Cultivating alternatives: crafting, sharing and propagating seed-saving practice in the UK

Seeds form the fundamental building block for all food systems, yet have been relatively overlooked in research into ethical consumption and alternative food networks. Contemporarily, seed has emerged as a basis around which diverse economic practices might be instigated and performed by ‘seed-savers’ - gardeners who grow their own food, save the seed and exchange it with others. Practitioners claim seed-saving contributes to maintaining biodiversity, resisting corporate control, and generating resilient communities of connected growers. This thesis identifies that sharing, gifting and non-monetary exchanges are prevalent and highly significant dimensions of seed and food self-provisioning, involving complex interpersonal rewards and reciprocities. Existing theorisations of ethical and alternative food systems tend to assume ethical consumption choices are motivated by increasing consumers’ knowledge about conditions of production, and stress the need to reconnect geographically and socially separated consumers and producers. Yet to be fully interrogated are the lived everyday experiences of ‘growing your own’, and how simultaneously productive and consumptive practices of crafting, sharing and exchanging seed and food are made meaningful. Conducting fieldwork in gardens, allotments and seed swap events, this study addresses this gap by examining seed-saving and exchanging practices of growers in the UK. It utilises a practice-centred approach and draws on a mixed-method, multi-sited ethnographic strategy to explore how individuals relate to the seed and food they grow, tend and propagate. By foregrounding seed-savers’ practice, it sketches out the multi-layered, emotional, affective and embodied dimensions of diverse economic exchanges entailed in saving and swapping seed.The diverse economies performed around seeds are exposed as heterogeneous, at times contradictory and exhibiting a ready co-existence of hand-made and mass-produced. They are thus better understood as located within ordinary practice, and continually reworked and contested through practices of alterity creation rather than existing in distinct communities, spaces or projects. The findings also question models of responsible action as motivated by rational decision making and moral persuasion. Embodied, practical acts of seed-saving allow individuals to align making, creating, growing, cultivating and sharing with environmental and social ideals. These ordinary, interpersonal and joyful aspects of practice are shown to be crucial to developing, reflecting on and performing ethical commitments and dispositions. I argue practices of caring for environments and others might be nurtured, encouraged and advanced by identifying practical, tangible opportunities for action that chime with individuals’ existing enthusiasms and sociabilities.