Food letters: reconfiguring people, foods, and species across boundaries

Food Letters is a magazine that includes food samples and combines narratives with photographs, illustrations, and tastes to tell stories about producers, food, and rural places. Originating in Japan after the Tōhoku earthquake, the idea of food letters “traveled” to Taiwan in 2017 and inspired several similar magazines. This paper explores how food letters advance understandings of agriculture in the Anthropocene and of the rural as a space of hope. Focusing on Yunlin Food Letters in Taiwan and an issue of Tohoku Food Letters in Japan, the study conducts narrative analyses using the concept of teleo-affective configuration to examine how affects toward food, family, and rural place reconfigure relationships among people, food, plants, and animals. The paper argues that food letters emphasize love and care for family and food in ways that reconfigure multispecies partnerships and imagine mutually supportive communities involving urban consumers. Drawing on the concepts of the rural as performed and spaces of hope, the paper further discusses how food letters cross boundaries between rural and urban, human and non-human, and Japan and Taiwan, reflecting both the challenges and hopes of rural revitalization efforts in East Asia.