Forage for thought: Mobilizing codes in the movement for grass-fed meat and dairy products (original) (raw)
Related papers
Forage for Thought: Mobilizing Codes in the Movement for Grass-fed Meat and Dairy
Administrative Science Quarterly, 2008
This study illuminates how new markets emerge and how social movements can effect cultural change through market creation. We suggest that social movements can fuel solutions to three challenges in creating new market segments: entrepreneurial production, the creation of collective producer identities, and the establishment of regular exchange between producers and consumers. We use qualitative data on the grassroots coalition movement that has spurred a market for grass-fed meat and dairy products in the United States since the early 1990s. Our analysis shows that the movement's participants mobilized broad cultural codes and that these codes motivated producers to enter and persist in a nascent market, shaped their choices about production and exchange technologies, enabled a collective identity, and formed the basis of the products' exchange value.•
Food for good? Social movement organizations making sustainable markets for 'good food'
Röcklinsberg, H., & Sandin, P. (2013). The ethics of consumption. The citizen, the market, and the law.
Ethnographic research approach is used to study how food collective movement organizations (FCMOs) organize and create markets for locally produced and organic food in Finland. Increased evidence related to unsafety, unsustainability and unjustness of contemporary food markets has resulted in the mobilization of various food movements over the world in order to challenge the current systems of food provisioning. These movements are striving towards creating more sustainable markets – practices of food production and consumption. This study elaborates on how social movement organizations make markets for good food by engaging in and managing market exchange of local and/or organic food.
Mobilizing food: A review of Building Nature's Market
Miller’s (2017) Building Nature’s Market introduces the American natural foods movement to social movement studies, highlighting its challenge to the prevailing social order related to food, consumption, health, state authority, and individualism. This movement is concerned with more than just food; it tackles no less than society’s values about progress as it is generally tied to industrialization and technical innovation. The book’s primary thesis is the argument that the natural foods movement has been propelled not only by activist altruism and perseverance, but also through the innovativeness of savvy capitalist entrepreneurs and corporations. This argument is distinctive in social movement studies, as many scholars identify corporate cooperation as “selling out” (Chasin, 2000) or capitalist co-optation (Wrenn, 2016; Zeisler, 2016). Despite the clear contradiction created by aligning with a corporate system that was simultaneously problematized, Miller identifies businesses as movement participants.
Scale and affect in the local food movement
Food, Culture & Society, 2018
Growing demand for local food has spurred the emergence of aggregation and distribution businesses, called food hubs. They developed to retain the values of the local food movement, help small farmers achieve economies of scale, and supply large markets. While appearing as an innovative solution to several key constraints of local food systems, there is debate on how these businesses should function and whether the insertion of a middleman breaks down the basic premise of local food, namely the focus on face-toface transaction. This paper highlights the affective nature of local food purchases, examining ethnographically how one particular food hub with close ties to the local food movement in Atlanta, Georgia contends with this issue as it articulates with larger markets. It finds that building a resilient and sustainable local food system beyond the level of direct markets necessitates illuminating the role affect plays in economic decision-making. Recent years have seen a push to move away from the dominant industrial food model to one that is more localized, focuses less on large commodities, lessens food insecurity, and situates more power in the hands of the producers (e.g., Allen 2010; Jacques and Racine Jacques 2013; Janssen 2010; Nost 2014). In the United States, the local food movement works to redefine what food production could and should be, which has ushered in a new conceptualization of the "farmer, " pushed us to think more critically about food and health, opened opportunities for an unprecedented number of novel food-related businesses, and united a community of activists (e.g.
Agriculture and Human Values, 2018
Despite decades of struggle against the industrial food system, academics still question the impact of the alternative food movement. We consider what food movement leaders themselves say about their motivation to act and their capacity to scale up their impact. Based on semi-structured interviews with 27 food movement leaders in Michigan, our findings complicate the established academic narratives that revolve around notions of prefigurative and oppositional politics, and suggest pragmatic strategies that could scale up the pace and scope of food movement impacts. In contrast to the apolitical perspective some scholars see guiding alternative food movements, local leaders we interviewed see the food system from a structural-political lens. Though some see strength in fragmentation, most are not under the illusion that they can work alone and aspire to build their collective strength further. Concerns about organizational survival and conflicting views about the goals of the food movement, however, present ongoing challenges. Ultimately, we argue that there is a middle ground food movement leaders can walk between prefigurative and oppositional politics, one that still attempts to intentionally change the state, while also maintaining the inventiveness that can come from autonomous, grassroots initiatives. Specifically, interviewees suggested that increased strategic capacity around policy advocacy, critical food systems education, and negotiation could help them extend cross-movement networks and mainstream more equitable food policies, while continuing to experiment with customized solutions.
