Garden Time and Market Time: Finding Seasonality in Diverse Food Economies

Lucie Sovová, Department of Social Sciences, Wageningen University & Research, Netherlands

Petr Jehlička, CESCAME

This paper brings together two fast-developing bodies of literature: diverse (food) economies and food temporality. Critiques of the frantic pace of capitalism and calls for slowness or deceleration have been implicitly present in both postcapitalist economic imaginaries (e.g. degrowth) and the debates on more sustainable food systems (e.g. slow food, seasonal eating). Nonetheless, few scholars have engaged explicitly with the temporality of diverse food economies. Drawing on an in-depth study of urban gardening in Brno, Czechia our paper offers several theoretical contributions to this topic. First, responding to Gibson-Graham’s invitation to read for difference and not dominance, we investigate the interrelations and hierarchies among capitalist, alternative capitalist and noncapitalist food economies on the household level. We decentre the presumed dominance of market-based provisioning by showing that gardeners’ food choices are crucially shaped by their experience with food growing which in turn creates particular understandings of food quality. Second, we argue that the garden temporality plays a particularly determining role in the way other parts of the households’ diverse food economy are mobilised at certain times and for certain purposes. Unravelling how the cyclical experience of natural time in gardening seasons determines the social rhythm of food provisioning in a contemporary urban context provides a counter-narrative to the seemingly inevitable speed of just-in-time delivery models justified by the fast pace of Western modernity. Finally, we counterpose our case of traditional food self-provisioning to the fascination with novelty permeating much of the scholarship on diverse food economies. With this, we hope to open a debate on the temporal ontologies underpinning the ideas of capitalist modernity as well as postcapitalist prefiguration.

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