This book is based on the assumption that "organic has lost its way". Paradoxically, it comes at a time when we witness the continuing of growth in organic food production and markets around the world. Yet, the book claims that organic has lost sight of its first or fundamental philosophical principles and ontological assumptions. The collection offers empirically grounded discussions that address the principles and fundamental assumptions of organic farming and marketing practices. The book draws attention to the core principles (...) of organic and offers different clearly articulated and well-defined conceptual frameworks that offer new insights into organic practices. Divided into five parts, the book presents new perspectives on enduring issues, examines standards and certification, gives insights into much-discussed and additional market and consumer issues, and reviews the interplay of organic and conventional farming. The book concludes with a framework for rethinking ethics in the organic movement and reflections on the positioning of organic ethics. (shrink)

Farmers markets have traditionally served as a space for farmers to sell directly to consumers. Recently, many FMs in the US and other regions have experienced a renaissance. This article compares the different value sets embedded in the rules and norms of two metropolitan FM regions—Minneapolis, Minnesota and in Vienna, Austria. It uses a values-based framework that reflects the relationships among FM operating structures and their values reflected by the key FM participants—i.e., farmer/vendors, consumers and market managers. The framework allows (...) us to focus on two very contrasting value sets of metropolitan FM regions in presenting and discussing the values found and embedded in the two metropolitan market regions; illustrating how the values found are embodied as rules and norms in each FM region; considering the alignment or not of FM participant values with their corresponding FM values; and the differences and commonalities as well as the benefits and challenges of the two market regions. In contrasting metropolitan FMs we explain that FM value sets are complex and differ among and within FM participant groups and are dependent on their respective OS. We show that contrasting two metropolitan FM regions can be useful in understanding beneficial and disadvantageous relationships between the values and structures of, and in FMs, and specifically in examining institutional impediments such as governance. Thus we illustrate the possibilities and limitations of values for and within metropolitan FMs. (shrink)

Since the turn of the lastcentury, Michigan farmers, elevators, and stategovernment have used production and processstandards to shape the dry bean industry totheir interests and set a worldwide standardfor quality dry beans. Over the last 20 years,however, multinational agro/food firms haveintroduced their market criteria into standardssetting, and recent changes in Michigan beanstandards largely accommodate the interests ofthese firms. A review of the changes in thesestandards over time allows us to explore howconcepts of accountability and control improveour understanding of changes in (...) the structureand operation of food production and marketing.What is the measure of state governmentaccountability to corporate capital and to thestate's bean farmers? In what ways can farmersuse standards to re-assert their priorities andgain a greater measure of influence overmarketing? What challenges do changing qualitystandards pose for public research as well asfor the institutions representing Michiganfarmers and elevators? (shrink)

Over many long years, whenever a modest and not quite disinterested emissary of a member Association of the International Council of Philosophy and the Humanistic Studies came to visit Jean d'Ormesson at his headquarters in the rue Miollis, patiently clearing his path through mountains of dossiers and brochures, he did not, unlike the title of this paper, associate Jean d'Ormesson with the CIPSH - he simply identified the man before him with the CIPSH itself. An equation born of an admiration (...) barely suppressed under a veneer of polite restraint, an identification perhaps suggested to them by the president or secretary of their home association. Nevertheless a quite unfair one for anyone able to perceive with a greater deal of clarity (the office was very dark in overcast weather) what the ‘Secretary-General’ was, as well and much more, outside of the rue Miollis: the writer, the chronicler of his time, soon to become the assiduously active Academician, or even, dare I suggest, the blue-eyed charmer who graced debates on television. But this summary judgement could readily be forgiven, for the host of the premises had the good taste, when welcoming one to CIPSH, to assume only his mantle as Secretary-General. Besides, for the delegates of member Associations - and it was in this capacity that I first met Jean d'Ormesson before becoming his collaborator on the executive Bureau of CIPSH, and then briefly his successor - he appeared as the effective intermediary with that far-off but richly resourced galaxy called UNESCO. He was the man of warmth and charm who could be relied on to safeguard the subsidies that helped support our conferences and fund our voluminous compilations, which were vital tools for our research. (shrink)

This paper draws upon the events surrounding two small United States Department of Agriculture-funded projects in order to explore some preliminary ideas about the influence of corporations in US policy-making through federal advisory committees created by the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act. Following a synopsis of the political controversy created by the efforts of these projects to generate more discussion of geographical indications in the US, this paper outlines a path for further analysis of the relationships between members of advisory (...) committees to the US Trade Representative and a newly established non-profit, the Consortium for Common Food Names. After a brief discussion of two worlds of geographic indications defined on the one hand by key principles of terroir and on the other hand those embodied in US Patent & Trademark Policy, the paper concludes with short discussions of two approaches for bringing geographic indications into federal and state policy discussions. (shrink)

Publication d'un nouveau fragment de l'exemplaire delphique de l'Édit du Maximum, récemment identifié à Delphes (Praefatio §§ 6-8 Lauffer). Il confirme deux corrections qui avaient été faites au texte défectueux des témoins.

