Seeds and Ideas: Food as a method in development practice
Summary
To understand how ideas come to be, and particularly how they take root in people’s minds and in the collective mind of societies, it is not enough to locate where they began. In a sense (Foucault (1977) would say), origins are irrelevant: understanding the paths that ideas take as they evolve, and the passions, struggles and dissensions that shape them, brings us much closer to their essence than locating their beginning. Ideas are not singular, incorruptible monuments, but networks of interacting ideas and the powers that move them.
This may sound abstract, but it will be useful as a premise in explaining the intention behind this paper: to explore how new ideas that exist outside the mainstream discussions about development can be brought into its narrative and influence its course. And how food in general, and agricultural biodiversity in particular, can help facilitate this process.
We would like, firstly, to trace the evolution of the idea that gave rise to this paper. It is the idea of a book, and begins with a testimony of our own blindness.
