An urban vegetable garden: a blooming for the food memory of the future

Abstract

This work concerns an urban vegetable garden beyond 200 plots in Famalicão (northern Portugal) and aims to check out mnemic narratives circulating there linked to gastronomy and technical agricultural resources that have been used in the past. This research has been developed since last December/2022 and will check this environment for four seasons of the year. Its methodology is based on an ethnographic exercise, using flanerie dynamics and the application of interviews with open-ended questions. This analysis is supported by the Anthropology of Food, the concept of Collective Memory, by Halbwachs, and the Semiotics of Culture, by Iuri Lotman, approaching with specificity the concept of food semiosphere. Some data has already been noticed about this place mostly frequented by retirees, like their nostalgic speeches, that are materialized now on their meters of earth, through a recovered process of agriculture, that had been disabled by a society that has abandoned the countryside. Their ancestors' knowledge is also shared with younger people there, and the group improves their practices to keep the rules of this place, that do not allow the use of synthetic resources. They treat each other like “colleagues,” and there is a constant exchange of knowledge, products, recipes and seeds each other. The younger ones absorb new pieces of past knowledge to improve their future memories. Besides these “new-old” practices contributing to saving money, they declare how those improve health and especially the value given to the taste of food.