This article examines the diversity of food networks that fit within the alternative food system of the United States. While farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture schemes, and corporate organic food markets all fit within the alternative food system, they differ greatly in the conventions and beliefs that they represent. The alternative food system has divided into two movements: corporate, weak alternative food networks; and local, strong alternative food networks. The weak corporate version focuses on protecting the environment; however, it neglects (...) issues concerning labor standards, animal welfare, rural communities, small-scale farmers, and human health. Local, strong alternative food networks not only assure environmental protection, but they also address the issues that weak alternatives neglect. Using three case studies from the Washington, D.C. metro area, the author explains that strong alternative food networks are better suited to create social and political change because they challenge the foundations of the conventional food system: standardized and generic products, price-based competition, consolidated power, and global scale. To affect true social and political change in the United States, the author recommends supporting strong alternative food networks by creating the requisite cultural and political space for them to succeed. (shrink)

Although the concept of food sovereignty is rooted in International Peasant Movements across the global south, activists have recently called for the adoption of this framework among low-income communities of color in the urban United States. This paper investigates on-the-ground processes through which food sovereignty articulates with the work of food justice and community food security activists in Oakland, California, and Seattle, Washington. In Oakland, we analyze a farmers market that seeks to connect black farmers to low-income consumers. In Seattle, (...) we attend to the experiences of displaced immigrant farmers from Latin America and their efforts to address their food needs following migration. In both cases, we find that US based projects were constrained by broader forces of neoliberalism that remained unrecognized by local activists. In Oakland, despite a desire to create a local food system led by marginalized African Americans, emphasis on providing green jobs in agriculture led activists to take a market-based approach that kept local food out of the economic grasp of food-insecure neighborhood residents. In Seattle, the marginalization of the immense agroecological knowledge of Latino/an immigrant farmers rendered local food projects less inclusive and capable of transformative change. Taken together, these very different cases suggest that a shift towards food sovereignty necessitates a broad acknowledgement of and resistance to neoliberalism. (shrink)

The lack of consistency between people’s engagement in ethical issues and their food choices has received considerable attention. Consumption as “choice” dominates this discourse, understood as decision-making at the point of purchase. But ideas concentrating on individual choice are problematic when trying to understand how social and ethical issues emerge and are dealt with in the practices of buying and eating food. I argue in this paper that “consumer choice” is better understood as a political ideology addressing a particular way (...) in which everyday practices can be directed so as to solve social problems. It is a way that makes questions of power particularly challenging. Some assume consumer sovereignty, emphasizing consumer choice as a reflection of neoliberal deregulation and commercialization. Others worry that ongoing changes increase consumers’ powerlessness. None of these seem to capture that there is active regulation, where public as well as commercial and civil actors are making strong efforts to make people do the right thing—voluntarily. Labeling is the key measure. In practice, the individualized and rationalized model of responsibility depends not only on market opportunities, but even political and social expectations and trust. People may lack concrete capabilities and power to follow up on moral calls, but they may also have a different understanding of who is responsible and what is a “good deed,” or their actions may, in a Foucauldian sense, represent resistance. The paper will, with examples from European empirical studies, discuss how mobilization as well as inertia and disinterest emerge within specific political constellations and practical contexts. (shrink)

Governments, producers, and international free tradeorganizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO) areincreasingly confronted with consumers who not only buy (or don'tbuy) goods, but also demand that those goods are producedconforming to certain ethical (often diverse) standards. Not onlysafety and health belong to these ethical ideals, but animalwelfare, environmental concerns, labor circumstances, and fairtrade. However, this phantom haunts the dusty world of social andpolitical philosophy as well. The new concept ``consumersovereignty'' bypasses the conceptual dichotomy of consumer andcitizen.According to the narrow (...) liberal response to this newconstellation, with respect to food one should conceptualizeconsumer sovereignty as the right of the individual consumer toget information on food products and to make his or her ownchoice on the market of food products. In this conception, thereis a very strong emphasis on rules and principles with respect tothe autonomy of individuals.I argue that these narrow liberal concepts are not sufficient forappropriate public policy-making in democratic societies, andthat they only enable us to identify problems; they do not helpnon-experts (and experts, if it comes to that, as well) inweighing the different ethical claims. Besides, not onlyprinciples play a role in the outcome, but all kinds of ideals aswell, like roles, values, and norms. My principal argument isthat analysis or justification of norms or principles is notsufficient to get a synthesis or construction of ethicalsolutions: we need some value orientation to guide us inbalancing the different ethical claims by solving an ethicalproblem. Moreover, this balancing is something that requiressocial space and social time, i.e., public debates. With theconcept of public debates a whole new dimension enters ethicalanalysis, because the attention of ethicists shifts toformulating criteria of successful and rational public debates.However, in the broad liberal view these concepts aresupplemented with values, preferences, practices of care, andinvolvement. I argue firstly for a broadened perspective on foodas an integral part of life styles and not only as something thatpresents risks. That is the reason that food gets such intensiveattention from the public, which is summarized in the concept ofconsumer concerns. Secondly, I defend the argument that not only(rational) public debates, but intensive commitments of bothproducers and consumers in every link of the chain in so calledcare practices or consumer councils can enhance confidence in thefood production system and the way we extract our daily intakefrom nature. (shrink)