When I was preparing a paper about the problem Greek studies have with globalization of culture on the threshold of the twenty-first century, I was asked who the Greek man was, considered as a separate entity, and how future decades would see him. The question had all the appearance of a trap. The very idea of ‘the Greek man’ is disturbing, even though it is so commonplace that it is hard to trace it back to its origins. Of course it (...) contains a well-established but ill-defined consensus around the Greeks as the first free, rational human beings to found a free polity, who furthermore presided over the creation of a literature without equal in Antiquity and an exceptional and innovative body of art. A more precise answer could also echo the prestigious and much discussed title of Werner Jaeger's indispensable and troubling volume: Paideia. Die Formung des griechischen Menschen (1934), and even become, rather insidiously because of its date and the last few words of the sub-title, a parasitic echo of the period when a mythical discourse evoked Aryans and non-Aryans. But we must take care not to place the thesis of Werner Jaeger, to whom I will return, in that company, since the title is less a reflection of a suspect mode of thought than a simple coincidence of choice of language. And the reason it turns up here is that Jaeger and Dodds, whom we shall meet later, are the two opposite poles of this paper, standing in Greek studies on either side of the bloodstained struggle that transformed Europe and the West's relationship with the rest of the world for ever. (shrink)

When I was preparing a paper about the problem Greek studies have with globalization of culture on the threshold of the twenty-first century, I was asked who the Greek man was, considered as a separate entity, and how future decades would see him. The question had all the appearance of a trap. The very idea of ‘the Greek man’ is disturbing, even though it is so commonplace that it is hard to trace it back to its origins. Of course it (...) contains a well-established but ill-defined consensus around the Greeks as the first free, rational human beings to found a free polity, who furthermore presided over the creation of a literature without equal in Antiquity and an exceptional and innovative body of art. A more precise answer could also echo the prestigious and much discussed title of Werner Jaeger's indispensable and troubling volume: Paideia. Die Formung des griechischen Menschen (1934), and even become, rather insidiously because of its date and the last few words of the sub-title, a parasitic echo of the period when a mythical discourse evoked Aryans and non-Aryans. But we must take care not to place the thesis of Werner Jaeger, to whom I will return, in that company, since the title is less a reflection of a suspect mode of thought than a simple coincidence of choice of language. And the reason it turns up here is that Jaeger and Dodds, whom we shall meet later, are the two opposite poles of this paper, standing in Greek studies on either side of the bloodstained struggle that transformed Europe and the West's relationship with the rest of the world for ever. (shrink)

Papyrus rolls, hundreds of thousands of rolls, carefully stacked in niches or in precious containers, also men, learned librarians or their erudite hosts, men who read books in order to write others, hardly paying heed to the vile rumblings of Alexandria, the unruly city, dreaming rather of tomorrow's lesson with the crown prince, their pupil, or even admiring from afar, protected by the shade of a portico, the silhouette of some queen, Cleopatra or Arsinoe or a Berenice counting her locks… (...) it is now a little over two thousand years since then, men and books, the Library of Alexandria. It did not even lack a dramatic conflagration in 48 B.C. when it found itself on fire by the wind that blew from the burning fleet set ablaze by the foot soldiers of Julius Caesar, general, scholar and old beau of political love. But probably, the Library soon recovered. (shrink)

This article considers the qualitative concept of place – what it means, how it feels, how it is expressed, and how it is managed across time and space as the appropriate context within which to study and promote local agriculture and the locus of relationships, both cultural and political, that prefigure a local civic culture. It argues that civic as a description of local food and farming is conceptually and practically shallow in the absence of our ability to understand and (...) to practice “being” in place. Using three vignettes from field research in northern Michigan, the article illustrates this interdependence by focusing on the ways in which place provides opportunities for learning, for play, for engagement, for identity formation, and for explicit political and policy initiatives – as prerequisites for civic awareness and action. (shrink)