Call for Papers

Collection no. 014: Foodways

Fall 2025

Editors: Matthäus Rest and Dolly Kikon

Food and infrastructure interact in multiple ways. Industrialized food is dependent on modern infrastructure for its production, processing and distribution. On its way from producer to consumer, it is often transformed beyond recognition, and it moves on a global scale. Bart Penders and colleagues (2014) use the difference between catching a fish and buying fish fingers at your neighborhood supermarket to drive home this point. Food often undergoes a complete deconstruction and reconstitution before it arrives in our refrigerators in a form that seems natural and straight from the farm. In a documentary film Das System Milch (2017), Aart Jan van Triest, head of marketing at the Dutch multinational dairy cooperative FrieslandCampina, proudly proclaims “We are from grass to glass,” and continues by comparing his company to a refinery, because a dairy plant transforms a single raw material into a vast array of products that “magically come out.” Where the analogy between oil and food breaks down is the fact that many foodstuffs spoil quickly. This time sensitivity makes the relations between food and infrastructure particularly complicated and producers such as dairy farmers dependent on the regular pick-up of their output.

Food and infrastructure invite us to dwell on the circulation of goods and their attendant power networks. In resource frontiers around the world, existing infrastructure that allows the movement of comestibles such as tea and cash crops are facilitated by militarized structures of power. Tracing the nexus between market, capital and violence, we look at the way infrastructure both delivers and distracts from our knowledge of food production. For instance, historian Jayeeta Sharma (2011) draws attention to the instrumentalized violence of railroads that delivered tea from the frontiers of South Asia to ports like Kolkata and London. Non-industrialized forms of food production, on the other hand, rely on very localized materials to engineer the transformation of vegetables, meat and fish. Artisanal practices of curing, fermentation and pickle making expand the notion of infrastructure to include social and cultural relationships and practices.

Our interests in this issue go beyond understandings of infrastructure simply as things that move other things. We invite contributions that explore, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• How is the transformation of food connected to infrastructure through its circulation across scales?
• In what ways are producers and consumers interacting through and with food infrastructures
• How are political struggles for food sovereignty and similar issues connected to infrastructural interventions
• How are non-industrial food producers dealing with attempts to force them into the use of modern infrastructure in the name of food safety?
• How are humans mobilized – and potentially invisiblized – as infrastructures themselves in the transformation of food?
• Where and when does it make sense to conceptualize animals, plants, nature, ecologies, etc. as infrastructure? 

Please send a title, abstract (max. 300 words), and a short biography (max. 100 words) by 13 April 2025 to Matthäus Rest (matthaeus.rest@unifr.ch) and Dolly Kikon (dkikon@ucsc.edu). We accept a wide range of formats, including but not limited to multimedia and photographic essays, short articles and interviews. Contributions are limited to 1,500 words. Please consult the Guide for Authors for detailed descriptions of the possible formats: https://roadsides.net/guide-for-authors/

Authors of conditionally accepted essays will be notified by 23 April 2025. We are planning to hold an online workshop in early May, where the selected authors will be invited to discuss their contributions. Final drafts are due by mid June 2025 and will subsequently undergo a “double-open” peer review. Publication of the issue is scheduled for November 2025.

References:

Das System Milch. 2017. Directed by Andreas Pichler, produced by Christian Drewing.

Penders, Bart, David Schleifer, Xaq Frohlich and Mikko Jauho. 2014. “Preface: Food Infrastructures.” Limn 4. https://limn.press/article/preface-food-infrastructures/ 

Sharma, Jayeeta. 2011. Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.