Food Resistance Movements:

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Food Resistance
Movements
Journeying Through
Alternative
Food Networks

Ferne Edwards
Alternatives and Futures: Cultures, Practices,
Activism and Utopias

Series Editor
Anitra Nelson
Informal Urbanism Research Hub, Melbourne School of Design
The University of Melbourne
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Movements such as degrowth, Occupy, solidarity economies, permacul-
ture, low impact living and Via Campesina variously address key issues of
the contemporary era such as inequalities of wealth and income, environ-
mental crises, and achieving sustainable cities and production. This series
demonstrates the breadth, depth, significance and potential of ‘alterna-
tives’ in the construction of this century, focusing on the type of future
each movement advocates and their strategic agenda.
Alternatives and Futures is of interest to scholars and students across
the social sciences and humanities, especially those working in environ-
mental sustainability, politics and policymaking, environmental justice,
grassroots governance, heterodox economics and activism.
The series offers a forum for constructive critique and analytical reflec-
tion of movements’ directions, activism and activists, their assumptions,
drivers, aims, visions of alternative futures and actual performance and
influence.
 Ferne Edwards

Food Resistance
Movements
Journeying Through Alternative Food Networks
Ferne Edwards
Centre for Environment and Sustainability
University of Surrey
Guildford, United Kingdom

ISSN 2523-7063     ISSN 2523-7071 (electronic)

Alternatives and Futures: Cultures, Practices, Activism and Utopias
ISBN 978-981-19-5794-9    ISBN 978-981-19-5795-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5795-6

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 This book is dedicated to the many passionate and critically intelligent
people who I’ve met on this journey. To highlight two we lost along the way.
Paul Martin,
Aka ‘Biodiesel Man’ who introduced me to dumpster diving,
a good friend and one of the truest activists I’ve ever met.
Jane Dixon,
An astute and kind PhD supervisor and dear friend.
 Series Editor Foreword

I was first introduced to Ferne Edward’s work when I examined her

Master’s thesis on freegan subcultural practices in two Australian capital
cities, Melbourne (Victoria) and Brisbane (Queensland). Her detailed and
passionate, exploratory and critical ethnographic analyses of edgy yet sig-
nificant actors in sustainability movements immediately excited and
impressed me. Ferne clearly argued her claims and drew on a range of
interview and case material to provide evidence for compelling insights.
At the time a colleague referred to my university office as the feral drop-
­in centre. Many students of environmental courses that I coordinated
were sustainability activists trying to protect various aspects of the envi-
ronment, such as Victoria’s state forests against a timber industry that was
(and remains) lightly regulated and substantially supported by the govern-
ment. Ferne’s preoccupation with sustainable food practices met interro-
gations of mine on ecoforestry and degrowth activism, permaculture and
nonmonetary practices.
Subsequently, our activist-scholar friendship grew on such joint inter-
ests and associated networks. Ferne researched in Venezuela just as all my
undergraduate coursework had focused on Latin American Studies.
Moreover, Ferne conducted studies of food programmes in New South
Wales where I had, coincidentally, moved to live and work. Recently we
collaborated on editing a collection for the Routledge Environmental
Humanities series—Food for Degrowth: Perspectives and Practices (2020,
hardcover, and 2022, paperback).
By this time Ferne had accumulated decades of experience in alternative
food network research. This rapidly evolving field of practical and

