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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam

EATWELL: A Comparative Material-Semiotic Ethnography of Food Systems and More-than-Human Health in Bhutan

Alternative title: Matsystemer, helse og økologi i Bhutan: en komparativ etnografisk tilnærming (EATWELL)

Awarded: NOK 12.0 mill.

Project Number:

324158

Application Type:

Project Period:

2021 - 2027

Subject Fields:

Partner countries:

Food systems—food from production to digestion and related contexts—contribute significantly to disease and environmental degradation. Hence, transforming food systems is thus key to improve sustainability and health, and requires attentiveness to the physical and meaningful aspects that affect food production and consumption. This project seeks to enrich the current sustainable-food-systems-for-health agenda by including important socio-cultural aspects besides the more common nutritional, biological, ecological, and technological aspects in the development of an integrated approach to food system. EATWELL pursues this holistic ambition with Bhutan as our informative and critical case. In a first stage, we will examine and describe the food system in the cultural heartland of Bhutan, exploring the cultivation, foraging, herding, eating patterns and the like. We will thereafter examine why the food system is constituted the way it is by examining its connections with broader environmental, cultural, and religious factors. After describing and explaining how food systems and practices are constituted, we will investigate their effects on nutrient intakes. In a second stage, we will scale-up this examination of the food system to additional sites across Bhutan. The methods for investigation entail ethnography, nutritional surveys and extended ethnographic nutritional case studies. The project has following key aims: 1) Turn food systems approaches more sensitive to local environments and cultures, 2) Learn from Bhutan’s approach to happiness and environment as they have been key in developing a more socially-oriented approach to development, 3) Improve health and nutrition in a culture-sensitive way by engaging stakeholders and relevant actors and end-users in Bhutan, and 4) Craft a model of food system development that contributes to Sustainable Development Goals in a culture-sensitive way and that can be replicated and adapted in different contexts.

EATWELL examines the entanglement of food systems and health in the context of One Health, Planetary Health, and the like, considering interconnections between people, animals, plants and environments that shape health. Yet, we seek to enrich these by deploying the concept of more-than-human health and by studying Bhutanese approaches to the environment, food, nutrition and health, and thereby critically assess the biological universalist assumptions undergirding these global approaches. Our interdisciplinary global team will examine the food systems in their complex entanglements with health, nutrition and biosocial environments. We first conduct a material-semiotic ethnography of the Bhutanese and regional food systems in 7 sites for comparison. We will examine key physical and socio-cultural aspects pertaining to cultivating, cattle and yak herding, foraging, buying, cooking, sharing and eating as well as how these vary according to different contexts, including everyday life, ritual events, healing and biomedical practices, gender and age (WP1). We add a particularly focus on the entanglements of food with different conceptualizations and enactments of body, health and cosmology in these sites (WP2). The findings from different sites will be analyzed and compared (WP1, 2, & 4). In the wake of these ethnographies and analyses, we will conduct a nutritional survey (WP3) during one time point among 250 people in 1 or 2 of the sites. The nutritional survey is contextualized by the ethnographies (WP's1 & 2) and will provide the larger context for the extended ethnographic nutritional case study (WP3) where food consumption and nutritional intake are measured conjointly among a small subselection in the 1 or 2 sites of the survey, and determine how intake is shaped by different contexts and practices. Once these data are collected, we will work intensely with the whole team on integrating these heterogeneous data sets and analyses into an integrated food systems frame inspired by our conceptual approach (WP4). To conclude, we will develop an institutional frame for continued interdisciplinary research on food and health, and for multi-sectoral cooperation in policy implementation in Bhutan and beyond. To facilitate such frame, We will develop a model for mapping and visualising complex and integrated food systems with the purpose of valorization (WP4).

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Funding scheme:

FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam