The Food and Agricultural History Network is a network for (especially young) researchers in this field, who present and discuss their own work as well as that from other scholars and new books. The network is an initiative by Amber Striekwold (UU) and Anna Teijeiro (VU). This is their website: fahnn.nl.
Program 2025-2026
February 16th (15.30-17.00) at Utrecht (Drift 23 – room 206)
Antonia Weiss, Wageningen University – Deep Foodscape: Migrant Biographies and Food Cultivation in the Afterlives of a Postwar Garden City Neighborhood
This paper contributes to the multidisciplinary scholarship on urban gardening in Europe by examining the Amsterdam neighborhood of Nieuw-West, a postwar garden city neighborhood where approximately 70% of residents have a migration background and where a historical green infrastructure is incrementally being transformed into an edible landscape against a backdrop of urban renewal efforts. Drawing on an innovative combination of historical and qualitative research methods, the paper examines how residents’ gardening biographies intersect with the longer history of Nieuw-West’s food environment. By developing the concept of deep foodscape, the paper demonstrates how urban gardening in Nieuw-West is wrought through the interplay of migration histories, historically produced urban forms, and biological-ecological temporalities, thereby offering a new lens for centering marginalized food-growing practices in European cities.
Sanne Steen, Erasmus University – Religion and spirituality in the early modern kitchen garden
The early modern kitchen garden provided gardeners with much more than vegetables, medicine, cosmetics or art. Gardening was considered a relaxing pastime, a scientific inquiry or a religious experience, to name a few purposes. I will present my research of early modern Dutch kitchen garden handbooks to elaborate on gardening as a religious experience. In my presentation, I combine book history, art history and literature, to distinguish two types of a religious practice of vegetable gardening evident in Dutch seventeenth-century gardening manuals.
Past Meetings
October 6th 2025 there was a discussion on the book by Niek Koning Food Security, Agricultural Policies and Economic Growth. Long-term Dynamics in the Past, Present and Future. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. The book is one of the new modern classics. To get an impression from the book, you may read the following review: https://antonschuurman.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/RHA76_WEB_resenasNiekKoning.pdf.
November 10th there was a meeting with the theme: ‘Unequal global economic power relations (and how to bridge these gaps)’. Peter van Dam (UvA)and Grace Leksana (UU) presented their work during this meeting. Peter van Dam reflected on the theme from the perspective of the history of Fair Trade, and Grace Leksana discussed her new project that investigates place-based knowledge on food and agriculture in Indonesia before the Green Revolution.
8 december (15.30-17.00 JK 2-3 room 220) Floor Haalboom pitched her ideas for new research titled ‘Growing doubt: The strategic production of scientific ignorance on health and the environment in the postwar European agro-industry’. In the face of major health and environmental damage caused by present-day food systems, there is an urgent democratic need to understand why change is so hard, particularly amid growing distrust in public institutions for health and the environment.
Website voedselgeschiedenis.nl
Parallel to the FAHN website, Amber Striekwolda and Jon Verriet will revitalize the website www.voedselgeschiedenis.nl. This website is currently still in development but will contain information about Dutch Food and Agricultural History in the form of short blogs.
We hope that we can make use of the knowledge in this network to fill the website with interesting stories about Dutch Food and Agricultural History! The website is meant to inform students, journalists and other people who might be interested in Dutch Food and Agricultural History.
pagina bijgewerkt 28/01/2026
