Abstract
This chapter introduces the method called Critical Family History (CFH), which has recently been developed as a means by which academics (and a range of others) can research and critically interpret the politics and meaning of their own family history. The CFH approach is used as a technique for opening up silences in family narratives and using such insights as a launching point for wider discussions of the big forces that historically structured the lives of families: like colonisation, the emergence of industrial capitalism, the creation of global-scale food regimes, the changing nature of gender relations in history and the shifting cultural realities and separations that characterise the emergence of a modern world. CFH has been recently deployed to open up family histories of farming (but is only rarely used to examine food). This chapter reviews recent CFH accounts of colonial farming in both Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. From these family narratives, a clear story emerges of the way in which families act as agents of not only what remains visible from the past, but also what is invisibilised and forgotten. These small and specific histories help reveal much larger dynamics in food systems: how modern food worlds became characterised by large silences and spaces, separating sites of production from consumption and rendering many foundational food and farming relationships virtually invisible to food consumers.