Janita Van Dyk

Janita Van Dyk is a PhD at the Department of Anthropology with a collaborative specialization in Food Studies. Her dissertation project, “Food Tempos: Making Time, Food, and Value in Northern Italy,” examines the changing economic and social landscape of food and farming in Northern Italy. She focusses on how groups of international and Italian students, activists, researchers, and producers associated with the slow food movement respond to climate change impacts. As place-based foods, such as terroir goods and products with Geographical Indications certifications, increasingly become oversaturated in the market and under threat by changes in the landscapes that support them, her research examines how people turn to different strategies to make food valuable, growable, and knowable. Notably, people turn to time and temporality to render food a key medium in the history and present of the Italian nation-state, social collectives, and associational life, thus forming emerging subjectivities, relationships, and value regimes. Janita is the recipient of the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (2021), the SSHRC Jean-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (2018–21), and the Culinaria Research Centre Graduate Student Fellowship (2020–21). Her work is currently published in Food, Feminism, Fermentation’s “Musings,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food Studies, and Fieldsights, hosted by the Society for Cultural Anthropology.