Caring Foodscapes - Can Food Shape Sustainable Scenarios? Practices and Hypotheses for the Venice Lagoon

Abstract

"We never talk enough about the influence of places on feelings," writes Yasmina Reza in her book 'Happy are the Happy'. In order to talk about environmental change and its impact on the human and non-human communities that live within it, the narrative has to start with what we hold dear and what we want to care for. To me, Venice is home for the body and home for the heart, while food and eating are about joy, connection and discovery. For these reasons, the final paper of the Environmental Humanities course will focus on the Venetian lagoon and ask whether we can care for its ecological and social ecosystem through the local food system, including production, distribution and consumption. In order to answer these questions and imagine possible future scenarios, the thesis will be quite broad in scope. It will contextualize the issues and immerse them in the specificities of the Venetian lagoon. Starting from a general framework defining the concept of sustainability, local food systems and socio-ecological services, the work will proceed by describing where these issues apply: the lagoon environment, how it has been formed, what the main anthropogenic interventions have been and how these have influenced the ecosystem dynamics and affected food production. Within this framework, the thesis will present six local realities and how each of them contributes to the environmental and social sustainability of the lagoon through food: some through production, others through research and education, or through cooking and conviviality. To understand the impact of these initiatives on the Venetian community, the results of a three-week questionnaire conducted between March and April 2024 will be analyzed. These results will help to define a space from which to imagine a wider spread of these practices and initiatives, trying to understand if food can be a tool to take care of our territory and the human and non-human communities that inhabit it, making our ecosystem sustainable. To read the environmental changes around us and in which we are immersed, environmental humanities become the roots of critical discourse encompassing science, literature, economics, philosophy, history and society. Individual and collective stories are needed to deconstruct a narrative that has shaped the way we think about the ecological crisis, indispensable tools to unleash the cultural forces needed to build a more sustainable future. Our stories thus become fundamental tools for the construction of new and alternative models, legitimation of knowledge and, potentially, liberation. To ensure environmental and social justice that is inter- and intra-generational, and not just about our individual permanence in the world, we need to listen, to observe and to feel. And we need all possible tools to create the dialogue that is fundamental to humanizing science and imagining new scenarios. Food is one of these.