The AnthroMob network is delighted to announce the 10th lecture in our Moving Mobilities Online (MoMO) series, with a talk by the FOODCIRCUITS research team on February 2, 2026 at 6:00pm CET.
Most fruit and vegetables required and enjoyed by European and North American societies could not be obtained without the work of migrant laborers, who plant, harvest and transport them. Yet the contribution of migrants to crucial food systems is generally absent from the experience of buying and consuming food.
The FOODCIRCUITS team investigates the movements of people, foods, and values in the production of fruits and vegetables in Europe and the Americas. It specifically focuses on how migrations and transnational interdependencies are invisibilized in these often-romanticized economies. The project critically unpacks at some of the most nationally iconized and, at the same time, most labor-intensive and transnationally entangled fruit and vegetable economies in the EU and the Americas: citrus in Spain/ Ecuador and North Africa, strawberries in California/Mexico, asparagus in Germany/Romania and Poland, and the greenhouse production in Austria/Romania.
To understand the labor of producing and transporting food and the process of consumption, in FOODCIRCUITS we focus on embodied experiences in our respective food circuits. Tracing fruit and vegetables through their circulation, we investigate the embodied experiences of farm laborers – treated simultaneously as essential, disposable and sometimes illegal supply chain workers – who are increasingly migrants and generally work under tight delivery time constraints; and consumers, whose consumption habits reflect diverse intentions encompassing aspects of survival, enjoyment, identity and ethics. By connecting the four fields visually, through the lens of the camera, FOODCIRCUITS further proposes a new means of visualizing connections between migrants and societies, through the beauty, brutality and necessity of food.
In our talk, we will introduce the overall project and share preliminary insights and reflections from our four field sites in Spain, Germany, California, and Austria. We will further present excerpts from the project’s own documentary film “Invisible Roots.”
