Infrastructuring for Caring Food Practices: Learnings from an Alpine Community Academy

In this paper, we explore instances of grassroots infrastructuring in support of communal learning projects that centre caring food practices. We explore these instances of infrastructuring from a practitioner perspective, i.e. from the perspective of people who are closely involved in these efforts as part of the community academy La Foresta, based in the Italian Alps.

We present four distinct yet interdependent activities – a community garden, a participatory drinks initiative, a mobile bread oven, a forest school – and trace how food acts as a low-threshold and convivial element that fosters community economies. These economies in turn foster empowering narratives and practices of eco-social transformation.