Degrowth 2020: food matters

Call for interventions – *Food matters* the role of your dinner plate in degrowing the economy

A subtheme at *Degrowth2020* the 7th International Degrowth and 16th ISEE Joint Conference: Building Alternative Livelihoods in times of ecological and political crisis *Manchester 1 to 5 September 2020*

As the world races toward a projected 9 billion inhabitants, the failings of dominant food systems are impossible to deny: severely polluting, the cause of malnutrition, unevenly distributed, unjustifiably wasteful and their power concentrated in the hands of few corporations. The industrial food and agriculture apparatus drives climate chaos, biodiversity loss, water shortages, planetary urbanisation and economic growth.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, visions for and transformative practices of the food regime are plenty, such as: intensifying agricultural output by inserting precision technology, robotics, digital gadgetry and data into farmers’ fields; devising urban hydroponics, vertical systems, and fully controlled environments; funnelling plant protein through hi-tech machinery and enlisting genetically modified organisms to grow ‘meat’ in laboratories; introducing dietary guidelines and related public policies; developing community-supported agriculture, permaculture forest gardens, regenerative farming, subversive plant breeding and other agroecological approaches.

In this subtheme, we explore alternative visions for transforming food production and distribution and what their different implications are for individual, community and planetary health, as well as for the configuration of power relations: what kinds of livelihoods and what kinds of habitats are created by any particular vision?

*Possible interventions*: academic papers, short films, lightning talks, mini performances, etc.

*Topics* (not limited to and in no particular order):

• Diet and degrowth
• Metabolic rift and subsistence
• Political agroecology
• Intersections of soil, individual, community and planetary health
• Socio-ecological effects of sustainability transitions in agriculture
• Solidarity economy and cultural (inter-species) alliances
• Do carrots scream?
• Humanity in a complex web of life
• Food literacy
• Eating insects
• Animism and food
• Food industry frontiers
• Value chains and value change
• Civilisational diseases and diet
• Starting your own farming/growing/cooking/distribution project/network?
• Taking your health into your own hands
• Microbiomes, macroeconomics and food politics

Please send short proposals/abstracts of no more than 250 words by *February 24th*
to nina.moeller@coventry.ac.uk and martin.pedersen@coventry.ac.uk

More information here>>