Engaging alternative food networks: commentaries and research agendas

Abstract

Alternative Food Networks had its genesis in three leading questions that had been relatively neglected in the great outpouring of research on alternative forms of food provisioning and the social movements at their base. What is to be done to create a more effective democratic food politics founded on open, deliberative processes of civic governance? What are the threads of material, ethical and political commitment that hold people together, however loosely, in these innovative organizational forms? Our third question reflects the fact that most of the alternative economies discussed in the book must secure their social reproduction and disseminate their values in the spaces of (neo-liberal) capitalism. It therefore asks what are the factors that condition and delineate alternativeness and how narrowly do these circumscribe the ‘politics of possibility’ of market-embedded social movements, such as organic agriculture, fair trade and Slow Food? To explore these questions we proposed three overarching conceptual bridges: reflexivity, shared knowledge practices, and alterity. Broadly speaking, these concepts are deployed to assess the potential of these ‘diverse economies’ to ‘reconfigure the values, time-space relations, and structures of governance of everyday food provisioning and the global trading system’ (p. 7). Writing Alternative Food Networks gave us the opportunity to review the research agenda devoted to the creation of a better food system, systematize our critiques of the limitations of that agenda, and consider how to overcome these limitations. The commentaries in this issue acknowledge the strengths and point out some of the weaknesses of our project. In particular, the commentators, like us, are working to further the conceptual ideas that, hopefully, can help to frame more effective actions to build a future food system that is more sustainable and more just. We greatly appreciate the response to our work in the commentaries published here, and also in a larger corpus of work by scholars who have found our analytical frames and reformulations to be useful in their empirical research. We are grateful to the authors of these commentaries for grappling with our sometimes dense prose and sometimes challenging ideas in ways that respect what we are saying while asking us to listen to their own not-always-congruent points of view. This kind of conceptual engagement is the definition of reflexivity as laid out in our work on knowing and growing. The invitation to respond to these commentaries gives us an