Keynote 2

Abstract

Home and community gardening, mushroom and berry picking, and small-scale beekeeping are widespread though often overlooked ways of producing food. Through a diverse economic lens, these "hands-on” practices of food production appear as intentional, meaningful activities which support the livelihoods and wellbeing of their practitioners. At the same time the everyday practices of food production bring forth the multispecies relationality of economies: how making a living is always already entangled with getting along with human and non-human others.

Dr Pieta Savinotko has conducted multi-sited ethnographic research on different forms of food production performed by one’s own hands. In this talk they examine the hand-made, multispecies economies of food production in relation to plantations and plantationocentrism. In plantationocentric material-semiotic practices plantations are enacted as the most essential, if not the only significant form of primary production, whereas other types of production, such as gardening or foraging, are marginalised or made invisible.

Plantationocentrism is not limited to agricultural policies and practices: in Finland, where the research is based, plantationocentrism prevails in forest management which aims at maximising timber production. However, the relation between plantation silviculture and foraging for food in the forests is more complex than it first may seem, as exemplified by a particular mushroom, gyromitra esculenta, which often grows at clear-cut forest areas. Guided by this mushroom, the talk will propose approaching plantationocentrism as an ongoing trouble to think with – and beyond.