Troubling Place in Alternative Food Practices: Food Movements, Neoliberalism, and Place

Abstract

The movement for local, organic, sustainable agriculture and food provisioning in the United States is framed as resistance to the expansion of corporate agriculture. In a coherent critique of industrial farming, US alternative movement practitioners often foreground the loss of locality and an ethic of place that is attendant with the Green Revolution, and the globalization of intensive, mechanized agriculture. Emphasizing the environmental costs of this global shift in food production, the mainstream alternative food movement builds on an “agrarian imaginary” (Guthman, 2004) that invokes a more ecologically sustainable agricultural past, which is characterized primarily by small, family farm production. One goal is to bring urban and suburban consumers into more direct relationships with farmers by re-localizing food systems. Celebrity chefs, alternative food gurus, and authors have popularized a set of tastes and consumption habits as a way of creating ecologically and socially conscious practices at food production sites, a trend scholars refer to as ethical consumption. Urged to “vote with our forks” by purchasing products labeled Organic, Fair Trade, or Geographically Indicated, the mainstream alternative food movement has been at the forefront of building a moral economy of consumption in the Global North, whereby consumerism constitutes engaged citizenship.