Much is being made of local food. It is at once a social movement, a diet, and an economic strategy—a popular solution—to a global food system in great distress. Yet, despite its popularity or perhaps because of it, local food (especially in the US) is also something of a chimera if not a tool of the status quo. This paper reflects on and contrasts aspects of current local food rhetoric with Dalhberg’s notion of a regenerative food system. It identifies three (...) problematic emphases—the locavore emphasis, the Wal-Mart emphasis, and the Pollan emphasis—and argues that they are shifting local food (as a concept and a social movement) away from the deeper concerns of equity, citizenship, place-building, and sustainability. It is suggested that local food activists and advocates might consider the use of multiple methodologies and forms of expression to explore the integration and reintegration of local food into diverse and redundant place-based practice. A short case study of a low-income, urban neighborhood in Lansing, Michigan, illustrates the value of contextual analysis for more fully enabling the local food movement and a regenerative food system. (shrink)

Originally created by the international peasant movement La Vía Campesina, the concept of “food sovereignty” is being used with increasing frequency by agrifood activists and others in the Global North. Using the analytical lens of framing, I explore the effects of this diffusion on the transformative potential of food sovereignty. US agrifood initiatives have recently been the subject of criticism for their lack of transformative potential, whether because they offer market-based solutions rather than demanding political ones or because they fail (...) to adequately address existing social injustice. In this paper, I consider how food sovereignty measures up to this critique both as it was originally framed by Vía Campesina and as it is being reframed for the US context. First I briefly compare food sovereignty to community food security (CFS), which was developed more explicitly for the North American context and has been criticized for its lack of transformative potential. I then explore how the potential of food sovereignty has been affected as it is reframed to resonate with US audiences through an examination of its use on the web sites of US-based organizations. I find that, while some reframing of the concept to highlight consumer choice does seem to be occurring, it remains a primarily political concept. It may not, however, be fulfilling its potential for addressing social injustice in the US agrifood system because it tends to be used either in reference to international issues or, when applied to the US context, treated as a rough synonym for local control. I conclude that, if advocates can successfully guide the reframing process, food sovereignty could serve as a valuable counter-hegemonic vision to complement the more pragmatic and locally-grounded work of CFS advocates. (shrink)

While the cultivation of genetically modified organisms (GMO) and the spread of genetically engineered (GE) foods has gone largely unnoticed by the majority of Americans, a growing number of vocal civil society groups are opposing the technology and with it the entire conventional system of food provision. As with other alternative food movements, non-GMO activists focus on changing individual consumption habits as the best means of altering the practices of food manufacturers and thereby what and how food is produced. In (...) this paper I argue that the increasing use of consumerist tactics reflect the neoliberalization of food activism in the United States – a process that rather than heralding sustainable agricultural and economic futures may reinforce the status quo. Using the emerging non-GMO movement, and the associated market for non-GMO products, I challenge the assumptions that consumer sovereignty and freedom of choice will bring about the small-scale, localized alternatives espoused by activists and scholars in the field. Specifically, I explore three critical limitations of contemporary alternative food politics. First, the neoliberalization of activism shifts the responsibility for social reforms from the state and manufactures to individual consumers, bringing with it important social justice implications. Second, focusing on choice opens new spaces for the profit without seriously threatening contemporary market structures or agro-ecological practices. Third, contemporary consumerist politics focus on eating right not less and thereby provide few alternatives to the current trends towards convenience and processed foods. (shrink)

With “consumer demand” credited with driving major changes in the food industry related to food quality, safety, environmental, and social concerns, the contemporary politics of food has become characterized by a variety of attempts to redefine food consumption as an expression of citizenship that speaks of collective rights and responsibilities. Neoliberal political orthodoxy constructs such citizenship in terms of the ability of individuals to monitor and regulate their own behavior as entrepreneurs and as consumers. By contrast, many proponents of alternative (...) food networks promote the idea that food citizenship is expressed through participation in social arrangements based on solidarity and coordinated action rather than on contractual and commoditized relationships between so-called “producers” and “consumers.” This paper thus focuses its analysis on the strategies used to mobilize people as consumers of particular products and the ways, in turn, in which people use their consumption choices as expressions of social agency or citizenship. In particular, the paper examines how the marketing, pricing, and distribution of foods interact with food standards to enable and constrain specific expressions of food citizenship. It is argued that narrow and stereotypical constructions of the “ethical consumer” help to limit the access of particular people and environmental values, such as biodiversity, to the ethical marketplace. (shrink)