vii
viii SERIES EDITOR FOREWORD

theoretical interest gained special significance in the early 2020s as

COVID-19 restrictions and impacts broke and deranged conventional
food supply chains; as climate change–associated droughts, fires and floods
have impacted food-producing areas in countries such as Australia; and,
most recently, as Putin’s onslaught on Ukraine abruptly ended vital food
exports to African countries already suffering food precarity.
Meanwhile, Ferne ends up in a perfect position to write this grainy and
fast-moving analysis of her intellectual journey through food resistance
movements: movements that focus on transforming unjust and unsustain-
able industrial and commercial food systems. Ultimately, Ferne draws on
discourses populating work in the fields of transitions and new social
movements to steer discussion of the multiple advances, barriers and hur-
dles that continue to challenge food producers and consumers, food activ-
ists and other change agents aiming to achieve as yet elusive conjoined
goals of food security and sustainability.
This addition to the Alternatives and Futures: Cultures, Practices,
Activism and Utopias series manages to identify significant ‘lighthouses’
and visions-with-feet with promising and relieving effects. Namely, hori-
zontally organised, anarchist-inspired strategies of autonomy, deep democ-
racy and direct action offer ways in which multiple grassroots activists can
change the future of food provisioning for the betterment of both human-
ity and Earth.
Self-critical community-based sharing and caring communities focused
on fulfilling everyone’s basic needs—no more, no less—are gaining sub-
stantial ground. Promising autonomous food spaces depend on, and cre-
ate learning opportunities for, future co-governance in localised economies
of caring, commoning and collective sufficiency.
Owing to our dependence on food, this book has the potential to cap-
ture much interest. But I commend this latest addition to the series to
readers not only attracted to this specific topic. For Ferne’s intriguing
interrogations and fascinating integration of various approaches and deft
treatment of the material of everyday life makes her work relevant to a
range of researchers and activists, as well as a joy to read.

Informal Urbanism Research Hub (InFur-) Anitra Nelson

University of Melbourne
Parkville, VIC, Australia
July 2022
 Acknowledgements

In Australia, I wish to thank the many activists, academics and innovators

within the food sovereignty movement who have given their time and
enthusiasm towards creating a more socially just and environmentally sus-
tainable food system. In Venezuela, I wish to thank William Camacaro,
Jorgelina Murua, Luis Angosto Ferrández and Dalia Guillén, staff from
the Fundación CIARA in Ciudad Bolívar and Caracas and members of
Sakororan for welcoming me into their projects. In Catalonia, I wish to
thank Nacho Sánchez Valdivia, my intern during the SHARECITY Barcelona
research, and the many activists I met. Thank you to the anonymous
experts and to Kevin Flanagan for reviewing this manuscript.
I gratefully acknowledge the Australian Postgraduate Award from the
Australian Federal Government that supported my doctoral research. I
would also like to acknowledge that parts of this research were funded by
the European Research Council as part of the SHARECITY project at
Trinity College Dublin (Grant Agreement Number: 646883).
Also, to acknowledge that all research followed the required ethical
procedures:

• Case studies 1 (freegans) and 2 (Venezuela) draw on pre-published

materials approved by the RMIT University and the Australian
National University Human Research Ethics Committees;
• Case study 3 (food sharing in Australia and Catalonia) received eth-
ics approval from the Trinity College Dublin Research Ethics
Committee.

ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would also like to thank the following publishers for granting the
right to reprint material from previously published articles. These include:

Edwards, Ferne and Mercer, Dave. 2007. Gleaning from Gluttony: An

Australian youth subculture confronts the ethics of waste, Australian
Geographer, 38(3), November: 279–296. https://doi.org/10.1080/
00049180701639174, reprinted by permission of the publisher, Taylor
& Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com.

With Permission from Springer

Edwards, F. 2016, 2nd edition, ‘Venezuelan Food Sovereignty Movement’

In Thompson, P. and D. Kaplan (eds.) Encyclopaedia of Food and
Agricultural Ethics. New York, Heidelberg, Dortrecht, London:
Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­94-­007-­6167-­4_514-­1.
Edwards, F. 2016, 2nd edition, ‘Alternative Food Networks’ in Thompson,
P. and D. Kaplan (eds.) Encyclopaedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics
(pp. 1–7). New York, Heidelberg, Dortrecht, London: Springer.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­94-­007-­6167-­4_513-­1.
Edwards, F. 2020. Overcoming social stigma by consuming food waste at
the Open Table, Agriculture and Human Values 38: 397–409. https://
doi.org/10.1007/s10460-­020-­10176-­9.
 Praise for Food Resistance Movements

