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Long Abstract
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In 2020, global travel and commercial restrictions due to Covid-19 placed unprecedented pressures on food chains with particularly negative impacts on human collectives considered “marginal(ised)”, including rural Indigenous communities, and urban informal or semi-formal neighborhoods. The extraordinary conditions of the pandemic influenced a wide range of effects on local food practices and security, from an increase in malnutrition and correlated negative health outcomes, to the springing up of individual and collective food strategies. In some cases, the faults in global food chains favoured the revitalisation of peasant farmer practices and “traditional” foodways based on barter, small-scale commercial exchanges, and food sharing. There has also been evidence of the rejection of processed industrialised foods, banning food companies from selling in communities, as awareness of the role that malnutrition plays in fatal Covid-19 outcomes grew. In some urban settings, to address food shortages, food collectives emerged from community action networks. More than two years after the beginning of the pandemic, we aim to explore how (and to what extent) Covid-19 changed food practices and conceptualisations in rural Indigenous or “marginalised” urban settings, and whether these changes have persisted over time. We invite contributions that look at foodways, starting from the initial phases of the pandemic into current times, providing ethnographic examples of food strategies at household and/or community level, including their impact on health and wellbeing. Relatedly we consider food chains to be intricately interwoven with water, and water access, and understand the pressures that Covid-19 hygiene requirements may have exerted in settings where water access is limited; as such, submissions drawing on the water-food-health nexus will be welcomed as well. Food sits at the cross-roads of past and present social histories as well as of future imaginaries; we hope, therefore, to reflect on its role in times of disaster and uncertainty.
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