Petr Jehlička, Lucie Sovová, Petr Daněk (2024) ‘It is the most perfect experience ... Workshop 'Food, inequality and care in times of crises', 29 September - 1 October 2024, Bergen

This presentation engages with the ethics of care framework to propose imagining a food system that cares for Others. It explores this theme by focusing on the everyday practice of home gardening and the related social relationships and material flows. This area complements current scholarship, which mostly focuses on food-related care as a form of activism driven by intentionality and knowledge about the effects of consumption choices. Combining a survey of a representative sample of the population and an in-depth qualitative study, the presentation highlights the importance of inconspicuous but materially significant food self-provisioning and sharing practices as caring behaviours that do not rely on educational campaigns but draw on the desire to produce healthy food for human Others. Home-grown food is distributed in the generalized reciprocity mode within wide food-sharing networks. The desire to produce healthy food further translates into the adoption of caring methods of cultivation that benefit non-human Others involved in the garden ecosystems.