(INTRA-)ACTIVITY OF ALTERNATIVE FOOD: PERFORMING A HOPEFUL FOOD FUTURE

Abstract

IntroductionThe transformation of our foodscape can take place through everyday, mundane connections and linkages. I propose here that individual participants of superficially discrete but subcutaneously complex and tangled AFIs, have the collective means to navigate a new food future. This future has potential to be focused on ethical, socio-ecological capital by the sharing of effort, experience, skills and information. I explore how AFIs materialize as cohesive and impactful net works wit h significant transformative potential for the dominant and unscrupulous Global Food system (Carolan 2011). The AFI case studies provided in the following sections highlight several interrelated foci of this paper. Firstly, there is a focus on the alternative foodscape as an inextricable entanglement of discrete individuals as they articulate with AFIs. Secondly, I reveal my observations of the perpetual changes in these relationships a nd connect ions. Thirdly, I look at these cha nges, wher e differ ent connections are regularly made and remade, which make way for new spaces of ethical and socially embedded practices. Fourthly, I consider the resultant potentia l for cha nge in our dominant food system given these const a nt changes in and new potentials of relationships and intra-action.Modern-day, conventional food typically presents a disengagement between consumption and production (see McClintock 2010; Wittman et al. 2010): how, wher e a nd by whom it was produced, distr ibuted a nd fina lly, t he context in which it was consumed. This disconnection seems unnatural given the entanglement of food ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics bound up in the processes of provisioning ourselves (Goodman 2009). Through the notion of intra-action, our normative view of the conventional food system can be problematized. Diverse ontologies of huma n interactions can be seen as relational and cooperative, embedding intricate social entanglements instead of disembedded and disembodied rational economic actors. This alternative view destabilizes conventional knowledges of both the drivers and the ways of assembling such mechanistic human systems. I challenge presuppositions that conventional food supply chains are made up of these individually constituted agents or entities that fit neatly into process-diagrams of food production logistics. Rather than accept our food system as discretely determinate units of efficiency, this paper offers the lens of intra-action to view an alternative food system composed of init iatives understood as a mutual constitution of entangled agencies (Barad 2007: 33).Further, this perspective of intra-action has no presuppositions of what difference looks like. Instead it explores how differences are perpetually and iteratively recreated. Alternative food initiatives (AFIs) can be seen to offer diversity and difference in their processes of dynamically (re)creating food phenomena, juxtaposed against what is traditionally hegemonic and unnaturally stable industrialized mass food production, procurement and consumption. The vast majority of AFIs and their participants are in favor of disturbing the disenfranchising associations of a dominant food system. AFIs portray a diversity of novel food enactments, to engender a politics of difference to help disturb this dominance. This research is important because it uncovers and legitimizes diverse practices that are not regularly considered as part of a valid food space. The intention of this paper is not to present AFIs in terms of relative success, which I argue cannot be measured through their lon- gevity or their size. Rather this paper explores the what and how of AFIs, to revea l their emer gence. I look to AFIs of far mers' mar kets, food boxes, community and guerrilla gardening as well as initiatives such as raw milk collectives, backyard chicken farmers, and dumpster divers to understand the potential for transformation of a food system subject to entanglements of ethical impoverishment. …