Regenerative Grains and Greens: Cultivating Sustainability and ‘Affective’ Foodscapes

Speaker:
Dr Jo Sharma, Director Feeding City Lab; Associate Professor, Food and Environmental Studies; University of Toronto, Canada

Abstract:
Have you eaten (rice) today? Numerous social encounters begin with such a question – it voices the symbolic, material, and affective resonances of eating and sharing foods – usually, staples derived from ‘agrarian environments’ (Agarwal & Sivaramakrishnan). It is a collective ethos of sharing and caring that we focus on today, with a journey through the multispecies terrain of the rice paddies, millet plots, and vegetable beds of southern India – whose human actors are the Akayaval and Karumady food and farming collectives of Kerala; and the Seed Island and Women’s Collectives of Tamil Nadu. We will explore how these grassroots groups strive to attain biocultural spaces where children are nourished on ‘safe foods’ while parents might cultivate regenerative seeds – and futures. And we will consider how we – global north scholars – can act in solidarity with communities of ‘affective sustainable landscapes’ (Carolan) and ‘global foodscapes’ (Begin & Sharma).

Bio:
Jo Sharma studied History at the Universities of Delhi and Cambridge; she is now an Associate Professor of Food and Environmental Studies at the University of Toronto, where she helped found the Culinaria Research Centre. She co-edits the ‘Culinaria’ book series (University of Toronto Press), the Global Food History (T&F) Journal, and edits the Empires in Perspective (Routledge) book series. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and a Board Member of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS): in that capacity she is co-organizing an international workshop with Asia-Pacific scholars – top be held at the Universities of Osaka and Kyoto in October 2027 (and invites interested enquiries from prospective participants). 

Jo is the founder-director of the Feeding City Lab which documents and supports socially just, culturally relevant, and ecologically sustainable food infrastructure, and socio-ecological transitions worldwide: https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/projects/feedingcity/.

Her community-forward research covers the topics of food sovereignty, imperial, diasporic, and urban foodscapes, sustainable food systems, mountain ecologies, street foods, and plantations. She is the author of Empire’s Garden (Duke 2012), and the forthcoming Mountains of Empire (California 2026). Her articles include Empires of Food; Gardens, Markets, and Migrants; Global Mobilities and Local Immobilities of Tea; Food Cries, Historical City Sounds, and Silencing of Street Vendors; to Seeing Histories from the Margins: An Indigenous Labour Force on Everest. Public reports include Ethnocultural Gardens and Urban Growing Toward SDGs; and Rice: Traditional, Climate-Smart, Resilient.