ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes a struggle between a “movement from above” and “movements from below.” The former is the transnational corporate food alliance which has established technocratic, profit-driven agriculture as the way of meeting the population’s food needs. In contrast, the latter are sustainable food movements whose activists promote fresh, locally and sustainably produced foods. Ethnographic findings on local food activism in North Carolina explain how it is that movement activists fail to “scale up” to regional or national levels in order to challenge the power and influence of the transnational corporate alliance. Research in one farmers’ market in the state reveals that local-food-oriented elites exalt local markets while implicitly excluding working people and people of color from decision making, and thus fail to work for national food justice goals. Incidentally, these elites promote the massing of affluent consumers at the site, thus inviting in gentrification forces that drive out poorer residents.