“This concise text gives an unflinching state-of-the art survey of popular resistance
to the prevailing global-mass-market industrial food system, backed up with three
excellent ethnographic case studies. A must-read for those interested in and teach-
ing about alternative food systems.”
—Richard Wilk, Open Anthropology Institute and Indiana University

“Ferne Edwards has spent years living and researching and eating with visionaries
of the future of food. Across three continents, her honest, rigorous, and thought-
provoking ethnography uncovers the promise, and the dangers, of some blueprints
for food sovereignty. We ignore those lessons at our peril.”
—Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved (2008), Research Professor, The University of
Texas at Austin, USA

“The risks and problems associated with globalised food systems are becoming
abundantly clear, so too is the need for credible alternatives. This punchy and
accessible volume brings much-needed clarity to the questions of what resistance
looks like and how it might facilitate widespread change. With a finely honed eth-
nographic sensibility, Ferne Edwards explores an impressive range of urban food
movements – foregrounding the experiences of participants and the lessons that
can be learnt. At once theoretically sophisticated and politically astute, Food
Resistance Movements breathes new life into scholarly and activist perspectives on
Alternative Food Networks.”
—Professor David M. Evans, co-editor of Waste Matters: New Perspectives on
Food and Society (2013), University of Bristol, UK

“This volume is a lively and important contribution to understanding global

movements for food justice. Grounded in years of ethnographic research on
“freegan” strategies to counter food waste in Australia, food sovereignty efforts in
urban Venezuela, and autonomous food spaces in Barcelona, it provocatively
uncovers the successes and failures of individual and collective tactics to democra-
tize foodways. It will be essential reading for scholars, students and activists inter-
ested in forging fair and sustainable food systems.”
—Carole Counihan, co-editor of Food Activism: Agency,
Democracy and Economy (2013)
“The process of devising and implementing more sustainable and participatory
alternatives to the mainstream food system takes many diverse forms and fre-
quently involves acts of defiance and resistance to the status quo. That growing
numbers of people around the world are engaging in such acts reveals the desire to
revitalise our relationship to food, to each other and to the planet. Ferne Edwards
brings us to the heart of three very different kinds of resistance in the cities of
Melbourne, Caracas, and Barcelona. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork the book
reveals the very concrete challenges, political significance, and potentially emanci-
patory character of these different initiatives. This is a powerful narrative that will
offer a source of inspiration for many.”
—Colin Sage, Independent Research Scholar

“Ferne Edwards’ Food Resistance Movements is a timely, deep ethnography of eco-

social resistance movements that explores the power of experimentation in the
creation of new urban food systems. This book produces an incredibly valuable
multi-scaled analysis of urban food movements across three continents, showing us
the lived struggles of what it means to create and experiment with doing food dif-
ferently in post- and anti-capitalist food spaces. More now than ever, we need to
learn from and apply the lessons from this book to produce different and more
equal food futures in the cities in which we labour to live and thrive.”
—Michael Goodman, Professor of Geography, Department of Geography and
Environmental Science, Global Development Research Division,
University of Reading, UK

“This is a book which is very timely in relation to increasing concerns about food
distribution and food waste — in connection with global warming and the war in
Ukraine. These problems are not going away but will intensify, and this is an excel-
lent resource regarding some of the approaches that are being tried in different
parts of the world.”
—Dr Terrence Leahy, University of Newcastle, Australia
 Contents

1 Introducing
 Food Resistance Movements  1
Alternative Food Networks   4
Trajectory 1: AFNs from Europe   5
Trajectory 2: AFNs from North America   5
Trajectory 3: AFNs in the Global South  11
Trajectory 4: Social Welfare AFNs  13
Why Cities?  17
Case Studies in Australia, Venezuela and Catalonia  18
Ethnographies of Food Resistance Movements  19
The Book Structure  21
Conclusion  22
References  22

