FieldTable

FieldTable took place in Lynedoch, South Africa, in 2017. The thanks-giving ritual brought together students and educators, gardeners and farmers, organisational leaders and activists, bakers and chefs, scientists and ecologists, journalists and researchers and artisan food producers to explore new agroecological futures for South Africa’s food and farming. Together, the diners ate organic and biodynamic food grown, harvested and prepared from no more than a few miles from the table. The ritual invited time to be-with the food and land, to share conversation, and to hear the experiences and aspirations of all those breaking bread together. You can read more about FieldTable in The Art of Food Rituals as a Practice in Sympoiethics within Julia Wrights pioneering anthology ‘Subtle Agroecologies: Farming with the Hidden Half of Nature’.

FieldTable was a space for awakening, inhabiting and re-imagining agroecological futures for the region. During the ritual, two questions were asked: at the start of the meal, ‘What are you hungry for’? and, at the end, ‘How has your hunger been satisfed’? Here follows a selection of participants’ responses which shares the diversity of perspectives from women and men of different occupations, ages, cultural heritages and ethnic communities.

“The return of the sacred to the table has created time, space and thinking partners to look at this hunger, to imagine its voice, its sounds, its texture, its feeling and fnd out how to hear it, how to respond to it.”

“I am starving for revolution to our food systems. Starving to see farmers doing away with the systems that harm the mother earth. I want food to be accessible to everyone because food is life.”

“A society where diversity is treasured, where food is not wasted; where Nature becomes and is the most revered or ‘desirable’ thing, asset, goal; where food and conversation serve to respect the farmer, the cook, the soil, and ourselves.”

“I understand collaboration of life-giving and not life-taking. The creation of living community in that time and space helped create a collective mindset to preserve and create energy that is positive.”

“Let’s go to the townships with this. Because in the townships, we do get to reach people who are practicing organic gardening, who are using indigenous knowledge to produce.”

As a participatory food ritual, FieldTable emerged with communities of place through attending to the diverse voices, energies and expressions of the human and the other-than-human world. By making visible the life-giving connections between humans and the sentient Earth and choreographing emancipatory encounters between the bodymind, the matter of food and the genius loci of habitats, this performative ritual engaged participants in convivial and interdependent exchanges with the living food cycle.

It is within this nexus that food becomes a changemaker with its role in re-orienting the matter of our thinking, reshaping our landscapes and re-confguring our response-abilities as humans within the geography of our planet. In co-creating naturecultural rituals, we are reviving thinking-feeling practices that respect each other’s embodied knowing, attend to the voice of nature and cultivate a sympoiethics that draws its life-affrming power from our caring for and becoming-with the living Earth

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