For the past decade, supermarket chains have been positioned as the pre-eminent actor in global and national food systems. Some agri-food scholars argue that their ever-expanding transnational supply chains have established an era of stable production-consumption relations (or Food Regime), while others point to the conflicts they are encountering with governments, social movements and ‘alternative’ consumers. However, remarkably little attention has been paid to their relationship with communities and to community system sustainability. Based on fieldwork conducted in the Goulburn Valley, (...) Australia, we argue that supermarket operations are contributing to community tensions through contestation over valued symbols and narratives about what desirable ‘progress’ looks like. We identified three interrelated points of tension being intensified by supermarket chains: whether progress is encapsulated by being an agricultural production or a modern consumption centre; whether progress should be based on a model of corporate capital or the local small business; and to what extent modern citizens can and should support community shopping instead of convenience shopping. For long-time residents, supermarkets are paradoxical actors appealing to, as well as, challenging the narrative of a community whose economic strength was based on the surrounding natural environment and local people’s endeavours. The concepts of solastalgia and structural nostalgia are relevant, with the former referring to the place-based distress experienced by residents whose local area is changing profoundly and the latter describing a process amplifying that distress. Through exploring the political paradoxes of community solastalgia, we raise new questions about supermarket authority within contemporary Food Regimes. (shrink)

The Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society and the journal _Agriculture and Human Values_ provided a crucial intellectual space for the early transdisciplinary critique of the industrial agrifood system. This paper describes that process and presents the concept of “The Doctors of Agrifood Studies” as a metaphor for the key role critical agrifood social scientists played in documenting the unsustainability of conventional agriculture and working to create an alternative, ethical, sustainable agrifood system. After the introduction, the paper details the “Critical (...) Turn” in agrifood studies, followed by a reconsideration of my “Four Questions” framework, focusing on the current tension between the food security and food sovereignty discourses and movements. (shrink)

As world food and fuel prices threaten expanding urban populations, there is greater need for the urban poor to have access and claims over how and where food is produced and distributed. This is especially the case in marginalized urban settings where high proportions of the population are food insecure. The global movement for food sovereignty has been one attempt to reclaim rights and participation in the food system and challenge corporate food regimes. However, given its origins from the peasant (...) farmers' movement, La Via Campesina, food sovereignty is often considered a rural issue when increasingly its demands for fair food systems are urban in nature. Through interviews with scholars, urban food activists, non-governmental and grassroots organizations in Oakland and New Orleans in the United States of America, we examine the extent to which food sovereignty has become embedded as a concept, strategy and practice. We consider food sovereignty alongside other dominant US social movements such as food justice, and find that while many organizations do not use the language of food sovereignty explicitly, the motives behind urban food activism are similar across movements as local actors draw on elements of each in practice. Overall, however, because of the different histories, geographic contexts, and relations to state and capital, food justice and food sovereignty differ as strategies and approaches. We conclude that the US urban food sovereignty movement is limited by neoliberal structural contexts that dampen its approach and radical framework. Similarly, we see restrictions on urban food justice movements that are also operating within a broader framework of market neoliberalism. However, we find that food justice was reported as an approach more aligned with the socio-historical context in both cities, due to its origins in broader class and race struggles. (shrink)

This Symposium provides an important opportunity to reflect on the current state of scholarship positioning alternative foods against mainstream agri-food systems. Symposia of this kind have a long tradition as marking particular turning points in agrifood debates. This collection provides an opportunity to examine the current positioning of scholarship around the theoretical and methodological fracture line between successor theories to classical political economy and more post-structuralist approaches to alternative economic activities around food and agriculture. In the current collection, despite clear (...) evidence of theoretical positioning around the structural: post-structural divide, I argue that both aspects of agri-food theorizing share similar political intent and are positioned within the same wider political project of agrifood critique. Therefore, despite theoretical fracture, there is a unity of political intention that continues to bind together this particular field of research and practice. (shrink)