Description
Food is a contentious and emotive issue, subject to critiques from multiple perspectives. Alternative food movements – including the different articulations of local, food miles, seasonality, food justice, food knowledge and food sovereignty – consistently invoke themes around autonomy, sufficiency, cooperation, mutual aid, freedom, and responsibility.
In this stimulating and provocative book the authors link these issues to utopias and intentional communities. Using a food utopias framework presented in the introduction, they examine food stories in three interrelated and complementary ways: utopias as critique of existing systems; utopias as engagement with experimentation of the novel, the forgotten, and the hopeful in the future of the food system; and utopias as process that recognizes the time and difficulty inherent in changing the status quo.
The chapters address theoretical aspects of food utopias and also present case studies from a range of contexts and regions, including Argentina, Italy, Switzerland and USA. These focus on key issues in contemporary food studies including equity, locality, the sacred, citizenship, community and food sovereignty. Food utopias offers ways forward to imagine a creative and convivial food system.
Table of Contents
Foreword: Food Utopias in Perspective
Fred Kirschenmann
Foreword
Wes Jackson
Part 1: Food and Utopias
1. Food Utopias: Hoping the Future of Agriculture
Paul Stock, Michael Carolan, and Christopher Rosin
2. Everyday Life in Utopias: Food
Lyman T. Sargent
Part 2: Emergent Food Utopias
3. From the Nano to the Global Scale: New Utopian Solutions to Food Waste
Grant Shoffstall and Zsuzsa Gille
4. ‘We Should Have a Culture Around Food’: Toward a Sustainable Food Utopia in the Ozark-Ouachita Bioregion
Joshua Lockyer
5. Urban Agriculture as Embedded in the Social and Solidarity Economy Basel: Developing Sustainable Communities
Isidor Walliman
6. Slow Food Presidia: The Nostalgic and the Utopian
Cinzia Piatti
7. Towards Utopias of Prefigurative Politics and Food Sovereignty: Experiences of Politicised Peasant Food Production
Nave Wald
8. Re-Wilding Food Systems: Visceralities, Utopias, Pragmatism, and Practice
Michael Carolan
Part 3: Food, Ethics and Morality
9. Sketching a Global Agro-Ecology Eutopia: The Land Institute in Directional Context
John W. Head
10. Contradictions in Hope and Care: Technological Utopianism, Biosphere II and the Catholic Worker Farms
Paul Stock
11. Spurlock’s Vomit and Visible Food Utopias: Enacting a Positive Politics of Food
Hugh Campbell
Conclusion: An Invitation to Food Utopias
12. Food as Mediator: Opening the Dialogue around Food
Paul Stock, Michael Carolan, and Christopher Rosin
