ABSTRACT
How can we grasp the proliferation of alternative food networks (AFNs) since the 1990s? How can we understand the many different ways in which they are organized? Does the growth of these networks mark a watershed change – “back to a future” of re-localized, re-embedded quality food production–consumption and away from globalizing industrial food systems, with their “placeless and nameless” supply lines encircling the world? How “alternative” are these re-localized networks? What are their relationships with mainstream food provisioning? Is re-localization an oppositional move, articulating a new moral politics of food informed by ecological sustainability, social justice, and animal welfare? Are these moral politics grounded in a Putnamesque (re-)valorization of social community or is the quality “turn” to the local rather a new form of cultural capital in Bourdieusian status wars for social “distinction?” This chapter does not answer all these questions but it does provide us with analytical tools and contextual materials to move toward a better understanding of the issues at stake.
