O que você sustenta quando se alimenta? Teoria ator-rede e o design das redes agroalimentares

Abstract

This is a thesis about the networks that are organized so that we have food: the agri-food networks, which are understood here in a broader sense than the traditional food production chains, and may include all sorts of elements, human and non-human. We will investigate a plate of food within the network that allows it to exist. Agri-food networks are understood here as something designed, and the action of designing is not attributed to a designer subject. In the network, the project is diluted by everything and everyone who acts on it. The aim of this investigation is to trace the connections that have to be made among various actors so that our food is on our plates everyday. Through explaining the network that gives existence to our food, we are also able to understand and explain the inexistence and unavailability of food for many people. Using actor-network theory and the cartography of controversies as a theoretical-methodological approach, the comparative tracing of two networks begins, from two plates of food served each side of Rua da Lapa, in Rio de Janeiro. On one side, there is Refettorio Gastromotiva, linked to the Social Gastronomy Movement, which offers courses in social and gastronomic entrepreneurship and prepares meals with unmarketable ingredients donated by food sellers, and serves these meals to people who have nothing to eat. On the other side, there is the Terra Crioula commercial space, linked to the Landless Workers’ Movement, which sells the production of agrarian reform settlements in the state of RJ in the form of baskets and meals prepared by a university extension project. The main reference on actor-network theory used here is Bruno Latour. As a result, we have descriptive texts of the two networks, obtained, in both cases, through field visit reports. From these texts, it was possible to trace visual representations of the networks made of heterogeneous elements, connected around the agri-food issue. Through the expansion of the notion of project, it is possible to understand that the network’s conformation happens through the conjunction of things, people, ideas associated in processes of stabilization so that, in a certain shared reality, we can rely on food being on our plates daily. And just as everyday food is a project, so is waste, scarcity, malnutrition and starvation. What is gained with the expansion of the idea of project, when we imagine the dissolution of the designer subject in a network of changeable connections, is the possibility of creating and building concrete orders of the reality in which we exist as a group, in addition to being able to choose whether or not to join a certain network conformation.