[This post is based on a talk presented at Enough! Aesthetic Politics in a Finite World -symposium in a panel Decarbonising the imagination on 16.4.2026]

I Setting the scene

As I think about how and when my interest in food began, it all seems quite logical now, in retrospect. I spent my early childhood with my grandmothers, who would tend a vegetable garden, a dacha as it is called in Russia. Much of our food came from this 800 sqm garden plot.

I would sunbathe while my grandmothers tended the garden and occasionally help them with different tasks, of which harvesting and eating the harvest were my absolute favourites. We would sell a small part of our harvest at a local market, and store and preserve much of it for winter.

Much later, having lived in Finland since the age of five, I ended up travelling in 2010 to Samara, a town that was one of the last ones in Russia to open up to global markets. The change that had taken place with regard to the availability of local food was striking.

Babushkas, the grandmothers, and other local farmers had been pushed out of the marketplace, and in their place there were middlemen and women selling produce whose origin was hard to trace. The same had happened in supermarkets.

This shocking observation turned into a topic for my PhD, in which I examined how people find and source food directly from local farmers and other food providers, such as fishermen and women, hunters and gatherers, home bakers, and mushroom grannies.

I spent six years doing ethnographic research on alternative food economies, including food collectives, community-supported agriculture and other food exchange groups. I was a founding member of the first CSA in Finland, and a member of three different food collectives for over ten years.

And yet, when I defended my PhD in 2018, having been as close to the origins of food and to those who grow, gather, and hunt it as possible, I realised—much to my embarrassment—that, if asked, I would not be able to grow food in order to sustain myself, my family, and my proximate community.

My postdoctoral work and research have since been guided by a strong will and commitment to learning the work of feeding from those whose livelihoods depend on this work, particularly small-scale farmers.

My research has changed not only my own perception of the world, but also my orientation within it. Some two and a half years ago, I moved to a rural village with my family, and we have since started a smallholding ourselves.

Trying to sustain ourselves by living off the land while also working full-time as a researcher and while being a mother for two kids has not turned out to be easy, and it is far from sustainable in the long run, since, if done properly, all require full-time dedication.

This is the context within which I turn to exploring how we might understand an aesthetics of sustaining in a societal context where most of the work done to feed ourselves is not only heavily dependent on fossil resources, but also, as a consequence, cut off from relations to the land, waters, and non-human living beings that enable our sustenance.

But before this, I wish to show a short ethnographic documentary on burbot ice fishing (mateenpyynti in Finnish).

I want to note that this is not a professional, or even amateur-quality documentary, and I hope it will not be judged as such. (I know there are many professional film makers present here, so not competing in that genre.)

This is a film that emerged very spontaneously to document one day in the life of my husband and me, and our path of learning to become more self-sufficient in sustaining ourselves.

I will not return to this video immediately after showing it, but a bit later in my talk.

[watch the video here]

II The work of feeding

Growing and foraging food, once foundational forms of work, have, in the name of economic growth and capital accumulation, gradually been pushed to the margins. Indeed, contemporary forms of development have rested upon what, the philosophers Antti Salminen and Tere Vadén (2018) describe as fossil capitalism.

In the context of agriculture and food production more broadly this has meant a gradual substitution of human labor with oil-powered machinery and other productivity-enhancing inputs such as fossil-based fertilizers and soil amendments, chemical pesticides, and patented seed varieties developed through laboratory based breeding.

The development of modern society has thus been driven by a process in which the share of human labor in working the land has been steadily reduced and its productivity intensified.

But what, in this context, does intensified productivity, in other words, efficiency, actually mean?

In agriculture, efficiency is often spoken of as productivity—and, at times, the two are treated as one and the same. A correlation is assumed: the more efficient the production, the greater the output in relation to the resources used.

The belief that efficiency and productivity can expand indefinitely within modern (agri)cultural economies is, ultimately, an illusion. Modern technology enables “more efficient” production largely because efficiency itself is defined so narrowly, as output per hectare, and because of not accounting for the negative externalities generated in production processes.

