What's alternative about alternative food networks? The landscape of agrifood studies and politics in advanced industrial countries has changed dramatically in the last ten years or so. The productivist research and policy agendas that dominated for most of the second half of the last century magnified an intensification of agriculture and globalisation of food markets that promised to accelerate the eradication of embedded food networks. These agendas came to be epitomised by the relentless march of the`golden arches' celebrated in George Ritzer's Macdonaldization thesis (Ritzer, 1996). What more fitting reminder of inadequacies of this familiar orthodoxy than the news at the close of 2002 of Macdonald's enforced retrenchment of its fast food outlets following a sustained decline in profits and sales. Far from disappearing, those diverse and dynamic food networks that had been cast as remnant or marginal in the shadow of productivism have strengthened and proliferated. This unexpected turn of events has garnered unprecedented interest from researchers and policymakers in, variously,`alternative' and/or`quality' and/or`local' food networks (see Murdoch et al, 2000). These overlapping but nonidentical collective nouns consolidate a multiplicity of food networks from organics and fair trade to regional and artisanal products that represent some of the most rapidly expanding food markets in Europe over the last decade (for example, Michelsen et al, 1999). What they share in common is their constitution as/of food markets that redistribute value through the network against the logic of bulk commodity production; that reconvene`trust' between food producers and consumers; and that articulate new forms of political association and market governance. In this sense, alternative food networks represent an archetypal case of what Michel Callon and his colleagues at the Centre Sociologie de l'Innovation at the E è cole des Mines in Paris call the`economy of qualities'. The term signifies a gathering moment in market relations in which the conditions and competences of production, consumption, and regulation become molten in the heat of intense social reflexivity and, thereby, subject to reorganisation or`qualification' (Callon et al, 2002, pages 194^195).It is no coincidence that the new-found research and policy significance attached to these so-called`alternative food networks' (AFNs) is greatest in Europe whether in theoretical, political, or economic terms. Indeed, their`alternativeness' has come to be associated with an intensification of differences between (North) American and (Western) European food cultures and politics. For example, these differences play through a stylised analytical opposition between`political economy' and`actant network theory' (ANT; see Goodman, 1999); popular mobilisations against US cultural and corporate food imperialism (Bove¨and Dufour, 2001), and regulatory disputes between commercial and government players, as in the case of genetically modified foods (Barry, 2001). But, as the papers ...

Abstract:The concept of agroecology is being mobilized increasingly. However, its socioeconomic dimensions receive little attention from academia. This study helps to clarify the socioeconomic principles of agroecology by first identifying a list of principles in popular and scientific literature and, as a second step, by putting the principles to the test of a qualitative study of two Belgian organizations. Agribio is a grain cooperative, and Les Grosses Légumes is a network of consumers, farmers, and the members of an association set up to organize the production and distribution of vegetable boxes. Semi-directed interviews of the various actors linked to these organizations were conducted and then analyzed through an approach inspired by the convention theory in order to reveal the principles that the stakeholders have adopted. The main findings are then made explicit by analysis of four strong agreements (which concern the two organizations' marketing schemes, a Participatory Guarantee System set up by Les Grosses Légumes and Agribio's flour mill). The two case studies show the gap that exists between the principles that describe the horizon of agroecology and the principles that are actually put into practice by the parties in the field through various transition pathways.

In this paper we explore the event of foodscares as an example of what Callon calls ‘hot situations’, in which the landscape of competing knowledge claims is at its most molten, and alternative production and consumption practices galvanise new modes of sense-making against the market and state-sanctioned rationalities of industrialisation. Through a case study of the Belgian cooperative Coprosain and its meat products, we examine the ‘stuff’ of food as a ready messenger of connectedness and affectivity in which ‘risk’ is transacted as a property both of the growing distance between the spaces of production and consumption and of the enduring metabolic intimacies between human and nonhuman bodies.

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The pion structure function is investigated in a simple model, where pion and constituent quark fields are coupled through the simplest pseudoscalar coupling. The imaginary part of the forward γ ⋆ π → γ ⋆ π scattering amplitude is evaluated and related to the structure functions. It is shown that the introduction of nonperturbative effects, linked to the size of the pion and preserving gauge invariance, allows a connection with the quark distribution. It is predicted that higher-twist terms become negligible for Q 2 larger than ∼2 GeV 2 and that quarks in the pion have a momentum fraction smaller than in the proton case.