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This paper examines some recent analyses of alternative agro‐food networks (AAFNs) and claims that these innovative modes of food provisioning are emblematic of a new rural development paradigm in Western Europe. A political‐economic critique of the territorialised, farm‐centric value added strategies underlying these claims suggests that this characterisation is overdrawn and premature. The neglect of the consumption side of the rural development equation also argues for a more modest assessment of AAFNs and their paradigmatic potential.

T his paper examines some recent contributions to the literature on consumption in agro-food studies, with particular attention to the conceptualization of the loci and practice of food politics. The current interest in food consumption and its politics is informed by the earlier 'turn' to culture and the cultural in poststructuralist and post-modernist social theory, which contested the dominant optic of production relations, workplace politics, and associated conceptualizations of power. Despite these more general theoretical developments, however, current efforts to bring consumption into rural sociology are critically impaired by the continued reliance on production-centered theoretical frameworks. Consequently, although in other fields consumption has been "duly acknowledged" (Jackson 1999, p. 95), it is argued that the treatment of production and consumption in agro-food studies is still highly asymmetric. As this asymmetry is redressed, the potential of new forms of progressive food politics can be engaged, ranging from diffuse, often localized, struggles over modes of social ordering, such as knowledge systems, to more formal alliances between producers and consumers.In this paper, the alternative conceptualizations of food politics are illustrated by two contending interpretations of social resistance to recombinant bovine growth hormone/bovine somatotropin (rBST) in milk production by Buttel, (1998; and DuPuis (2000). For Buttel, unorganized and consumption-based resistance to rBST does not truly qualify as political action and, he argues, has made little difference to the contemporary configuration of the dairy food system, and the dominance of such powerful actors as the large-scale, national and multinational dairy firms and dairy co-ops. DuPuis, on the other hand, heralds anti-rBST activity as a new form of consumption-based politics, despite its fractured, unorganized political base and its support primarily among upper-and middle-class people. In this view, reflexive consumption is a social act even if it is not part of an organized social movement.The divergence between Buttel and DuPuis arises from more deep-rooted theoretical differences concerning the constitutive roles of production and consumption in contemporary society. These differences emanate, in turn, from a larger disagreement between Marxian and production-oriented perspectives and more

Low-moderate steady-state exercise elicits a neuroautonomic cardiovascular dysfunction in concussed athletes that is not present in a rested state. This dysfunction alludes to an exercise induced uncoupling between the autonomic and cardiovascular systems.