As production and consumption have become increasingly separated, value chains grow ever more complex, rendering any comprehensive assessment of true efficiency and productivity extremely difficult. Productivity is most often calculated in monetary terms, through output–input ratios, but when introducing alternative measures —such as use of energy, or water— the picture starts to radically change.

If we consider, for instance, industrial agriculture grounded in the heavy use of fertilizers, pesticides, and combustion-engine machinery, from the perspective of energy use it appears strikingly inefficient. Food writer Michael Pollan (2008) has calculated that producing a single calorie of food through industrial agriculture requires as much as ten calories of external energy, drawn largely from fossil fuels.

In this way, we are basically eating oil.

Without oil-based fuels, tractors stop moving, harvesters fall silent, and the trucks, ships, and airplanes that transport our food come to a halt. Decarbonising food production would, in this sense, as a philosopher, dramaturg, and friend of mine, Ilja Lehtinen, and I argue in our article, entail a shift toward more work-intensive forms of farming oriented to local sustenance — in other words, replacing oil with manual labor.

But what would it require, in practice, to replace oil in a society where most people have lost their connection to work of feeding and to what it actually requires to feed oneself? By work of feeding I refer to growing and harvesting vegetables, caring for and killing animals, gathering and preserving food, but also and equally to work that is required to feed the soil, the animals, the newborn and the school children, workers of the factories and of the shiny rooftop offices, the poor and the elderly.

Ultimately the work of feeding makes possible the ongoing sustaining of oneself and of one’s household.

As most of us have become increasingly distanced from growing and foraging food, the nature and quality of the work of feeding has shifted quite radically: from requiring careful attunement to, and skilful movement within one’s living environment to performing a rather mechanical set of tasks that demand rather little and very different kinds of sensory knowledge and skills.

As one farmer-chef once described to me, the sensory perception between cutting open a carcass with a butcher’s knife and cutting open cardboard boxes and plastic bags with a utility knife, or between picking dandelion, yarrow, sorrel, and ground elder outdoors and picking up a bag of salad mix from a supermarket shelf, cannot really be compared.

These acts not only belong to completely different kind of work of feeding, but refer to an entirely different kinds of webs of relations that give rise to how that what is considered as beautiful or ugly, attractive or appalling, good or bad is generated and perceived in the course of the work of feeding.

It is this kind of sensory perception and judgment that I turn to next.

IV Towards an aesthetics of sustaining

In what follows, I want to propose an understanding of aesthetics not as the assessment of an object conducted in the mind’s eye, but as a way of sensorially attuning to and participating in the unfolding of the world.

In other words, attaching aesthetic experience to movement is key here.

While I feel that initiating a conversation on the aesthetics of sustaining can offer a novel way of understanding the kind of work of feeding that is inevitably required to sustain not only humankind but the diversity of life on this planet more broadly, my thinking with and through this concept remains at a very early stage.

I have been particularly inspired by the writings of two thinkers, the anthropologist Tim Ingold and the philosopher Annemarie Mol. What unites them, for me, is a relational ontology and a shared attention to the sensing body — both of which have been central in shaping my attempts to think through the concept of aesthetics.

Let me now return to the video on burbot ice-fishing. How might we understand this kind of work of feeding if we approach it from a perspective of aesthetic experience, that is, a particular kind of sensory perception — one that carries a sense of beauty, enchantment, or fulfilment.

The video showed one day of Arttu’s—my husband’s—burbot ice-fishing trip. While both fishing and ice-fishing have long roots in Finland, and while Arttu has been doing both since he was a child, this was his first proper attempt at trying to catch burbot.

First, he needed to get the equipment, and the most important are the hooks. There are different sizes to choose from; he chose ones from the middle range, which are noticeably larger than a traditional fishing hook. You also need thicker line, and some thinner thread as well. Then you need weights—something to get the hooks down to the bottom of the lake.

At the other end of the line many people use a branch to keep it resting over the ice hole. Arttu decided to make his own wooden stoppers: a relatively long wooden stick, with a T-shaped crosspiece set about one third of the way up. His idea was to use them the following years as well. When the line is tied to the stick, it needs to reach below the ice, so it doesn’t freeze into it.

