Food Circuits: Hidden Connections between Migrants and Societies

Most fruit and vegetables required and enjoyed by European and North American societies would not be possible without the planting, harvesting and transporting performed by migrant labourers. Yet, the contribution of migrants to crucial food systems is generally hidden in the experience of buying and consuming food. In this project, I take asparagus from Germany, oranges from Spain and strawberries from California as the vantage points from which to see connections between migrants and societies as well as the ways in which those connections become invisibilized. I focus on embodied experiences in food circuits in order to understand the labour of producing and transporting food and the process of consuming and incorporating food into oneself. Tracing asparagus, oranges and strawberries through their circulation, I investigate the embodied experiences of migrant farm labourers – who are treated simultaneously as essential, disposable and sometimes prohibited; supply chain workers – who are made up increasingly of migrants and work under tight delivery time constraints; and consumers – who eat with diverse intentions of survival, enjoyment, identity and ethics. I propose a new way of seeing social and embodied connections between migrants and societies – through the beauty, brutality and necessity of food. With FOODCIRCUITS, I will provide novel contributions on three primary fronts:(i) developing a theory of connections between migrants and societies – including on embodied levels – by following fruit and vegetables as they circulate from the hands that pick them, through the arms that deliver them to the mouths that eat them; (ii) re-conceptualizing the ways in which indirect connections between different categories of people are invisibilized through the infrastructures and processes of producing, transporting and consuming food; (iii) expanding collaborative methods and ethics in field research across steep social and power hierarchies.