Temporal Precursors for Lifelong Skills: Food Literacy and Future Adult Capabilities

This study examines the seemingly disjunctured temporalities between childhood food literacy development and eventual dietary functioning into adulthood. Drawing on Woodman and Leccardi's (2015) concept of time as a social institution, we explore how the interconnected temporalities of everyday life, biographical time, and generational timescales shape the emergence of food-related capabilities and food citizenship. Central to our analysis is the novel concept of "precursors" – dormant knowledge and skills cultivated in youth that emerge later in life when circumstances demand. These precursors, we argue, are cultivated through both structural conditions and creative interactions with one's environment during childhood and adolescence. Our research reveals that while some youth may exhibit lower immediate food literacy, they often possess rich precursors that can be activated under specific conditions such as independence, family formation, or economic crises. This outcome challenges conventional temporal understandings of cumulative or linear skill acquisition.

Based on qualitative components of a food literacy assessment in Asia, complemented by ethnographic research with young factory workers and migrants facing dietary precarity, we demonstrate how precursors are not usually intellectualized or recognized by individuals, expressing themselves rather in more automated and instinctive ways, such as inexplicable self-assuredness in a food-related task, such as shopping, planning, or food preparation. Our findings suggest that the temporal modes of precarity and uncertainty characteristic of contemporary society significantly influence the development and activation of these precursors. We argue that nurturing these latent capabilities is also a non-linear task embedded inconsistently in parenting, education, and environmental curiosity, but emergent under periods of duress, such as stress, survival, or independence. Precursors thereby offer new perspectives on youth agency in dynamically navigating shifting conditions of food systems, with implications for educational approaches and evaluation strategies to innovatively measure and nurture food literacy.