Food matters - escaping to the garden during Covid-19 lockdowns and (re-)connecting with food

This research is an ethnographic study of gardeners growing food in their home-gardens during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns in England, UK during 2020-2021. With people confined to their homes under law in attempts to stem the spread of the virus, the UK government recommended that people undertook daily exercise outdoors for the benefit of their physical and mental health. Over 3 million people took up gardening(HTA, 2021). From multi-sited fieldwork data, the themes of escape, memory, relations,and temporality emerged. The study explores how gardeners forge a relationship with their food when they grow it themselves in the garden taskscape (Ingold, 1993). Participants rejoiced in the unsurpassed tastes of freshly harvested produce and described how memories of relations and events as well as the phenomenological experiences of nurturing plants become embodied as meaning in the food they grow(Sutton, 2001; Crowther, 2013; Pollan, 2013). Gardeners felt a connection with nature, described as an immersion in the world,and attend to non-human seasonalities. This also highlighted gardeners’ sustainability ethic, which adds another lens through which to view and understand motivations and outcomes for those who choose to grow their own food in their home-garden