Support for Workshop Concerned with Current Trends in Foods and Food Movements in Postsocialist Settings

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This award to Dr. Melissa L. Caldwell (University of California, Santa Cruz) provides support for the international workshop to be held in collaboration with the Food Studies Centre of the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London). Issues of ethical food consumption, including food safety, consumer health, and the dynamics of macroeconomic policy effects on global food systems, are critically important for scholars, policy makers, farmers, producers, and consumers. By focusing on these topics in late socialist and formerly socialist societies, this workshop will provide new contexts for examining the interplay among market values, moral values, and other factors influencing food movements in emerging capitalist systems. The workshop also will consider the connections among political regimes, producers, and international trade regimes, and it will examine the effects of global regulatory regimes as well as more locally oriented food movements on local consumers.This workshop brings together, for the first time, leading international researchers in anthropology, sociology, geography, and environmental studies to share research on ethical food movements and consumption across a diverse cross-section of previously communist countries in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Africa, and market-oriented communist states such as China, Vietnam, and Cuba. Topics to be examined include: production of economic moralities through different economic global processes; food and farming as forms of resistance and critiques; models of health and civil society; supply and demand relationships outside formal market economy systems; national and international food safety policies; consequences of global governance systems; and models of sustainable development and environmentalism. A variety of ethnographically based qualitative and quantitative field data will be discussed at the workshop.This workshop is important because it will present research findings on the complexities of the contemporary global food system, with special attention to relationships between state, industry, and international trade within specific forms of governance, and their impact on citizen-consumers throughout the world. The workshop also supports international research collaboration and the mentoring of junior researchers and graduate students.