Amber Striekwold began her PhD titled 鈥淔ood as a Tool for Social Change: How Ideas and Practices on Natural Food and Farming Entered the Mainstream in the Netherlands (1950-2000)鈥� in October 2022. The Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) funds the project. Amber studies the evolution and circulation of ideas and practices in the Netherlands in this project on alternative agro-food systems. She focuses primarily on meat consumption and production.
The substantial increase in meat consumption and the rise of industrial livestock farming have been presented as logical stories and inevitable developments. There was no other alternative. The Dutch food system was modernised in the post-war period under the motto of 鈥榥o more hunger', the desire to provide farmers with a stable, decent wage and cheap meat for consumers. The agro-food system needed to scale up and be organized more efficiently. Concerns about, for example, the environment and the health of animals (human and non-human) only arose in the seventies by environmental, food, and animal movements. That is how this history has been told.
In this research project, Amber shows that this path of modernization was not self-evident. It was actively stimulated and alternatives were ignored or silenced. In the period between 1950-2000, various agro-food imaginaries about the future food system circulated. These imaginaries were often alternatives based on critiques on changes in the agro-food system at the time. These imaginaries were created by and circulated between various actors in the agro-food system: conventional and alternative. These imaginaries show that critiques on the food system were not only voiced by 鈥榓lternative鈥� social movements, from the seventies onwards. Conventional actors voiced similar concerns from the fifties onwards. This project focuses specifically on the following themes: scale (small scale as an alternative to scale enlargement); meat consumption (meat replacements as an alternative to environmental and health issues due to excessive animal protein consumption); a third theme is to be decided but will be on production enhancing technologies.
How have these alternatives and critiques evolved? Why did some took hold and others did not? These questions are central in this research. By focusing on central points of contestation en the alternatives that provided a solution for these issues, this research shows that the agro-food system is the product of choices made by various actors (such as farmers organisations, supermarkets, the government and consumer organisations) informed by socio-political and cultural ideas. Ideas that also change through time. This project aims to provide a deeper understanding of the historical rootedness of contemporary narratives and debates about the future of the agro-food system.
Amber is part of the organising committee of the international bi-annual Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food. She set up a food and agricultural history network in the Netherlands that brings together everyone with an interest in the history of food and agriculture. The network meets every six weeks to discuss various themes and foster bridges between researchers and enthusiasts in the Netherlands.
In 2020 Amber graduated cum laude from the RMA History at Utrecht University. She wrote her MA-thesis on the political ideas of the Dutch Alternative Food movement of the 1970s. Between 2020 and 2022 she was a teaching assistant at the research group Modernity and Society at KU Leuven.