2 Food
 Waste Activism in Australia 29
The Problem of Overconsumption and Food ‘Waste’  29
My Radical Beginnings in the Bin  31
The Ethics of Sourcing and Eating ‘Garbage’  33
Associated Freegan Subcultures  34
Where Do Freegans ‘Shop’?  36
What’s on the Freegan Menu?  38
The Politics of FNB Serving Sites  39
Is Eating ‘Garbage’ Safe?  40
Is It Legal?  42
Constructing a Freegan Identity  43

xiii
xiv Contents

Conclusion  46
References  46

3 The
 Food Sovereignty Movement in Venezuela 49
A Brief History of Venezuelan Politics, Dutch Disease and
Agriculture  50
So Enters Chávez  51
In the Field  54
Venezuelan Gastronomy and Food Pathways  56
Indigenous and Traditional Food Pathways  56
The Commercial Pathway  58
The Informal Sector  58
Independent Alternative Food Pathways  59
The Venezuelan Food Sovereignty Movement  60
Rural and Urban Land Reform  60
Urban Productive Programmes  62
Distribution: Subsidised, Regulated and Free Food for All  67
Subsidised and Regulated Supermarket Chains  67
A Blockage in the Food Chain?  69
Subsidised Eateries  71
Free Food  72
Dietary Outcomes  73
Environmental Outcomes  75
Chávez’s Final Years  78
Conclusion  78
References  80

4 Autonomous
 Food Spaces in Catalonia 83
A Catalan Culture of Resistance and Protest  85
Internal Governance Processes of Autonomous Food Spaces  91
Can Masdeu  92
L’Aixada  93
La Xarca D’Aliments  94
Governing ‘Openness’ to Sustain Resistance  96
Sharing Physical and Virtual Space  97
Membership 101
Sustaining Autonomous Spaces Through Food Sharing 102
Beyond Ethical Consumption at L’Aixada 102
 Contents  xv

Anti-consumerism at La Xarxa 104
Degrowth at Can Masdeu 105
Conclusion 107
References 108

5 Reflections
 on Food System Transitions111
Beyond Awareness Raising and Behaviour Change 113
Institutionalisation: A Pathway for Integrating AFNs into
Policy and Planning 116
Maintenance and Care: Deepening and Sustaining
Engagement in AFNs 120
Failure 123
Technological Innovation 125
The Commercialisation of AFNs 128
A Food Sharing Ecosystem: Diversification, Hybridisation
and Replication of AFNs 129
Diversification and Hybridisation 131
Replication 134
Translocal Food Movements 136
Food Resistance Movements from Global South to North 138
Conclusion 139
References 140

6 Future
 Directions for Food Resistance Movements147
Conclusion 151
References 152

Index153
 About the Author

Ferne Edwards is a cultural anthropologist with close to 20 years of

international research and teaching experience on just and sustainable cit-
ies, food systems and social change. She has conducted ethnographies on
food waste, urban beekeeping, non-monetised alternative food economies
and food sharing in Australia, Venezuela, Spain and Norway. Ferne has
more than 30 academic publications, including the edited books, Food for
Degrowth (with Anitra Nelson; 2021) and Food, Senses and the City (with
Roos Gerritsen and Grit Wesser; 2021). She has been involved in design-
ing and delivering numerous global interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral
research projects and networks, including as a core member at the Victorian
Eco-Innovation Lab (University of Melbourne, Australia), SHARECITY
(Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) and EdiCitNet (RMIT University and
RMIT Europe, Australia and Spain). Her work has been recognised inter-
nationally as an UrbanA Fellow for Just and Sustainable Cities, World
Social Science Fellow on Urban Issues in the Global South, Australian
Anthropology Society Fellow, Honorary Research Associate for the Centre
for Urban Research (RMIT University), and Invited Chair on Sustainable
City and Human Life at the World Knowledge Forum (Seoul, 2008).
Ferne holds the position of Research Fellow, Sustainable Food Systems,
Centre for Environment and Sustainability, at the University of Surrey
(United Kingdom).

