Between the Lab and the Cooking Pot: Recovering Culinary Design and African Women’s Creativity in Technological Studies of ‘Climate-Smart’ Seeds

• In Event: STS Africa: Infrastructures

Abstract

As climate change begins to disrupt crop systems worldwide, scientists make urgent calls for agricultural adaptation to intensifying drought, floods and pest regimes. A large research community in the biosciences now focuses on improving seeds for climate change, with much of their emphasis on genetics. My paper considers the content and consequences of an unfolding ‘climate-smart’ paradigm for plant breeding in Africa, drawing from 22 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mozambique among scientists and farmers. This paper brings needed attention to the ways that women employ social and technical knowledge to transform mutant plant species and modified seed varieties into appropriate, usable technologies through culinary innovation.
There exists a widening gap between science and demand in plant breeding — particularly in Africa where new breeds are often rejected by farmers for not being practical to their way of life. Therefore, the basis of legitimacy of new seeds hinges on ‘use,’ and it is the work of women who invent usable forms of seeds to render plant technology vital. Nonetheless, global perception continues to reduce crop improvement to a particular knowledge domain (technical, grounded in a Eurocentric tradition, belonging to a select community of experts), while deepening highly uneven and unjust international flows of plant genetic resources among countries. By highlighting the creative production that takes place in the often dismissed, woman-centered realm of culinary practice, I expose how recent attempts to decolonize narratives of innovation in Africa remain overwhelmingly masculine (Mavhunga 2014) and are ripe for intersectional feminist political ecology interventions.

Author

• Serena Stein, Princeton University