Foodways and Ecological Management in Rural Bosnia

My Research

I am an environmental anthropologist who studies food and agriculture systems in South Asia, Eastern Europe, and North America. Food and farming are starting places to ask fundamental questions concerning how we learn about the world around us, how we come to shape the landscapes where we live, and even what impact our culture has on the microscopic worlds within us.

My research has led me to explore the human experiences behind biotechnology and organic agriculture in India, heritage foods and climate change in Bosnia’s mountain gardens, the decisions and aspirations of the next generation of Midwestern farmers, and the influence of food traditions and fermentation on the human microbiome. To study these issues and examine the changing social and ecological worlds where we live, I use a social science toolkit that includes ethnography, spatial analysis, interviews, surveys, ethnobotany, and photography.

Environmental knowledge, and the relationships and affects that continually shape it, grow within a larger political context that includes everything from biotechnology to microbial legislation to ethical supply chains. My work in anthropology uses seeds and microbes as heuristics to explore how we shape and are shaped by the social, political, economic, and ecological worlds around us.

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.