ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, in rural sociology and cognate disciplines, considerable interest has developed in what have been variously labelled as ‘alternative food strategies’ (Kirwan 2003), ‘alternative food initiatives’ (Allen et al. 2003), ‘alternative food supply chains’ (Renting et al. 2003), ‘alternative consumption practices’ (Bryant and Goodman 2004), ‘alternative food networks’ (Whatmore et al. 2003) and the ‘alternative food economy’ 1 (Morris 2002). These labels are used to describe a number of diverse initiatives and developments that have recently risen to prominence in the agro-food system. Examples include organic and other forms of ecological agriculture, direct marketing such as farm shops, farmers’ markets and box schemes and fairly traded goods and produce which comes from locally unique and distinctive places of production. The appellation, ‘alternative’ points to the oppositional character of these phenomena, which have often been developed in an attempt to counteract and offer sustainable solutions to some of the environmental, social and economic problems that have come to be associated with the mainstream or conventional agro-food system. More specifically, alternative food networks embody relations between their constituent actors that are somehow different from the conventional industrial food supply chain model. These differences may be environmental, social or economic, but what they have in common is an intention to make more explicit the connectedness between the production of food and its eventual consumption. They have been defined by Renting et al. (2003, p. 394) as being ‘newly emerging networks of producers, consumers, and other actors that embody alternatives to the more standardised industrial mode of food supply’.
