Alternative Food Networks

Several interrelated processes, not entirely synchronous, but with cumulative effect, are transforming and diversifying modern food provisioning in North America, Western Europe and many other parts of the world. These processes have created economic and cultural spaces, often designated as niche markets, for alternative food networks (AFNs), whose products – organic, Fair Trade, local and quality, premium specialty foods – are differentiated from those typically furnished by mainstream food manufacturers and retailers. Through the lens of the so-called ‘quality turn’, we work through some of the conceptual devices and empirical materials that define this turn in US, European and transnational AFNs. Here, food space and place figure heavily in the polysemic material and social construction of ‘quality’ foods, not least in the labeling of food origins, ‘local’ foods, and the ‘moral geographies’ that look to connect the processes and places of food production and consumption. Given their economic growth, their capture by and movement into more ‘mainstream’ food networks, and the normative register assigned to AFN practices, we critically interrogate the spatial and political expressions of AFNs from a number of different and interrelated perspectives.