Thinking Spaces: Alex Chesney and Dr. Nathan TeBokkel—Storied Social Practice: Improvisation in Farming and Food

Growing and making food are ancient practices yet also scientifically advanced, necessary for everyday living yet often inaccessible but to experts, interdisciplinary yet highly specialized. Considering the role of improvisation in farming and cooking, especially in our chosen subfields of beekeeping and dietetics, fruitfully foregrounds these tensions. With improvisation as our watchword, we bring to bear a syncretic mix of lived experience and literary criticism to develop a concept of storied social practice, which will allow us to attend to social relations, embodiment, sensory perception, and historicity, without sacrificing, as so often seems conventional in the long critical post-enlightenment, individual agency, the mind, cognition, and contemporaneity. Along the way we engage with our own stories and social practices as well as those of philosophers like Sylvia Winter and Ludwig Wittgenstein, literary theorists like Anne-Lise François and Lenora Hanson, and food and farming events like eighteenth-century agricultural improvement, the contemporary Right to Repair movement, and Leah Penniman’s Soul Fire Farm.

Alex Chesney is a dietitian and farmer living and working on her family’s fruit and vegetable farm in Southwestern Ontario. Alex’s dietetic practice and farming work go hand in hand; rooted in food and agriculture education and communication, she creates spaces for people to experience their food at its source, and teaches them about agricultural production, food preparation, and nutrition. She manages pick-your-own fruits and vegetables, on-farm workshops and tours, recipe development, communications (social media, newsletters, blog posts), and daily produce-subscription delivery (paired with nutrition tips, recipes, and techniques for food storage and preservation). Alex is also the current Chair of the Berry Growers of Ontario and is proud to help represent and promote the thriving Ontario berry industry through research and marketing efforts.

Dr. Nathan TeBokkel is a Banting postdoctoral fellow at Western. He’s writing a book, Working Feeling, on labour history and lived experience, and he has a book in press at Cambridge, Whistling at the Plough, on agricultural capitalism and romanticism. Nathan’s also training to be a master beekeeper, managing 160 hives on his family’s melon farm, and researching requeening. His recent publications include an essay on food labels and technocratic populism in New Literary History.