Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays which analyze and evaluate both the theoretical and historical contexts of the agrifood system and the ways in which trends of individual action and collective activity have led to an "accumulation of resistance" that greatly affects the mainstream market of food production.
Trade Review“The categorization of the essays and the overarching theme of agency results in a balanced approach, avoiding easy tropes or doomsday scenarios. Individual essays are consistently sound in scholarship.”
—J. M. Deutsch Choice
“This book will help students enter into discussions of agency in the sociology of agriculture; the issues it raises make it worthwhile reading for anyone interested in promoting real structural change within the agriculture and food system.”
—Jessica Bagdonis Gastronomica
“How will we feed ourselves in the future? Who will decide? Can people acting together make a difference in the food system to come? This book takes up the key sociological questions of structure and agency in addressing these questions. It moves beyond abstract debates, applying the structure/agency lens to a most important human system—the one that produces and distributes our food. . . .
“The Fight Over Food illuminates possibilities for change in the food system and simultaneously reminds us of the constraints of global capitalism. This book will be of interest not only to sociologists who study food and agriculture, but to all students of social change within a variety of disciplines. The Fight Over Food points us in directions for our engagement both as scholars and as citizens of the world who care about food.”
—Patricia Allen American Journal of Sociology
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Fighting Over Food: Change in the Agrifood System
Wynne Wright and Gerad Middendorf
Part I. Conceptual Framework
1. Agency and Resistance in the Sociology of Agriculture and Food
Alessandro Bonanno and Douglas H. Constance
2. Agency and the Agrifood System
William H. Friedland
3. Resistance, Agency, and Counterwork: A Theoretical Positioning
Norman Long
Part II. Case Studies: Making Room for Agency
4. Counterhegemony or Bourgeois Piggery? Food Politics and the Case of FoodShare
Josée Johnston
5. Resistance, Redistribution, and Power in the Fair Trade Banana Initiative
Aimee Shreck
6. Sustaining Outrage: Cultural Capital, Strategic Location, and Motivating Sensibilities in the U.S. Anti-Genetic Engineering Movement
William A. Munro and Rachel A. Schurman
7. Social Life and Transformation in Salmon Fisheries and Aquaculture
Michael Skladany
Part III. Case Studies: Constraints to Agency
8. Infertile Ground: The Struggle for a New Puerto Rican Food System
Amy Guptill
9. Possibilities for Revitalizing Local Agriculture: Evidence from Four Counties in Washington State
Raymond A. Jussaume Jr. and Kazumi Kondoh
10. Consumers and Citizens in the Global Agrifood System: The Cases of New Zealand and South Africa in the Global Red Meat Chain
Keiko Tanaka and Elizabeth Ransom
Conclusion: From Mindful Eating to Structural Change
Wynne Wright and Gerad Middendorf
Index
