ABSTRACT
The present chapter reveals that ‘organic’ and small-scale producers share the farming imaginaries associated with industrial farming and expressed by large-scale, growth-oriented commercial farmers. These imaginaries also reveal a sense-based normative ‘distrust’ of agro-industrial processes. At the epistemological level, this distrust may signal a cultural dissonance in farming concerning the question of how to articulate a history of the senses (Ackerman 1991; Polan 2002), food culture and heritage and the place of food (Bowen and De Master 2014; Carroll and Fahy 2014; Feagan 2007). The normative distrust experienced by farmers emerges from a mindset that requires them to act/think-like-a-firm in commercial farming. Recent literature has identified acting/thinking-like-a-firm as a manifestation of ‘neoliberal rationality’, which figures humans as entrepreneurial, self-investing capital seeking to maximize their performance values and competitively reposition themselves in society (Brown 2015; Dardot and Laval 2009). This chapter examines whether ‘organic’ and small-scale farmers’ distrust reflects a distinctive value orientation that appeals to certain quality practices and marketing strategies – specifically situated at the landscape level of the farm – in relation to the smell, taste and texture of food. Distrust, therefore, brings forth spatially valued traditions and practices that co-exist as one of the hybrid forms within agro-cultural diversity. I explore this hybridity by considering the simultaneous co-existence of what I call participatory certification by consumers for non-standard local food and corporate-imposed Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) standards for industrially designed food.
