ABSTRACT
The end of the twentieth century marked the close of a chapter in the history of social change. In the 1960s, political mobilizations, inspired by revolutionary socialism, reformist social democracy, and identity politics seemed to call into being a brave new world. By the 1980s, these hopes and visions that the world could be transformed by protest-and-projects activity had become distant dreams. Yet social activism is remarkably resilient as revealed by the efflorescence of democracy movements in eastern Europe and the Arab Spring in the Middle East, environmentalist groups, fair trade, the anti-globalization/global justice movement, La Via Campesina, and myriad other expressions of social protest. This “new wave” of social activism includes the burgeoning alternative food movement in its many and diverse forms, from local farmers’ markets to fair trade producer cooperatives. Manifestos of this movement, bracketed, for example, by Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet (1971) and Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food (2008), offer a vision that people, by eating differently, can change the worlds of food as well.
