the popularity rankings of its blogs and community diaries for all of its users, based on social capital.

Social capital is understood by the company as index of communication between people and is displayed in the statistics of the site for all of those interested in numbers. The new system, according to its creators, can be excluded from ranking blogs that are artificially popular. For example, when blogs are being followed by so-called “blog bots” (accounts of non-existing people).

“The rating on the basis of social capital is valuable because the new system reflects only the “live” traffic and allows the owners of the diaries to adequately assess their position on the “blog court”” – says the head of LiveJournal Russia Ilya Dronov.
At the moment, LiveJournal has 5 million registered blogs. The audience of LiveJournal numbers 65 million people, 29 million of them live in Russia.

Looking at the literature one can briefly define social capital as value generated by a (social) network. Social capital is the main theme of my particular interest in research on innovation within alternative food networks. I wonder if the same operationalisation of the concept can and should be applied to our Easy to Digest blog.

In Late April in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil a great congress will take place: ‘World Nutrition Rio2012Knowledge Policy Action’ http://www.worldnutritionrio2012.com.br/ingles/index.php. What is interesting in addition to remarkable lecturers and riveting original programme, it is the fact that it will happen just three weeks before Rio+20. For those who want to attend the conference visit the web-page, it is attractively designed. And for those who are interested in how food and collective health are gaining momentum in the public and political spheres, it is time to start thinking how we can move from there to the everyday individual meal decision. Does anyone have some ideas about how to do it? Or there are interesting actions you want to share? It can be that food blogging is one of those.

The Purefoodlinks blog needs a new ‘face’. We want to adjust the top part and change some colours. Do you have a suggestion for a great picture that can serve as a ‘banner’? Remember, it has to be a copyright free picture. Suggestions for a name, colours or other items that can change the look and feel of this blog are more than welcome!

Looking forward to your creative suggestions!

Tastes like fresh milk

This gem of a food(-like?) product passed my camera, but not my lips, during a recent trip. Were someone to indulge my thoughts, the vitriol would be thick and the sardonicism – a work Etymology Online tells me originates in the Greek plant sardonion, which ‘caused facial convulsions resembling those of sardonic laughter, usually followed by death’, a result perhaps not ultimately unlike those of products like these – unbearable.

Instead, then, I leave the dear reader with the image alone and an invitation to contribute her own – rancorous or otherwise – commentary.

There is a new interesting initiative on the horizon: The Forgotten Feast. The Forgotten Feast is a new restaurant concept created specifically to highlight the 20 million tonnes of annual food wastage that exists within our society. Whether it’s fresh fish thrown back into the sea, vegetables ignored for being too ugly, or unusual cuts of meat simply discarded, The Forgotten Feast is making a clear and public declaration against waste.

The Forgotten Feast was launched in Autumn 2011. The first event was specifically focused on highlighting the incredible wastage of fish that happens as a consequence of EU quotas. In partnership with the food charity FareShare  and food waste activist Tristram Stuart, The Forgotten Feast rescues large quantities of unwanted food, and through the magic of head chef Tom Hunt (chef at Feeding5k and FOE), turns what would otherwise be wasted, into luxurious feasts. Using wild and seasonal foods, wasted foods, and foods ignored by the modern world, Tom creates a stunning new menu for each occasion based on the ingredients he is provided with. This is no greenwashed endeavour, everything from the location, to the furniture, to the food, to the zero waste recycling policy will be intrinsically sustainable, and will shine a spotlight on waste and excess in our society. 

If you want to play a role in this project to fight food waste or want to join one of the events, visit ww.tomsfeast.com.

We received an interesting reaction via the contact form from Tamara Guirao. Tamara Guirao is coordinator of  the Atlantic Arc Cities Conference and they are currently working on a project that links cities and the short-delivery (local) food system, which is called ANATOLE. She invites you to visit their web www.anatoleproject.eu for more info on the activities, and the blog anatolenetwork.blogspot.com for update on this question from several points of view. There are some interesting things to discover there!

