Overview

This book highlights the value and skill of horticultural work through stories of food cultivation. It examines the difficulties that arise from the perception that this type of activity is unskilled and the importance of acknowledging the expertise involved in growing food. The book provides a rare focus on horticulture as a vital part of agri-food systems, offering a social science perspective on the sector’s current and past characteristics. It presents new primary research into horticultural work and workers across UK food growing, using close attention to their abilities to highlight the depth of their knowledge and learning. This is set in the context of global agri-food regimes which press producers to seek ever more precarious labour, undermining food justice. By examining these in the context of internationally connected supply chains, it characterises injustices which recur globally and across food system labour. The conceptual argument starts from an ecological definition of skill as a social practice embedded within its socio-economic landscape, developing this perspective beyond its association with artisanal contexts. Together the empirical and conceptual materials highlight the fallacy of discourse which tends to individualise skill and the challenges around recruitment into food production. To counter this, the book proposes a more collective approach to fostering healthy skills ecosystems, reaching towards commoning through examples of horticultural communities seeking this in the meantime. It will appeal to postgraduates, researchers and professionals interested in food systems, their workers and related topics of horticultural education, training and human resources, labour, migration and politics of injustice. It draws on perspectives from rural studies, human geography and sociology and connects with international debates in these fields. Food focused scholars and activists will find data and insights to support calls for better work in food systems.

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9781032251202

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Reviews

Those bright red strawberries or unblemished tomatoes do not just fall from the plant into their packing materials. It takes the exquisite attention and detailed care of the millions of harvest workers, underpaid and overworked, often migrants, to put our cherished fruits and vegetables on the table. Finally, we have a book that thoroughly and lucidly explores why such important work has been coded as de-skilled and how it could and should be otherwise. - Julie Guthman, author of Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry. This book is so welcome. It gives horticulture and its skills due respect for feeding people and for what they are – a remarkable array of knowledge without which urban consumers would be entirely instead of only partially in hock to mostly big food processors. Horticulture is a bulwark between public health and food serfdom. Hannah Pitt’s understanding of exactly what skills are entailed is both fine scholarship and a cultural appeal for dignity. Peeling back myths that growing food is unskilled and of low value, she poses deep challenges to British politics. Why is cheap food seen as a good thing if it demeans the real values of those who grow it? Why is land labour so vulnerable to exploitation? These are not easy questions but this book places them fair and square on our plates as well as minds. -Tim Lang, Professor Emeritus of Food Policy, City St George’s, University of London Revaluing Horticultural Skills offers an insightful account of the deep social injustices that arise from the devaluing of horticulture work and workers. This is a vital, timely book for people who care about just and sustainable food systems. -Associate Professor Victoria Stead, Deakin University, Australia

Author Information

Hannah Pitt is Senior Lecturer in Environmental Geography at Cardiff University’s School of Geography and Planning, where she specialises in researching and teaching food system sustainability, with a focus on human-plant relations.

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