ABSTRACT
In activist narratives and academic debates, food has become an agent of change. A variety of practices and movements have gathered under the ‘local food’ umbrella in both global North and South. The transformative practices and academic discourses that deploy the concept of local food appear far from homogeneous. The transformative horizon of localness is predicated on re-connection of food to the territory in which it is produced and consumed. Localness articulates different dimensions of proximity: geographical, social, cultural and ecological. The local food movement is too heterogeneous to express a single, defined political theory for the transformation of the food system. The paradigm shift in the global food economy envisaged in the Real Utopias Project depends on food regaining its multi-dimensional value, beyond commodification. The foundation of such an emancipatory project is in the overcoming of the reductionist vision of food as a commodity and in the embracing of its complexity and multi-dimensional value of food as a commons.