xvii
 Abbreviations

AES Alternative economic spaces

AFN Alternative food network
BsF Bolívares
CEO Chief Executive Officer
CMD Can Masdeu
CSA Community-supported agriculture
DD Dumpster diving or dumpster divers
DEF Diverse economy framework
El Banc El Banc del Expropiat de Gràcia
FAO Food and Agriculture Organization
FNB Food Not Bombs
Fundación CIARA Convenio de Capacitación y Innovación para Apoyar la
Revolución Agraria
GDP Gross Domestic Product
GM Genetically modified crops
INN Instituto Naciónal de Nutrición (National Institute of
Nutrition)
La Xarxa La Xarxa D’Aliments
MINPPAL Ministry of Popular Power for Food
NSM New social movement
PAE Programa de Alimentación Escolar (School Feeding
Programme)
PDVAL Producción y Distribución Venezolana de Alimentos
PDVSA Petróleos de Venezuela
PIC El Punt d’Interacció de Collserola
SFSCs Short food supply chains
SSE Social and solidarity economy
UK United Kingdom
USA United States of America

xix
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Urban agriculture in Caracas 54

Fig. 3.2 Plantains at Sakororan 57
Fig. 3.3 Mural at a cooperative farm that has been established on
repossessed idle land 62
Fig. 3.4 Aquaculture project in Caracas 64
Fig. 4.1 BCN Explota poster 86
Fig. 4.2 Can Masdeu 88
Fig. 4.3 Ateneu Rosa de Foc 89
Fig. 4.4 The front door of El Banc del Expropiat de Gràcia 91
Fig. 4.5 Sharing out the collected surplus food at La Xarxa 95
Fig. 4.6 The Can Masdeu community garden 99
Fig. 4.7 Attendance at the social centre (PIC), Can Masdeu 100
Fig. 5.1 Mercal packaging printed with the constitution 117
Fig. 5.2 Rescued flowers, chocolate gold coins and fruit cake make a
special Christmas meal at the Open Table 132
Fig. 5.3 The FareShare Kitchen Garden 133
Fig. 5.4 Parsley rich in vitamins is harvested at the FareShare Kitchen
Garden133

xxi
 List of Tables

Table 2.1 Freegan subcultures in Australia 35

Table 2.2 Characteristics of freegan versus mainstream capitalist culture
(Edwards and Mercer 2007: 289, reprinted by permission of
the publisher, Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.
tandfonline.com)45
Table 3.1 Structure of the Venezuelan food movement 74
Table 4.1 Distinctions between El Banco del Aliments and La Xarxa
(adapted from leaflet produced by La Xarxa D’Aliments ND) 105
Table 6.1 Research questions for future research 148

xxiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introducing Food Resistance Movements

Lord Cameron’s estimation that it would take only nine meals after food
supplies shut down for chaos to erupt on British streets is a concern that
still stands true for many cities today (Boycott 2008). Although the glo-
balisation of the food system has produced positive outcomes, such as an
international supply of products to consumers, negative impacts from dis-
tant, complex supply chains and petrochemical-dependant processes con-
cern both academics and activists. A global food system impacts national
economies and environmental and people’s health on a variety of levels.
As food has become a commodity crop in a global market, international
trade policies have overshadowed national food security concerns, favour-
ing produce grown in high volumes to be exchanged for minimum price,
allowing only high volume producers to make a profit (Cockrall-King
2012). A global, industrial, market-based food system encourages unfair
conditions for workers and the inhumane treatment of animals to gain
greater profit from production. It values characteristics of consistency, uni-
formity and durability to allow the long distance transport of products.
These characteristics restrict diversity of what can be transported, while
extensive food miles increase carbon emissions and relocate limited local
resources, such as water and phosphate, to distant destinations. Other
environmental hazards of industrial production include contaminated soil
and waterways that, along with the uncertain impact of genetically