Jumping from one video to another on youtube last night, I came across this advertisement and I was curious to know your opinion on it. It’s a celebration of Sibusiso, a new product of the DuPont corporation which is probably the biggest American chemical company. Just to have an idea about them we can just say that they invented material such Lycra, Teflon and so on. But now seems that they are getting much more interest in food than in chemistry. Or is it the same thing for them? I think that this video describe clearly the problems related with food, globalization, corporatization, market colonization: it’s an example of Good capitalism. The intention is to fight malnutrition, but the means is to do it through a highly processed product made out soya (one of the less sustainable crop after corn) which has the ambition of being exported everywhere to solve the old problem of world hunger: “We can benefit not only Africa, but South America, Asia.. and the whole world”.. When Jesus has multiplied bread and fishes perhaps he had not yet thought about using Sisubiso®!

As follow-up of the successful Working Group on “New Forms of Consumer Engagement in Food Networks: Diversity, Mechanisms & Dynamics” that was held at the ESRS Conference in Chania, Crete last August 2011 (see previous entry on this blog) we have organized Working Groups on similar topics at different scientific events in the coming year.

The different scientific events for which WGs are organised are the following.  Specific details and call texts can be found at the indicated links to conference websites:

1. International Conference “Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society“ on Multifunctional Agriculture and Urban-Rural Relations, 1-4 April 2012 in Wageningen, The Netherlands
Working Group 3 “Exploring ‘civic food networks’ and their role in enabling sustainable urban food systems“, convened by Petra Derkzen, Cornelia Flora, Markus Schermer and Henk Renting
Deadline for abstract submission extended to 20 January 2012. Deadline for paper submission 1 March 2012.

2. 10th European International Farming Systems Association (IFSA) Symposium on “Producing and reproducing farming systems: New modes of organisation for sustainable food systems of tomorrow” in Aarhus, Denmark, from 1-4 July 2012

Workshop 4.1 “‘Civic food networks’ as driver for sustainable food and farming systems“, convened by Chris Kjeldsen, Markus Schermer and Henk Renting
Deadline for abstract submission extended to 3 January 2012. Deadline for paper submission 1 March 2012

3. XIII World Congress of Rural Sociology of the International Rural Sociology Association (IRSA) on “The New Rural World: From Crises to Opportunities” in Lisbon, Portugal from 29 July to 4 August 2012
Session number 64 “New Forms of Consumer-Producer Cooperation within Food Networks: Comparing Experiences in the North and the South“, convened by Henk Renting, Gianluca Brunori, Flávia Charão Marques and Claire Lamine
Deadline for abstract submission 15 January 2012, Deadline for paper submission 15 May 2012

We propose to use the concept “Civic Food Networks” as a common denominator for the type of newly emerging food networks that we wish to explore in these different Working Group sessions. This term has several advantages compared to other commonly used concepts such as “Short Food Supply Chains”, which has mainly been used in producer-centred analysis and in relation to rural development impacts, and “Alternative Food Networks” which mainly proposes an opposition to dominant, conventional food systems and implicitly supposes that these types of networks never will become mainstream and will continue to remain marginal. Additionally, the term “Civic Food Networks” clearly expresses that the food networks we want to explore have their basis within civil society and that, rather than merely as economic actors, consumers and producers in these networks mainly cooperate as “citizens” in new forms of collective action to shape the food system. As such, they can be understood as expressions of new forms of “food citizenship” in which consumers and producers together regain control over the ways in which food is produced and relations between state, market and civil society within food governance are actively reshaped.

We have tried to ensure that the various WG meetings have a different thematic focus and broaden the geographical range of our debates. While one Working Group focuses on the potential role of Civic Food Networks in enabling sustainable urban food systems, another rather analyses their contribution to sustainability transitions of farming systems and the farm and regional level. For all conferences we aim to broaden our debates beyond Europe and explicitly invite for comparisons with similar experiences in the United States and comparisons between Civic Food Network experiences in the North and South.

