Anthropology Seminar Series:

Cultivating bread: Imperial transoceanic shifts and current alternatives in staple food production

Speaker: Ailin Naderbagi – University of Sydney

Host: Dr Shiori Shakuto

Hybrid Event: A02 Room 441 and Zoom

3:00–5:00 PM (Sydney time, GMT+10)

In this presentation I provide a critical historical discussion of the ways industrial farming and food processing developed from the mid-19th century onward. This is not only aimed at providing historical context, but to theoretically synthetise the present alternative food movement – specifically the artisanal grain chain which is the empirical focus of my research – with the dominant food system to which it is responding. I specifically attend to cereal diversity – its erosion on the one hand, and producers’ experiments with it on the other – to show the ways farming and food processing are integrated. My presentation will highlight the permeable boundaries between alternative and conventional food supply in Australia, while also linking the anthropology of food with considerations of crop biodiversity.

Ailin recently completed her PhD at the department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. For her research she conducted fieldwork with bakers, millers and farmers in Australia engaged with the artisanal bread market. In her thesis she was interested in why the pursuit of ‘real food’ is symbolically loaded in industrialised countries such as Australia, and what bread can tell us about the society, and world, we live in.