Feeding ourselves and our geographical futures

Late last year, it was gently suggested to me that I take some leave. In fact, it was suggested that my leave liability might be worth reducing significantly and, generously, I was given until December 2025 to get there. I love my work, but I appreciate that the advice given was important. So I took a full month from mid-December 2023 to mid-January 2024 and gardened, went on a small beach holiday with family and friends, and immersed myself in long walks—some of which were peppered with music and some of which were silent. More leave is planned.

As it happens, returning to a practice I have not observed for some years, on most of my walks I listened to various podcasts focused on one of my key and longstanding personal passions and hobbies—the relationship of food, nutrition, and health to our ways of being and flourishing in the world over the life-course. Those who know me know that this orientation might border on … well … working!

Either way, still “hooked” on three particular podcasts by mid-January, I then returned, first, to the computer in my home office and thereafter to my two hot-desks at the University of Tasmania’s Sandy Bay and Hobart CBD campuses. But by then, as a result of the insights gained from listening to about 200 h of material, I had comprehensively rethought my relationship with food and reshaped the geographies both of home—planting, harvesting, cooking, and processing—and of shopping and procurement. My impulse has nothing to do with any article that follows this editorial in our first issue for 2024, but it is informed by a strong desire to see work in this journal focused on food geographies and food futures. (Given the press of time—being on leave, I left my editorial until the eleventh hour, and the production team needed it last week—I will be brief at this juncture and my comments imply no judgement of others’ health and wellbeing practices.).

So what is my point? Simply this: Because of that aforesaid longstanding interest in nutrition and health over the life-course, for years I have approached food and eating as experiments in self-care; I am my own highly adherent guinea-pig, if you like. Of course, I do consult my GP, a functional and integrative medical expert with additional formal qualifications in biochemistry. I keep records. In my leisure time, I read scholarly papers from medical and nutrition journals and—in all likelihood—am a nerdy about it all, and I guess I thought I had nailed “it.”

But new findings, including from large, randomised control trials such as that by Lee et al. (2022), include insights about the deleterious effects of ultra-processed foods. Reading such studies has prompted four significant responses in me: (1) With my partner’s blessing and collaboration, I audited what we purchase and eat and then reshaped our food choices. (2) I have rediscovered fermenting and preserving and sought to do so on a budget to test, at least in my context, the correlation between types of food consumption and dollars spent. It is not, I concede, in any way a scientific approach, and I am not sure it needs to be. (3) I have rearranged my diary so that, in addition to honouring my commitment to getting my leave liability down, I am finishing work 30 min earlier than I have in the past so I can prepare meals from scratch when it is my turn. It has become a precious time to unwind, create, and ground.

Well, that is all well and good, for I am a privileged member of a privileged society, and I recognise that and appreciate that each of us journeys through foodscapes in diverse ways.

But more than that, my other (renewed) response has been this: (4) As a person and, specifically, as a geographer, I am—to be blunt—incensed and offended that so, so many people have so little choice in relation to food. In another privileged but divided society, the UK charity, Turn2Us, has evidence that some 900,000 people live without fridges and many more also have no stoves, freezers, or washing machines (Big Issue, 2021). How can they possibly cook for and nourish themselves or others in such conditions?

Moreover, how can we radically, respectfully undermine the multi-trillion dollar industrial food complex as individuals, in collectives, and in organisationally and institutionally strategic and tactical ways so that spatially just food futures are possible? As observed in a synthesis review by Baker et al. (2020), the ongoing development of that industrial food complex shapes “growth in the market and political activities of transnational food corporations and inadequate policies to protect nutrition in these new contexts. The scale of dietary change underway, especially in highly populated middle-income countries, raises serious concern for global health.”

For me as a geographer fascinated by scale, such concern inevitably spills out from the human body to the more-than-human world and demands our concerted attention. I would invite readers to contribute to the debate in this journal in coming months and years.

This issue leads with work by our new book review editor, Alexander Burton. In what has become one of our regular commentaries by a member of the core editorial team, Burton (2024) reflects on ways in which geographers might (re)think our commitment to praxis across our personal, professional, and community lives, and the result is both provocative and evocative.

In this first offering of 2024, we also showcase work by Webber (2024), who gave the Fay Gale Memorial Lecture at the 2021 Institute of Australian Geographers’ conference before taking a period of parental leave. Entitled “For and against climate capitalism,” the article in this issue is a powerful development on that earlier oral presentation. In particular, Webber shows how—in two fascinatingly contrasting sites—work towards reparative climate futures is being charted. This subject matter, in my view, merits sustained engagement from us all.

