ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the 'alternative food economy' constituted by the provisioning of 'quality' food products to what at present is a relatively narrow segment of consumers. It describes the uneven retail and moral geographies of quality food provisioning, with some illustrative examples from London, and argues for a renewed emphasis on social justice in food production-consumption practices as the foundation of a reinvigorated food policy. An analytical focus on the contested knowledges of 'growing food' and 'knowing food' provides a bridge between the spaces of production and consumption, private and public spaces, and highlights alliances across these spaces in which consumers engage as active and relational participants. This amounts to the simple, yet long ignored, recognition that food, its producers and consumers, are entangled in a politically contested, ever-changing discourse of competing knowledge claims. The chapter looks at the 'alternative' retail geographies of quality foods and the 'moral charge' of these political geographies of aestheticised consumerism.
