Meal Cultures - A New Concept in Food Security Debates on African Leafy Vegetables in Kenya and East Africa

The debate on food security predominantly focuses on availability of and access to food as agricultural products like wheat, rice, maize etc. However, human beings usually do not eat raw agricultural products, but prepared dishes. This is why it is pivotal to take account of the whole process of transforming food to meals. Food security debates that concentrate on agricultural products only, remain too narrow. Human nutrition is a complex socio-cultural phenomenon. All living species need food for survival, but human beings are governed by cultural norms and taboos regulating this process of incorporation of natural products. I have introduced the concept of meal culture in my research because I felt a strong need for a new view – a new paradigm that reflects the social, cultural, and environmental embeddedness of our gender relations in the nutritional and agricultural sciences. Thus, the meal culture approach can be seen as a challenge to the classical discussion on food security and safety, or even food sovereignty. It can be seen as a query, even to critical agro-food studies, as the concept of “meal” has not been given the needed merit by having been included as a focal point of investigation and research, yet. The concept of meal culture offers a way to build new transdisciplinary connections within the scientific debates on food and nutrition. It is part of a broader concept of humans interacting with the natural and cultural environments. In this contribution, a human and cultural ecological approach to meal culture will be introduced. As meals shape our social relations and communication systems, including gender relations, they should be part of scientific reflections about our daily diet. It is not only a matter of what people eats, but also how they organize the whole process of preparing and sharing. Meals can bring people together and strengthen human interactions. Meals are constitutive in community building and are, thus, especially important in food insecure regions where social ties significantly determine whether someone is food insecure or not. Moreover, environmental conditions and the availability of water and energy, for example, need to be taken into consideration. The infrastructure including the necessary knowledge and technology for cooking, and not to forget the needed time beside social and cultural criteria of choice as well as the division of labor has to be considered in order to prepare and share a meal. Still meal preparation in most of the food studies and discussions remain in the dark, as long as these activities are taken place at home as part of care economy