Food, meaning-making and ontological uncertainty: Exploring ‘urban foraging’ and productive landscapes in London

Abstract

While efforts have been made to reframe cities as food-producing landscapes, it remains important to attend to the contingent and relational matter of food, and the potentially ambiguous role that urban space itself may play in its figurative and material definitions. Urban food scholarship or practice that focuses uniquely on concerns of production and provision tends to overlook the blurry edges and ontological uncertainty of what food is, what is food and how matter becomes food. This paper partly draws on existing work connected to the relational materialism of food and its various modes of becoming, and re-examines this with reference to the practices of ‘urban food foraging’ in London, UK. It builds on mixed-method fieldwork in London and develops a series of vignettes concerning unattended and unintended plants in the city and their uncertain status as potential foodstuffs. The central argument is that the ontological status of ‘food’ cannot be found in its edibleness or bare matter but through the varying material, cultural, legal, environmental, scientific and spatial assemblages which give rise to it. ‘Urban foraging’ helps reveal this tension through the practices’ transgressive qualities and the disruptive influence of the proximity, density and diversity of urban space. In so doing, it presents the moment of picking or acquisition as an additional – but not definitive – moment of ‘meaning-making’ in the food system, serving to widen our focus too often fixated on specific moments in linear renderings of production, consumption and disposal. As a challenge to our otherwise shared understanding of food, it speaks to those seeking to reconfigure the position of cities in the food system (and food production within cities), those concerned with the greening of urban environments, and those seeking alternative modes of generating and distributing food.