Agencies of intimacy: fleshing out vegetal politics by exploring plant agency in gardens and produce supply chains

Abstract

This article investigates plant agency and human-plant relations in two disparate sites: city vegetable gardens and pandemic produce supply chains. Drawing on posthumanist theory and data generated during two qualitative research projects in food systems, this paper explores the characteristics of plant agency to flesh out an understanding of ‘vegetal politics,’ the complicated and intimate world-making relationships between people and plants. The argument is that the relational agency of plants produced through human-plant intimacies emerges in part from the plants’ capacity to turn sun into food for humans through photosynthesis. Comparing the relational agency of plants in these two different sites reveals plant agency to be mutable, shaped by the processes and conditions of the interspecies’ relationships including mobility and immobility. Further, these agencies emerge from the plant collective. This article underlines how all plants cannot be flattened into one category of ‘plant’. Plant agency matters because plants in agri-food systems have long been bound up in the workings of power. Understanding what plants do can deepen an understanding of the current context, including justice and injustice..

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