Wendy Wills, Chair, BSA Food Study Group and Conference Commitee
It is very satisfying to know that so many people enjoyed this year’s conference – I’ve had so many emails from grateful, happy, inspired delegates, on top of the many who personally passed on their thanks during the conference that this kind of event exists. I think the conference particularly inspires those from a public health, nutrition or dietetics background who often have little access or time to find out about social scientific research on food and eating. I also hope, though, that academics and researchers from the social sciences found the event useful – in terms of providing a forum and an audience specifically interested in food and I also hope that such colleagues find it useful to discuss their work with a multi-disciplinary audience. Am I right? Please let me know!
By the end of the conference my appetite for reflective, philosophical and theoretical perspectives, rather than the merely descriptive or empirical offerings, was almost sated – though there is definitely scope for further improvement. We, as a network, need to keep digging to debate ‘what it all means’ – theories need revisiting (it was nice to hear mentions of Durkheim though!), new theories perhaps need developing and we need to keep talking to each other to make this happen (not to mention making time to think and reflect….which is getting more and more difficult!).
The conference particularly made me think about whether there is a need to keep collecting new data or whether we need a rigorous exploration of the data that already exists – within our own archives as well as within the national data archive (http://www.esds.ac.uk/) – and the need to share and discuss such data with each other to interrogate all the possibilities for new insights. I also wondered about the reliance within qualitative studies on individual interviews and focus groups – could the same results be achieved through email discussion and social networking with/between participants? I think so… and Sarah Nettleton’s paper on analysing data from the Mass Observation archive (http://www.massobs.org.uk/accessing_material_online.htm) gave me hope that there is rich description to be mined from giving individuals the opportunity to tell us about themselves, in their own time and space. And in these cash-strapped and uncertain times, saving money on data collection, and applying for smaller research grants can only be a good thing.
I had a niggling concern during the conference that all the wonderful talk and discussion about food systems, farming, urban agriculture and rural livelihoods outweighed reflection on how this ‘joins up’ with the everyday – there were some excellent papers on domestic food practices, for example, but this was not joined up with the other topics I’ve just described – for most people, for most of the time, despite growing awareness of the need for sustainable food systems and some truly excellent local initiatives to improve access to tasty, unprocessed food – food will continue to be bought in large supermarkets. Can this be tackled? Should it be? It makes me nervous to think that a concentration on sustainability and food security will not tackle the bigger picture and that there will be a (further) polarisation between supermarket and non-supermarket shoppers which will particularly stigmatise families from lower social class groups. Food for thought… and I’d welcome some feedback on this – I didn’t (of course!) hear all 60+ papers at the conference so perhaps some of those I didn’t hear tackled some of these issues?
What else did I enjoy at this year’s conference? Sheila Dillon’s reflections during the drinks reception were amusing and insightful and it was a real pleasure to meet Sheila after listening to her for a good many years on BBC Radio 4’s Food Programme. I enjoyed meeting up with old friends and meeting a few new ones; the food! (what did you think?), the refreshing non-alcoholic cocktails (hope you enjoyed my insistence on avoiding cartons of lukewarm orange juice!) and working with Jude and Polly at the British Library – they are an absolute joy to work with and their passion for promoting the social sciences fuels my own. Whilst an awful lot of effort goes into making these conferences happen – I get to work with an amazing, supportive committee – I can’t wait to start planning the 2012 conference!!
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