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023
F. Edwards, Food Resistance Movements, Alternatives and Futures:
Cultures, Practices, Activism and Utopias,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5795-6_1
2 F. EDWARDS

modified crops (GM), create health concerns for animals and people
(Philips 2006).
The nature of the global food system combined with increasing urban-
isation further impacts who can farm what and where. Small-scale farms in
fertile peri-urban regions are increasingly consumed by urban develop-
ment (Szabo 2016). The peri-urban zone is understood as the physical
interface where complex urban and rural interactions take place, a zone
full of conflict and fertility with the potential to foster resilience for food
security and biodiversity. Threatened by urban expansion and unable to
compete in the global marketplace, small-scale farmers are forced to leave
their farms to seek new jobs in the cities, where: “Everyday more and
more people eat more food that has been grown, processed or cooked for
them by fewer and fewer others” (Mintz 2006: 5). Furthermore, risk of
food shortages are becoming more apparent due to extreme weather
events that are further exacerbated by climate change, with many coun-
tries experiencing increased drought, higher temperatures and sea level
rise. These climatic impacts affect both the transport and production of
goods. For example, The Guardian reported (May 2022) that global
warming “amplifies risks all the way through the supply chain, from farm
to warehouse to supermarket shelves”, where farmers in Australia are one
of many countries on the frontline for dramatic weather changes.
In response, food resistance movements are emerging across the globe.
Consisting of diverse groups of people, they resist, respond and foster just
and sustainable alternatives along the food chain to the capitalist industrial
agri-food model. Diverse scales of food resistance movements range from
international movements, such as Via Campesina and slow food, through
to more local actions such as anti-GM protests and community-supported
agriculture (CSA). Many food resistance movements are representative of
New Social Movements (NSMs), emerging alongside the rise of postmod-
ernism and globalisation, witnessing a proliferation of splinter identity
groups. Each social group creates their own space and politicises their own
specific area of social relations in contrast to unified homogenous class-­
based struggles. NSMs gain strength and support from sharing “common
interests on a variety of terrains of struggle, often in opposition to the state
and other political and socio-cultural institutions” (Peet and Watts 1996:
31). While many participants in NSMs may possess the intellectual capital
of the new middle class, they do not focus on material gain but instead
choose to challenge the political structures that create injustice.
This development in social movement literature follows a shift from
rural production to urban consumption, challenging assumptions that
 1 INTRODUCING FOOD RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS 3

citizens are ‘consumers’, where activists bypass the nation-state to protest

directly at the feet of transnational corporations. Radical consumer move-
ments challenge not only specific practices and policies but also the under-
lying ideology of consumerism. Globally connected through online tools,
NSMs and consumer movements often share common goals, where exam-
ples include the anti-corporate globalisation movement and the women’s
and indigenous movements (Burgmann 2003).
Food justice is often used to describe food resistance goals with a focus
on race relations in the United States of America (USA) (Alkon 2012;
Gottlieb and Joshi 2010). Food justice acknowledges, “the struggle
against racism, exploitation, and oppression taking place within the food
system that addresses inequality’s root causes both within and beyond the
food chain” (Hislop 2014: 19). Food resistance movements seek to re-­
politicise behaviours and processes that have become hidden, subsumed or
assumed within dominant discourses and practices, including challenging
imaginaries and discourses that often “tend to romanticize the histories of
whites” (Alkon and Guthman 2017: 1).
Food is becoming “a potent symbol of what ails society, a way of mak-
ing abstract issues like class or exploitation into a material, visceral reality”
(Wilk 2006: 21–22). This book joins an emerging field that explores
diverse forms of food activism in local, national and transnational settings
(Counihan and Siniscalchi 2014), on topics of civic agriculture, consumer
and community-based initiatives (Bonanno and Wolf 2017), and the influ-
ence of specific groups such as Via Campesina (Mann 2014). Recent
grounds of inquiry include the application of food regime theory to food
resistance (Tilzey 2018) and the rise of digital food activism (Schneider
et al. 2019).
The recounting of food resistance actions is itself political as it unsettles
the assumed dominance of the industrial food system. Katherine Gibson
and Julie Graham (Gibson-Graham 2006) did likewise in their diverse
economy framework (DEF) that sought to de-naturalise the dominance of
capitalism by revealing often hidden alternatives. By drawing attention to
valid diverse economies, Gibson-Graham questioned capitalist dynamics,
values, concepts of progress and the “mechanistic logics of reproduction,
growth, accumulation, commodification, concentration, and centraliza-
tion” (ibid.: 71). Furthermore, the DEF revealed the possibilities of hybrid
states, declaring people can exist in a “zone of cohabitation and contesta-
tion among multiple economic forms” (ibid.: xxi).
Richard Wilk acknowledges how the long arm of capitalism embedded
within global agriculture proves able “to commodify almost anything,
4 F. EDWARDS

