Arusha, in Northern Tanzania, is a rapidly expanding city in a complex though relatively fertile ecological niche; its growing population largely finds employment in the agro-food system, but the area is facing serious health and land scarcity concerns, prompting different forms of institutional and popular practices and narratives of sustainability. The project investigates these practices and the claims on the future they entail, with an ethnographic attention towards the daily experiences of food and of the infrastructures that feed the city and the surrounding regions.

Food is both a material and imaginative resource, something that is experienced directly as well as through the infrastructural channels it enrols. These are, extensively, everything that makes it possible for food to realise its value and for people to access it, from roads and lorries (and traffic), to people, to plastic wrappings. The ethnography focuses on markets and food exchange in general, especially investigating the negotiation of the “qualities” of food (i.e. being “fresh”, “natural”, “healthy”, “sustainable”) in the encounter of different discourses and sensory perceptions of the products.

The project asks how people use food and agro-food infrastructures to craft their livelihoods and sustain their lives, while filling foodstuffs with their affective value-worlds and their moral horizons of time. At the same time, it investigates how people cope with the impacts of infrastructures on the economy and the urban environment, and with how infrastructure also shapes meanings of eating, nutrition and sustainable life.

Ultimately, the project explores how people construct their own affective and material ecologies through food, how they charge them of values and stake claims on the future through their daily interactions with the surrounding (human and non-human) environment.