Then there is the bait. There are many options, small fish, for example. Some people use live bait, but Arttu finds that a bit too brutal. So instead, he made a big hole in the ice and lowered a fish trap into the water, in a place where he had observed small fish gather the year before. From there he got around ten perch, and chose ones about the size of a thumb. And this was already done the during the previous day; on the video you can see that only one fish had swam in the trap, which he released.

Often, when people set burbot hooks, they might put out ten hooks or so. But as his first time, Arttu set three. He placed them in a spot that was not entirely random, but not fully certain either — it was a location where he remembered having once seen an older man set burbot lines before.

He chopped the holes a short distance from each other, set the baits, and piled snow on top so they wouldn’t freeze shut. Then you just leave them there, and come back after a couple of days to check if there is anything.

Before I tell you whether we were able to secure our meal with this attempt, let me tune into the aesthetic experience of this activity.

Unlike much of the research on aesthetics, which tends to take a final form, like an art piece —or in this case the fishing equipment, the fish, the landscape in which fishing takes place, or the meal prepared from fresh fish— as the object of aesthetic appreciation, and an external observer —you, me, or someone watching the video on my YouTube channel— as its subject, I want to take a different, a somewhat contrasting, approach.

I am interested instead in the unfolding and emergence, and in the interplay of attunement and arbitrariness that give rise to aesthetic experience.
Above all, I am concerned with the sensory perception of the practitioner, rather than that of the outside observer. For what may appear beautiful, enticing, or fulfilling to an outside observer —or even to someone encountering the activity as a one-off, touristic-type-of-an experience— is likely to differ greatly from how it is sensed and lived in the ongoing practice of sustaining oneself.

I want to propose that perception of beauty has much to do with rhythmicity, skills, and orientation.

Let me begin with rhythmicity.

Rhythmicity

In burbot fishing, just like in farming, attuning to the rhythms of nature and of other living organisms is essential. Burbot swim closer to the surface during their spawning season (kutuaika), from approximately January to early March, just as farming becomes possible only once the soil warms, roughly between April and October. It is not only seasonal rhythms that shape fishing and farming, but also those of the weather: one cannot ice-fish without ice, nor farm with it.

Fishing, like farming, requires more than attunement to natural rhythms—it requires timely commitment. When the baits are set, and the seeds sown, one must return, again and again, to check on them; neither can be left unattended for even a few days. It is, as Ingold (2021: 119) describes, drawing on the Greek concept of kairos, “the moment that must be seized in any process of skilled work, when human action meets a natural process developing according to its own rhythms”

But it is not only a matter of timing. It is also a matter of having the time to engage in all that fishing and farming require: preparing and mending tools, being available to respond when needed, and making meals from raw and unprocessed ingredients—fish, vegetables, animal parts.

Indeed, if there is no time to cook and the fish spoils in the fridge, or if one finds fifteen large perch in a fish trap, dead because it was not checked in time, the aesthetic experience is altered.

Yet rhythmic attunement extends beyond the present time. As a farmer, or as a fisher, one is also attuning to both past and future. The ability to fish or farm is shaped by the actions of previous generations, just as one’s own actions are oriented toward those yet to come.

Past generations may have depleted soils or eutrophied waters, and this, in turn, shapes what kinds of fishing or farming are possible now. Likewise, the movements of a fisher or a farmer are guided by the need to sustain fish stocks and maintain the health of the soil for future generations.

It is within these ongoing, shifting, yet repetitive and binding rhythms—rhythms that require commitment — that sensory perception takes form, and where judgments of beauty and enticement begin to emerge.

In this way, rhythmicity is inherently embedded in the activities of both the fisher and the farmer, and cannot be separated from how the world opens itself out to the skilled practitioners.

Let me turn next to skills.

Skills

There is much more to say about skills than I have time to address here. I will therefore draw your attention to just one aspect that I find both perplexing and essential for understanding skills: intergenerational learning.

As Ingold’s thinking is largely guided by examples from Indigenous communities, his conceptualisation of skills also follows from the ways of knowing he has encountered in these communities.