Then, in our ongoing commitment to supporting work that analyses both historical and ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, we feature three new special commentaries. Orman et al. (2024) first consider “Emergent time-spaces of working from home: lessons from pandemic geographies.” They trace how workers in Sydney and the Illawarra region in New South Wales, Australia, have navigated paid labour in the home. In the process, they also track the production of novel relational geographies and argue the need for more geographical research on emergent forms of hybrid work. Then, also focused on Sydney, McDuie-Ra et al. (2024) share telling insights about “Pandemic surveillance and mobilities …” and consider how pandemic monitoring systems became difficult to unravel after 2022. They posit that what remains are forms of persistent sensory power that have significant potential and actual implications for specific communities and locations and suggest there is need to question this “new normal” and our relationship with surveillance practices. Among the current—but not final—set of offerings on legacies and anticipatory geographies of COVID-19 driven by associate editor, Clare Mouat, the last article for this issue is by Działek et al. (2024). Their work on “pandemic disorientations and reorientations as legacies” is an immensely useful scoping review of the impacts of the virus on European cities. By such means, they establish that disruptions arising from the pandemic have been attended by calls by Europeans to find “new ways to inhabit, govern, and develop cities.” Doubtless, such calls are being made elsewhere, and more research on comparisons and contrasts is I think much needed.

Eight original articles then follow. Work by Tan et al. (2024) addresses “Employment, income, and skill alignment of humanitarian migrants in the Australian labour market: metropolitan and regional contexts, 2000–2016.” Analysing a unique integrated dataset, they show differences in how groups of humanitarian migrants experience the labour market. Those differences lead them to suggest an urgent need to ensure all visa category recipients are given equitable benefits and to posit a range of responsibilities of the host, that is, Australian economy.

Research by Atchison et al. (2024) is then featured. “Emotional geographies of an urban forest: Insights from an email-a-tree initiative” furnishes an intriguing and important set of insights about how to foster public care for and engagement with urban trees. Their focus is an email-a-tree initiative based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, and they have found that such an initiative succeeded, in part, because of platform design and also, in part, because of attention to complex emotions about trees and nature and their attendant spatial relations. I confess there are several trees in Hobart, where I live, that I am in correspondence with—at least in my head and heart.

In “How land-use planning in multifunctional regions shapes spaces for farming,” Pritchard et al. (2024) consider the interface between land-use conversion and landholders’ interactions with land-use planning regulation. Concentrating on the Ballina-Lismore region, New South Wales—an area of rapid rural change—they find that agricultural landscapes are compromised by planning policies in particular ways and they offer ways forward from such an outcome.

Work on a reliability study of the Park Life public participatory geographic information system survey by Hooper and Edwards (2024) follows. Tangling with parks’ planning policies, the authors provide novel insights on which parks people use and how they engage with park landscapes and activities, basing their findings on a case study from Perth, Western Australia, and positioning the work in a comprehensive international literature. In the process, they show how public participatory geographic information system technology can inform better planning, including for public health, and can better support parks as a crucially important setting for sustainable living.

Focus then shifts from Australia to other contexts. Al-Sabbagh et al. (2024) provide important insights on land use and sexual harassment in a geospatial analysis based on the volunteer HarassMap-Egypt. Their premise is that sexual harassment crimes warrant innovative solutions in contexts such as theirs, and their argument is that geospatial digital platforms can be immensely useful in tracking and dealing with crime clusters. Juxtaposed in relation to the work by McDuie-Ra and colleagues, noted above, the research prompts difficult questions about the varied benefits and drawbacks of surveillance per se. I would welcome more debate about such tensions in the journal in future.

In work that likely will resonate with readers of this journal based in universities in many countries, Li et al. (2024) report on findings from research “Exploring the geographies of transnational higher education in China.” Drawing from and drawing on debates about the globalisation of higher education, they consider in detail how transnational higher education, or TNHE, programmes have been shaped by political ideology, strategic policy, and state development. Their work shows how TNHE has a set of territorial geographies that “reflect complicated interactions between the state and the market, the global and the local, and economic and political/cultural forces.” I have no doubt that such forces are at play in diverse ways across higher education globally.

Attention to a range of socio-political factors that shape place attachment in Hong Kong is then explored by Lee et al. (2024). Observing that citizens of Hong Kong have experienced significant change in relation to place attachment in recent decades, the authors document how political inclinations, self-identity, mobility, global citizenship engagement, perceptions of law and the legal system, and perceptions of inequality affect place attachment. Among participants, those with “pro-establishment political stance and self-identifying as Chinese” and those “holding more positive views about the law and legal system of Hong Kong” showed higher levels of attachment. In contrast, those “with a greater degree of mobility who perceived inequalities in society showed a lower level of attachment.” While the results may be unique to Hong Kong, the methods used to establish the findings are I think usefully replicable.

Completing the offering of papers for this issue, work by Hayamizu and Nakata (2024) focuses on “Accuracy assessment of post-processing kinematic georeferencing based on uncrewed aerial vehicle-based structures from motion multi-view stereo photogrammetry.” They show that it is possible to acquire “digital surface models of steep, forested, small watershed topography, where real-time kinematic processing is difficult because of the presence of interfering objects.” Their work is transferable to “rapid topographic surveying in inaccessible areas during disasters,” and given suggestions that climate change will exacerbate such events, it is an important feature of their work.

Last but not the least, given this journal’s ongoing commitment to books and book reviews, Guy Robinson (2024) has provided a thoughtful and comprehensive consideration of David Boarder Gilles’s book, A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People. Food Not Bombs and the World-Class Waste of Global Cities, published by Duke University Press. Robinson describes the work as thought-provoking, vivid in its ethnographic detail, and attractively presented. He also concludes that the book is an apt place to start any journey oriented to making a difference in times in which social and spatial justice are crucial and yet too often absent.