Food, Place, Memory | Production, Plot, Story

This thesis explores the relationships between food, place and memory, in particular, through production, plot and story. To do this it engages the individual voices of food producers—my research participants—working small pieces of land in the peripheral spaces of Venice’s Lagoon and the rural fringes of Bristol. The research offers opportunities to hear the ways in which food production matters, and how different means of sense-making are negotiated and storied through it, in everyday life. The study combines bodily practice with narrative—working alongside producers, and recording their life stories—demonstrating the importance, and interrelatedness of the storied with the sensory. Paying attention to food production not only showed up areas of rupture, but also the creative strategies that producers employed to repair and narrate these disconnects and orientate themselves and others within the world. Following lines of tension emerging out of apprenticeship, this research challenges notions of tradition and argues that it cannot be reduced to one essential thing. Rather, multiple ontologies of tradition give rise to different enactments and effects. Considering place in practice, this research shows how cultivation can be used as a means to craft different types of place. Understanding people, places and practices as still unfolding, and listening to these small stories, this study makes audible processes of becoming, knowing and relating. Learning with food production, through its practicalities and narratives, this thesis contributes to current ethnographic and oral history literature in food studies, sensory geographies and ongoing conversations around individual experience.