可持续饮食系统的研究进展与理论框架

Sustainable food system: Review and research framework

20世纪以来,伴随农业的工业化和食物链条的"远距化",典型食物危机事件不断涌现并沿着食物贸易网络蔓延至全球,引发了学界对饮食系统及其可持续性的持久关注。国外地理学界关于饮食系统主要有生产主义、消费主义和关系主义等认识。在梳理已有概念内涵的基础上,将这三类认识归结为不同情境下、特定形式的"身体-食物"关系,进而构建了以饮食原真、饮食安全、饮食健康为内在线索,以去地化和再地化为外在情境的分析框架,并藉此分析饮食系统的演变过程,提炼其可持续逻辑。进一步地,从"身体-食物"与"地方"的关系视角详细阐述了上述三个维度的具体内涵,并归纳了饮食原真与饮食安全、饮食原真与饮食健康以及饮食安全与饮食健康的交叉议题。

The sustainable development of food in the age of environmental change and global food crisis has become a public concern and simultaneously a central research agenda that gains growing attention from scholars with diverse research backgrounds. This paper presents a systematic review on the historical evolution of what is termed ’sustainable food system’ in Western geography from the 1960 s up till now and based on this retrospect, a relational perspective is put forward in this paper, which focuses on the embodiment of foodways and the interconnections between body and environment. This study sums up the cardinal rationales and principles in this new paradigm of sustainable food system in two steps. First, it suggests that ’body-food relation’, after a prolonged neglect in productivism agriculture geography and consumerism food geography, does function as the fundamental ontology in sustainable food system research. Above all, this relational paradigm rejects the nature-society dualism that fueled the division between food researches in physical and human geography, namely division between agriculture geography and food’s cultural geography. It undermines the traditional opinion on food as a transcendental reality that can achieve sustainability in-itself through spatial fix or quality certification. In contrast, relational paradigms conceptualize food as a unity of nature and society that emerges, in a bodily-connections manner, from the process of’things becoming food’. In this perspective, sustainable ’body-food relation’, which is radically unstable and embedded in dynamic socio-natures, is the fundamental rationale in a relationally sustainable food system. Meanwhile, food is not simply a container of energy or nutrition and bodies are also not merely a passive recipient of material or meaning. Instead, they are reciprocally constituted in both material and symbolic ways and are intrinsically place-based.Put another way, sustainable food system should be ever-changing and can only be achieved through re-localized foodways. Second, this paper identifies three key principles, namely food authenticity, food security and food health, in building a sustainable food system. Such principles should not be understood as a static goal, but a fluid process in place-based socionature contexts. Because food is considered to emerge from the process of ’body-food encounter’, these principles inevitably involve both materially and socially constructed authenticity, quantity security and cultural acceptability, physiological health and psychosocial wellbeing. Besides, relationally sustainable food system also highlights a focus on the socionature environment and multi-scale connotations of these principles, which further extends their meanings, such as food justice, food sovereignty, and nutrition convention. In summary,this study seeks to promote the synergies in food geography and it also calls for Chinese food geographers to be engaged in sustainable food researches through an integrative and systematic perspective.