even resistance to capitalism itself (as in greenwashing) and this requires

that people constantly invent new forms of resistance” (2019: 224). This
research applies an economic anthropology methodology to look beyond
dominant, dualist discourses of the conventional economy to recognise
often unseen and unacknowledged anti- and non-capitalist economies.
Economic anthropology is defined as “the description and analysis of eco-
nomic life” (Carrier 2012: 1), where “the economy does not begin and
end in the marketplace, and the purchase of commodities in the market-
place is only one form of exchange” (Wilk 2019: 222). Anthropology
employs methods to understand cultures as more than traditional western
understandings (ethnocentricity), where value that may go beyond utili-
tarian attributes, and economies are part of a larger system that is influ-
enced by, and has an influence on, politics, society and the environment. I
borrow from Gibson-Graham’s (2006) weak theory of economy to look
beyond often assumed and problematic binaries—such as local/global and
formal/informal—that hide connections and changing states within the
capitalist market to recognise the diversity in the spaces in between where
other relations and actors can be found (Edwards 2016).
This book provides examples that go beyond individual green con-
sumption practices to explore transitioning, and often hybrid, anti-­
consumerist, ethical and degrowth actions along the food chain. It
introduces case studies occurring at different paces, scales and intensities
around the world. To understand the broader body of food movements
that food resistance movements have emerged from and distinguish them-
selves against, I next describe the trajectories and criticisms of alternative
food networks (AFNs): diverse alternative food pathways that grew prom-
inent in the early to mid-1990s as a reaction against the standardisation,
globalisation and unethical nature of the industrial food system (Edwards
2016a, 2016b).

Alternative Food Networks

AFNs build on an ethics of sustainability, social justice, health, animal wel-
fare and cultural identity. Their general characteristics include food that is
diverse, organic, quality and slow, with networks that are local, small-scale,
short, traditional, and based within or instigated by the community. AFNs
seek to diversify and transform modern food provisioning by connecting
ethical producers and consumers in novel ways. Examples of AFNs include
CSAs, organic schemes, farmers’ markets, fair trade, slow food, specialised
 1 INTRODUCING FOOD RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS 5

forms of quality and direct farm retail (Goodman et al. 2011; Renting
et al. 2003). Here I describe four key trajectories of AFNs: from Europe,
North America, those with a social welfare focus and the Global South.

Trajectory 1: AFNs from Europe

In Europe, AFNs emerged from a combination of environmental and
organic agriculture movements and because of agricultural reform to the
European Union Common Agricultural Policy. European AFNs were
spurred on by food scares and animal and consumer health and food safety
concerns, such as Bovine spongiform encephalopathy and Foot and Mouth
disease (an outbreak occurred in 2001). These and other food scares
prompted consumers to demand improved food quality control assur-
ances. European AFNs often arose out of a rural base, linking aspects of
quality with a product to its region. This revaluing of local, rural produc-
tion endorses “a Eurocentric rural imaginary and defend(s) its cultural
identity against a US-dominated, corporate globalisation” (Goodman
et al. 2011: 12), as illustrated by Italy’s slow food movement in protest
against the ‘McDonaldisation’ of their traditional foodways. Another
reading of rural European AFNs came from theorists Moya Kneafsey et al.
(2001) and Christopher Ray (1998) who described the movement as a
form of endogenous rural economic development that was indicative of
‘patrimonialisation’: a French term used to describe how the combined
qualities of authenticity, heritage and food engender a heightened sense of
place towards the protection of rural landscapes.

