Speaker: Heriberto Ruiz Tafoya
Date & Time: 26 November 2020 13:00 – 14:00
Venue: Middle sized meeting room, 3F, Inamori Foundation Memorial Building, Kyoto University

Overview:
The purpose of this presentation is to discuss and introduce ideas on a comparative study on Corporate Packaged Food (CPF) consumption and its socio-economic implications in the marginalized areas of Mexico City and Manila. This study explores a new area of comparative regional studies that, as Boaventura De Souza, Enrique Dussel and others have said, reinvigorates South-South dialogues and allows for epistemological construction to take place in the Global-South. In this regard, the study of food consumption serves as a reliable basis for contrasting realities. For this project, the platform for comparison includes both a macro and micro levels of analysis. At a macro level I ask how large multinationals such as Nestlé have strategically penetrated Mexico and The Philippines, the top markets in the Global South below China, India and Brazil (Nestlé, 2017); how Markets are sustained through the “inclusion” of the Urban Poor into regular corporative driven consumption schemes. I examine the role of Manila and Mexico City in guaranteeing the expansion of global corporate food regimes (Friedmann, 2005; McMichael, 2009) which require the domination of markets, their meanings generation and consuming bodies (Lang and Heasman, 2004; DuPuis, 2015). At a micro level. I explore the societal impact of CPF in cooking skills (Sutton, 2016) and eating habits (Warde, 2016) in slums of two historically related cities but with different current social, economic and political contexts. For this presentation I introduce my theoretical framework to ‘unpack’ the politics of packaged foods in these multiple sites.

Bio: Heriberto Ruiz Tafoya is a JSPS fellow and Guest Research Associate at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), Kyoto University. He received his Doctoral Degree in Economics from the Graduate School of Economics, Kyoto University in 2019. He received a BA in Economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), an MSc. in Technology and Innovation Management at Sussex University (Brighton, UK), a Global Master of Business Administration (GMBA) at the Doshisha Business School, and a Diploma in Small and Medium Enterprises Development from JICA-Ryukoku University (Kyoto, Japan). He has published papers, articles and specialized reports on Economic Development, Political Economy, Business Management, Social Entrepreneurship, and Regional Innovation, and since 2006, he has been lectured on Introduction to Economic Theory and Global Political Economy.