Comfort Foods: Biocultural Diversity and Community Resilience in Rural Bosnia
This project asks how the rural Bosnian community is adapting agrarian management traditions to support foodways and montane biodiversity as it rebuilds from the 1990s war, adjusts to high unemployment, and grapples with climate change. These pressures, along with unpredictable weather and volatile markets, encourage a patchwork of strategies that sustain biodiversity, cultural identity, and food security amidst social and ecological uncertainty. In a mountainous region where food security depends on small-scale agricultural production, natural resource collection, and heirloom plant and animal species, Bosnians must now adapt to a changing climate that pulls species up in elevation and depressed economic opportunity that pushes the next generation of land managers abroad to find work. Without local stewardship, such culturally-supported biodiversity has been shown to collapse. We propose to collect ethnographic, ethnobotanical, and spatial data to investigate how and to what extent Bosnian agrarian practices and natural resource management maintain biodiversity across this landscape. These data will center the socio-ecological contributions of this European multiethnic community in local conservation and food security. This project is funded by Purdue University.
Foodways and Ecological Management in Rural Bosnia
Food traditions are an important way of maintaining traditional ecological knowledge and heirloom resources. Cooking and gardening are means to keep both social relationships and environmental relationships strong because they require frequent practice and adaptation. Global environmental change will have consequences for land and biodiversity, but in rural Bosnia and elsewhere, these changes ripple through our cuisines, gardens, and communities. The solutions to climate change will have to include multinational policy initiatives and innovative technology. But while these grand solutions are important, empowering and celebrating the communities sustaining biodiverse traditions around the world can be even more valuable. The front lines of climate change are our world’s farms, gardens, seed stores, and kitchens. These families, and especially these women, work every day to sustain biological and cultural diversity for the rest of us. This project is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.
Publications Related to this Project
Flachs, Andrew 2022. “Degrowing alternative agriculture: institutions and aspirations as sustainability metrics for small farmers in Bosnia and India.“ Sustainability Science.