We welcome your contribution to any of the Working Groups indicated above and would be grateful if you forward this message to other people that might be interested.

We are also trying to establish a mailing list of people interested in debates around Civic Food Networks, with the aim to exchange information on interesting events, publications, case study examples and/or possibilities for publications or research proposals. If you want to be included in this mailing list, please contact us at <rentingh@gmail.com> or <Markus.Schermer@uibk.ac.at>

As mentioned in previous posts on the Rural Sociology weblog, an international conference entitled ‘Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society’ will be held from 1 to 4 April 2012 in Wageningen. A whole range of different topics and research findings will be presented and discussed in 20 different working groups, including a variety of food themes such as civic food networks, public food procurement, urban agriculture, transition approaches in urban food provisioning, and urban and regional planning. The deadline for submitting abstracts was originally 20 December 2011 but the conference committees, in consultation with the working group convenors, have decided to postpone this deadline by one month. So if you are interested to present and discuss your research activities (or plans) in one of the working groups, please send your abstract to the convenor of the working group before 20 January 2012. You are kindly requested to use the abstract submission form.

I’ve been intrigued for some time by the so many ways that ‘sustainability’ gets conflated. It doesn’t necessarily surprise me that most people don’t find it easy to engage with such a lofty idea, and usually I just agree with whatever people tell me sustainability ‘is’, smile, have another drink, and invite my interlocutor to keep on talkin’. (‘That’s right! I hear sustainable stapling techniques are all the rage these days in furniture upholstery hobby circles!?’) But of course part of the reason that sustainability often narrows to notions such as ‘local’ or ‘organic’ is that sustainability activists themselves are guilty of a reductionism that’s not only simplistic but also public.

All this is to acknowledge that sustainability advocates don’t necessarily deal well with the tensions inherent to the concept they want to promote. One important area of tension, I think, is that between the worlds of sustainability and technological advancement. Don’t get me wrong: I’m the person you’ll spy in Bute Park tasting wild plants as they grow. But, at the same time, I do think there’s a key place for technology in the sustainable food movement, and I even think things like cocina tecno-emocional are really cool. Of course the highly processed food culture that dominates contemporary landscapes – literally – with its aberrational manipulations such as trans fats and twenty-year Twinkies isn’t good. On the other hand, it’s not the technology itself that’s bad: man has used various technological innovations to manipulate food for thousands of years (think garum, flour, smoked meat and salted fish). Like just about everything else, it’s not the thing that’s good or bad so much as how it gets used.

On that note, I’ll share with you two recent videos that illustrate two very different sides of food technology – and I’ll be most curious to hear your interpretation of what they portray.

The first, from the TedX Harvard Law event (titled ‘Forum on Food Policy’), doesn’t give us a new message: most readers will have picked up on the associations between contemporary processed-food diets and poor health outcomes. But David Ludwig’s lecture does serve as a nice compendium of the research results which link the two – with sources cited, no less – and might serve as well for its good illustration of the bad use of technology.

The second features Homaro Cantu and Ben Roche showing the food tricks they’ve invented at their vanguard Chicago restaurant Moto. What’s interesting is that they’ve used haute deconstructive and reconstructive techniques to ask whether such methods could create a more ‘sustainable’ food system. Among their ‘flavour transformation’ tricks are turning corn, beets and barley (a cow’s food) into ‘beef-without-the-cow-in-between’, watermelon into ‘tuna’, and hay into ‘barbecue sauce’. What they create is all but natural and unprocessed, and yet they claim that these methods could ‘turn food miles into food feet’ and be a solution in the quest for food system sustainability. Cantu and Roche aren’t typical sustainability actors, and their methods are a far cry from popular protest and school gardens. Yet they raise interesting questions and at least suggest the prospect of using food technology for good.

http://www.ted.com/talks/homaro_cantu_ben_roche_cooking_as_alchemy.html

(*sorry, the video uploader isn’t working, so you’ll have to follow the link.)

So, what’s a sustainability advocate to think? More to the point, what do you think: where does food technology fit into a sustainable food future?