Getting Political and Getting Organized : A Call to Repoliticize the Food Movement
2018
Getting Political and Getting Organized: A Call to Repoliticize the Food Movement Alison Hope Alkon and Julie Guthman have each individually pushed the conversation in agrofood studies forward in critically important ways. As a result, I was particularly enthusiastic about a product of their joint effort. In their edited collection, The New Food Activism, Alkon and Guthman bring power and collective struggle front and centre to the food movement, a movement that has faced strong criticism for resorting to individual and market-based solutions to address what are in fact deep systemic problems (see, for example, Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Bradley and Herrera 2016; Busa and Garder 2015; DeLind 2011; Guthman 2008). Their central argument is that the food movement has become largely depoliticized and disengaged from food justice issues related to class, power and capital. In the words of Alkon and Guthman, their aim is to “expand the possibilities of food activism” by cultivating a food mo...
ESCAPING THE BONDAGE OF THE DOMINANT AGRIFOOD SYSTEM: COMMUNITY-BASED COOPERATIVE STRATEGIES
The "Missouri School" of critical agrifood studies has provided an effective framework for documenting and understanding the structural dimensions of the global agrifood system and locating important nodes of power. This has directed attention toward the negative impacts of industrialization and corporate concentration on agricultural producers, local communities and economies, and the environment. Using these critical insights, pressure on the dominant agrifood system by civil society organizations has resulted in important changes to production and marketing strategies and related public policies. We broaden this discussion by using social movement and livelihoods theory to explore the position of limited resource and minority producers in the southern United States. This analysis helps us to identify spaces for local responses in community-based cooperatives and other organizations. W e use the term "limited resource" as a generic reference to those producers/farmers who tend to 1 have low levels of farm and off-farm income, small-scale landholdings, and little financial capital. The U.S. Department of Agriculture provides an operational definition for these producers, using gross sales, farm assets, and operator household income ). Our use of the concept "minority" concerns race/ethnicity. In this case, our study is primarily focused on black/African American producers. W e do not imply that all minority producers would be characterized as limited resource. Instead, there are overlapping challenges that they face, and it is clear that a disproportionate number of minority producers also have limited financial resources.
Social Movement Organization Leaders and the Creation of Markets for “Local” Goods
Business & Society, 2016
Research illustrates that social movements can fuel new markets and that these markets can create social change, but the role of leaders in this process is less understood. This exploratory interview-based study of the localism movement contributes to such understanding. It articulates the relationship of social movement leaders and the legitimacy of their organizations to new market creation. Specifically, leaders in this study engaged in a dual role to legitimize their organizations and to legitimize the movement. At an organizational level, leaders chose strategies that conformed to a conventional organizational model of the social movement organization (SMO) as a business network, much like a local chamber of commerce. At a movement level, the SMO’s level of legitimacy influenced the leader’s choice of strategies to grow a “local” market. These strategies aimed, primarily, to shape consumer purchase behavior and, secondarily, to foster the development of producers’ skills, and o...
Ostrom Understanding Trends in Consumer Food System Mobilization
AgroEcological Transitions: Changes and Breakthroughs in the Making, 2017
This chapter examines trends in the attitudes and behaviors surrounding food consumption and food sourcing in the northwestern United States, their social movement dimensions, and the potential outcomes for structural change. Research across the full spectrum of food system actors suggests promising opportunities to reshape conventional agri-food production and market relationships, however, it also reveals a complex array of motivations for participation in alternative food initiatives (AFIs) and key vulnerabilities and obstacles to lasting change. This chapter utilizes current theoretical understandings of the globalization of the food system and the dynamics of social movements as a basis for investigating the configurations, tactics, and effectiveness of locally driven initiatives and their outcomes for improving agri-food system sustainability Structural barriers to systems-level change are identified and the potential of various mobilizing frameworks to overcome them are discussed. A social movements theoretical framework will be utilized to investigate the role of consumer ideological orientations and the effectiveness of local agri-food initiatives in driving larger food system innovation and institutional change. The results of random sample consumer telephone polling, farmer surveys, and participatory research with AFIs in Washington State will be analyzed to address underlying questions about the motivations and values-basis of food system participation. The motivational frames, behaviors, and movement orientations of various actors within the food system, including consumers, farmers, AFI organizers and institutional actors, will be analyzed to determine their degree of frame alignment with the goals of agri-food system sustainability and the potential for collective action.