Home Gardens and Food Production

Gardeners have tales to tell and home gardens are often at the heart of their stories. Home Gardens and Food Production explores stories which reveal the diversity of those who grow food at home and demonstrate the close relationships between home, food and identity. Kathryn Besio uses Hilo, Hawai'i as a case study to examine the meanings of household food production and home. Drawing on empirical research including participant-observation, in-depth interviews and a survey...
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Gardeners have tales to tell and home gardens are often at the heart of their stories. Home Gardens and Food Production explores stories which reveal the diversity of those who grow food at home and demonstrate the close relationships between home, food and identity.

Kathryn Besio uses Hilo, Hawai'i as a case study to examine the meanings of household food production and home. Drawing on empirical research including participant-observation, in-depth interviews and a survey of home gardeners, she shows how Hawai'i's legacy of pre-contact and post-colonial social, ethnic, gender and class relations play a major part in narratives of homes, homeland and domesticity in one specific place over time.

Readers will recognise parallels to situations in the continental United States, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand where home gardens are being promoted as an environmentally sustainable way of enhancing household food security. As the author demonstrates, this overlooks the social, cultural and place-specific dimensions of home food production, ignoring classed, gendered, and ethnic diversity.
Joining a feminist post-colonial theoretical framework with first-hand empirical research, this book makes an important contribution to a previously under-researched aspect of alternative food production and will be of interest to students and researchers in geography, anthropology, food studies, sociology, gender and post-colonial studies.