Yet my own context of research —and of living— is quite different. Many of the farmers I have worked with are self-taught. They have had no footsteps to follow, no farm to inherit. And those who have inherited land have often inherited landscapes in need of regeneration, and rather than learning from past generations they have needed to unlearn.

Arttu’s case is bit different. He has been fishing and ice-fishing with his stepfather, siblings, cousins, and other family members since he was a child. But this has taken place in very different environments and waters. He spent his childhood in the north, in Lapland, fishing in rivers. We now live, in contrast, by a lake. And he has not had an established practice of fishing burbot, neither does he know our lake well enough yet.

Of course, as Arttu pointed out to me, there is no shortage of instructions and advice online informing about the depths at which burbot swim, or the kinds of places one should choose for placing baits. But these are, in the end, very general. You have to know the place yourself. And if you don’t, you have to begin somewhere, and try.

According to a common advice the gear should be set along the paths of the fish. But what does one do when those paths are unknown, and there is no one to ask?

Knowing, as Mol reminds us, requires active engagement and attunement; it involves both perceiving and sensing the environment. And as Ingold (2000: 69) writes, “through the practical activities of hunting and gathering” —or, in my case, fishing and farming— “the environment, including the landscape with its fauna and flora, enters directly into the constitution of persons, not only as a source of nourishment but also as a source of knowledge” .

As the season for burbot fishing is short, we would need to dedicate ourselves to it in a sustained way in order to really learn it—to begin to recognise patterns, to notice where and when to set the lines, to understand how the fish move.

Learning and developing skills would emerge then through what Ingold calls an education of attention, and through processes of discovery. Indeed, attending to those selected bits of the world that affect one in a not-quite-predictable way, is part and parcel of both knowing and the formation of skill.

Knowing and developing skills are thus transformative — not only of the environment in which they take place, but of the practitioners themselves, and of the ways in which practitioners come to orient themselves in the world.

It is within the unfolding of skilful reorientation through practice that the experience of beauty begins to emerge.

Finally, I turn very briefly to orientation.

Orientation

With “orientation,” I refer to the way in which the practitioner—the farmer or fisher—relates to the landscape in which they carry out their practice and navigate within it. It is “in a sense, the performance of certain tasks [that] makes you the person who you are,” and who you become (Ingold 2000: 409).

The work of feeding has the potential to tie people to the land from which they eat or to separate them from it.

It takes a profession, a livelihood, to be able to call oneself a farmer or a fisher. Fishing burbot as a hobbyist is different from fishing to feed one’s family through the winter months, and different again from the work of a professional fisher selling their catch.

Each of these involves a different kind of relationship to the land and thereby orient people differently toward their practice. And it is through these different orientations, which manifest as diverse choreographies — as movements that make up the sensing body of those who fish and farm— that a sense of beauty emerges and dissipates.

Indeed, as the saying goes in Finnish fishing culture, “the bigger and uglier the burbot, the more impressive it is in the eyes of a fisher”. A hobbyist, by contrast, might assess a catch in terms of its potential to appear well in photographs in social media while someone fishing to sustain their family through the winter may assess the fish guided by necessity and use.

*

Taking all this together, what one finds beautiful or enticing in the work of feeding depends on its rhythmicity, the mastery of skills it involves, and the ways in which one orients oneself within it.

Indeed, if there is no catch — as was the case during our entire burbot fishing season — if the meal that is prepared does not succeed, or the fish goes bad because there was no one checking in on it the aesthetic experience is altered in comparison to moments of a successful catch, a well-prepared, tasty meal, and time to attend.

The point I wish to leave you with is an understanding of aesthetics as a way of participating in the world. This way the work of feeding should not be understood as an object of aesthetic perception, but as a way of perceiving. With an aesthetics of sustaining, then, I refer to an aesthetic experience that does not arise from detached observation, but from involvement, practice, and commitment.

This is why it is not enough to simply decarbonise the imagination by producing representations of a more beautiful world.

But reducing the dependency on fossil resources and transforming our food economies requires participation and getting our hands, and perhaps even our bodies, dirty.