ABSTRACT
In the 1970s and 1980s, social activists and progressive scholars drew attention to the deep and intensifying contradictions at the heart of the industrial food system, ranging from environmental degradation and the disappearance of the iconic “family farm” to concerns about food safety and unhealthy processed foods. While activists gave new impetus to building alternative food networks (AFNs), Academics developed critical analyses of industrialized food systems and began to systematize the experience of these newly-emerging forms of food provisioning, whose proliferation reached phenomenal proportions by the mid-1990s. To understand these turbulent changes in food provisioning, many scholars relied on the theoretical toolbox of political economy. Others, However, moved away from the dominant optic of production relations, workplace politics, and capital–class relations of power. Instead, they found new ways to understand the problematics of food by drawing on the “turn” to the cultural in poststructuralist and post modernist social science.
