Confronting the Goldilocks Problem: Encountering “The Middle” in Anthropological Studies of Food and Agriculture

Abstract

AbstractGlobally, and in the U.S., agricultural and food systems are increasingly bifurcated into large and small‐scale operations. Our ethnographic work indicates that there is a great deal of creativity and innovation between these poles, but this is largely being overlooked in agricultural research and policy where “the middle” is largely subject to erasure. Although constructs of scale are ideological in nature, they have material impacts across actors and networks. In this context, there is a critical need for theoretical and ethnographic work that seeks to understand the vast middle. Anthropologists are poised to bring the depth of contextualized, materially focused, process‐oriented ethnography to understanding how agriculture and food systems are experienced and navigated, in highly heterogeneous ways—at the thresholds of scale, and in the interconnections of networks. To illustrate, we draw upon our ethnographic research in the meat industry and with farm to school initiatives.