Seminar
Lunch seminar: 'Invisible hands: the unseen journeys of our food’
Please bring your own lunch | no registration needed.
Can we effectively steer food systems towards more sustainable and inclusive directions if a large part is overlooked? The informal side of the food system – existing of street vendors, food traders, but also farmers selling their produce straight from the farm – plays an essential role in providing affordable, fresh and nutritious food to all kinds of consumers. But it is also perceived as traditional, chaotic, vulnerable, at times illegal, whereas formality is labelled modern, regulated and organized. Are these labels doing justice to such a multi-faceted and important reality for millions of people around the world?
With this seminar, we shed light on the informal side of the food system. We will show how actors involved in informal activities look at this themselves, expressing agency, resourcefulness and resilience, and discuss how there is a need for different perspectives in terms of narratives, research and policies. Join us on March 12th in Impulse to explore these topics together!
The seminar includes contributions and reflections by researchers at Wageningen University - Dr. Sigrid Wertheim-Heck, associate professor at ENP, and Dr. Sietze Vellema, associate professor at the Knowledge Technology and Innovation group - and from the policy side by Ivo Demmers, Executive Director of the Netherlands Food Partnership.
The seminar is facilitated by Dr. Mirjam Schoonhoven-Speijer, postdoc research at the Environmental Policy Group (ENP) who has been exploring the informal side of food systems, its workings and the narratives surrounding it since her PhD research in Uganda.
The seminar is connected to the current exhibition in Impulse - ‘Invisible hands: the unseen journeys of our food’. It delves into the heart of the informal food economy, spotlighting personal stories and daily lives of individuals who play a critical,yet often overlooked, role in our global food supply chains. This exhibition presented was first hosted by the Netherlands Food Partnership at World Food Day 2024 and builds on research by Brink on The Future of Work in the Informal Economy in Kenya, in partnership with Kenyan partners Laterite, Procol Kenya, Ideas Unplugged, and Busara, with seed funding from TRANSFORM (Unilever, FCDO, EY).
For more information about the exhibition, or about the topic of informality in food systems, please reach out to Mirjam Schoonhoven, postdoc researcher at ENP.