Across the globe, people are challenging the agro-industrial food system and its exploitation of people and resources, reduction of local food varieties, and negative health consequences. In this collection leading international anthropologists explore food activism across the globe to show how people speak to, negotiate, or cope with power through food. Who are the actors of food activism and what forms of agency do they enact? What kinds of economy, exchanges, and market relations do they practice and promote? How are they organized and what are their scales of political action and power relations? Each chapter explores why and how people choose food as a means of forging social and economic justice, covering diverse forms of food activism from individual acts by consumers or producers to organized social groups or movements. The case studies embrace a wide geographical spectrum including Cuba, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Mexico, Italy, Canada, France, Colombia, Japan, and the USA. This is the first book to examine food activism in diverse local, national, and transnational settings, making it essential reading for students and scholars in anthropology and other fields interested in food, economy, politics and social change.

"This book examines local food movement activism in a period of increasing climate chaos and neoliberal crisis, economic inequalities and political divisions. In four locales in North Carolina, this book reveals the contributions made by local food movement activists seeking to bring about more sustainable and more socially just local food economies"--

Digital Food Activism is a new edited volume that investigates how digital media technologies are transforming food activism and consumers' engagements with food, eating, and food systems. Bringing together critical food studies, economic anthropology, digital sociology, and science and technology studies, Digital Food Activism offers innovative multi-disciplinary analyses of food activist practices on social media, mobile apps, and hybrid online and offline alternative spaces. With chapters that focus on diverse digital platforms, food-related issues, and geographic locales, this volume reveals how platforms, programmers, and consumers are becoming key mediators of the mandate of food corporations and official governing actors. Digital Food Activism thereby suggests that emerging forms of activism in the digital era hold the potential to reshape the ethics, aesthetics, and patterns of food consumption.

"New and exciting forms of food activism are emerging as supporters of sustainable agriculture increasingly recognize the need for a broader, more strategic and more politicized food politics that engages with questions of social, racial, and economic justice. This book highlights examples of campaigns to restrict industrial agriculture's use of pesticides and other harmful technologies, struggles to improve the pay and conditions of workers throughout the food system, and alternative projects that seek to de-emphasize notions of individualism and private ownership. Grounded in over a decade of scholarly critique of food activism, this volume seeks to answer the question of "what next," inspiring scholars, students, and activists toward collective, cooperative, and oppositional struggles for change."--Provided by publisher.

With her new book, Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia, cultural anthropologist Carole Counihan makes a significant contribution to understanding the growing global movement for food democracy. Providing a detailed ethnographic case study from Cagliari, the capital of the Italian island-region of Sardinia, she draws upon Sardinians' own descriptions of their actions and motivations to change their food as they pursue grassroots alternatives to the agro-industrial food system through GAS (Gruppi di Acquisito Solidale or solidarity-based purchase groups), organic and urban agriculture, alternative restaurants, and farm-to-school programs. They link their activism to the sensory and emotional resonance of food and its nostalgic connections to place, tradition, and culture. They stress the importance of education through experience, and they build relationships and networks through workshops, farm visits, and commensality. The book focuses on three key themes to emerge in interviews with Cagliari food activists: the significance of territorio (or place), the importance of taste, and the role of education. By exploring these areas of concern, Counihan uncovers key tensions in consumption as a force for change, in individual vs. group actions, and in political and economic power relations, which are of crucial importance to wider global efforts to promote food democracy.

The current debate on Traditional Knowledge (TK) and food heritage has had momentum in recent years, mainly thanks to the remarkable interest of some local and national institutions, small-scale producers, and emerging chefs. However, in the scientific arena, the process of documenting traditional knowledge and the heritage of local foods is often addressed by itself, and is not well connected to deeper reflections of the actual participatory processes involved in local development or to the manners through which TK informs public discourse regarding local foods and how this may further influence activists, institutions, and governance.