10 pgs, Artist Syd Carpenter uses clay to tell the stories of the Black farmers and gardeners who have shaped the course of agriculture in the United States.
14pgs, The World Health Organization (WHO) has used communication methods to promote the international ban of the agricultural pesticides paraquat, glyphosate and chlorpyrifos. This ban has led to misunderstanding among farmers who still use these chemicals, which may be available under different brand names. Communication with the non-scientific community is uncertain leading to miscommunication, especially where scientific language is used. Governments have banned the use of these agricultural chemicals. The scientific arguments are not necessarily understood by famers so they may ignore the prohibition and continue using them or other similar chemicals. This study uses story-telling and qualitative research methods where a questionnaire is combined with the content analytical technique. The quantitative research method was used to collect data in the field where 351 participants took part. Participatory action research is a method where community farmers engaged in self-reflection on the impact of chemicals on their fields, their health and the health of others. Their understanding of the non-chemical usage model and good agricultural practice farmers in the vicinity, especially as they were personally involved in the creation of the media from script preparation, to acting, filming, and evaluating the final docu-dramas. The findings of the docu–drama programmes of 5 GAP farmers are presented to identify the perception of how to avoid using chemicals and their solutions for tangerine farmers through a manual that is the media output from the project and the resulting findings suggesting that the factors related to the effectiveness of scientific communication are divided into pull factors and push factors.
17pgs, Despite the central role of seafood in Japanese cuisine, domestic fisheries are facing a severe crisis. Based on anthropological field research in fishing communities in southwestern Japan as well as on a sampling of cultural representations of fish, this contribution examines the changing cultural and socio-economic meanings and matter of fish in Japanese seafood assemblages: from sentient beings and commons cohabitants under existential threat from anthropogenic environmental change to their use as food for human consumption and their role in the livelihoods of fishers and coastal communities. The analysis finds a growing polarisation in the Japanese seafood sector as the cyborg fish of highly-processed food products and globally traded commodities inundate markets and dinner plates, while locally caught animals turn from basic foodstuff into folklorist stars of a vanishing rurality, a symbol of authenticity and national identity advertised as cultural commodities in romanticising campaigns to revitalise rural areas.
8pgs, This paper addresses the impulse to render systemic food systems issues into stories in light of ongoing challenges such as food scares, food fraud, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Such stories about food systems are seen as embodying the ideal of supply chain transparency currently in vogue and regarded as key to solving food system inequities by shedding light on them. Read in the context of documentary cinematic unveilings of unethical production practices, transparency initiatives of various types, particularly those dependent on the real-time, crypto-ensured storytelling of blockchain and digital twinning technology, would seem to provide a new model of indexicality, a new contract with social reality. However, such tracing systems and the questions they raise instead describe the way in which food—and the land, people and animals who are involved in its production—becomes fodder for various power plays.