Trajectory 2: AFNs from North America

The European AFN defensive posture differed to America’s, more radical,
emancipatory, civic-led models. In the USA, AFNs grew from the array of
counterculture movements of the civil rights campaign, anti-war activism,
and environment movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. With its social
and ecological critique of industrial agriculture and agribusiness, the back-­
to-­the-land movement became a key influence. Publications such as the
Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth News further inspired citizens to
revalue making a living from the land, linking rural farmers with urban
consumers via local markets that developed into new forms of urban food
cooperatives, buying groups, natural food stores and communal restau-
rants (Belasco 1989).
6 F. EDWARDS

The organic food movement emerged during this period with its initial
characteristics of self-governance and private regulation. However, its
countercultural characteristics were later conventionalised by scientific and
industry bodies to transform the sector into an institutionalised, multi-­
billion-­dollar industry governed by federal legislation and regulations in
the 1990s. The transformation of the organic food movement into a sci-
entifically framed, commercialised, ‘sustainable’ agriculture led it to be
relabelled as “organic lite” (Guthman 2004), an “Organic-Industrial
Complex” (Pollan 2001), or as a “corporate-organic foodscape” (Johnston
et al. 2009).
The local food movement further challenged this conventionalisation
by going ‘beyond organic’ to place emphasis on building “more locally
based, self-reliant food economies” that integrate sustainable food prac-
tices “to enhance the economic, environmental and social health of a par-
ticular place” (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program
cited in Feenstra 2002: 100). Initiatives within the local food movement
in the USA included the 100 Mile Diet and locavore movements with
their associated concepts of food miles, the ecological footprint and ‘inva-
sivore’; a diet of non-indigenous, invasive species considered to be harm-
ful to the environment (Gorman 2011).
Characteristics of the local food movement included the “quality turn”
(Goodman 2004): where the quality of a product could be expressed
through its relationship to the local or to a culinary culture. This assump-
tion of quality relied upon transparent relations between producer and
consumer. ‘Local’ implied food that was fresh, ethical and environmentally
friendly, with localisation said to emplace or embed trust between con-
sumers and producers, conveying knowledge of what the produce con-
tains and how it was grown. ‘Quality’ food then represented relationships
of trust and knowledge that were often, but not always, based on place.
Recognising that quality was socially constructed, contextual and con-
stituted a social, temporal and spatial process that could be interpreted in
a myriad of ways, scholars used a variety of approaches to explore quality
in AFNs. Henk Renting et al. (2003) explored this relationship through
categorising AFNs as more specific, Short Food Supply Chains (SFSCs),
that represented either organic farming, quality production or direct sell-
ing. SFSCs ‘re-socialised’ and ‘re-specialised’ products to incorporate
social and environmental justice values conveyed through transparency
and authenticity created by relations of ‘product-in-place’ or ‘process-in-­
place’. The former stressed the link between the product’s place of pro-
duction or producer, including factors of natural conditions and cultural
 1 INTRODUCING FOOD RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS 7

traditions, while the latter highlighted the bioprocesses associated with

that place, such as issues of health, and environmentally friendly methods
of organic or GM-free production. AFNs thus refocused food production
from a faceless, global “external, elusive ‘free’ market” to “an active [tan-
gible] construction of networks” that conveyed quality into produce based
on place (Renting et al. 2003: 399).
The concept of the local in AFN literature, like quality, was a relative
term that varied in definition, size and scale. The term local has become
“fluid in meaning” and “all embracing in scope”; “as was ‘small’ … in the
1970s and 1980s, and ‘organic’ … in the 1990s and 2000s” (Goodman
et al. 2011: 11). It has been used in many contexts, including when sus-
tainability movements called for decentralisation, democratisation and
self-sufficiency and when community development programmes advo-
cated community control and equitable access to resources (DuPuis and
Goodman 2005). Robert Feagan (2007) and others acknowledged a
range of local terms that include SFSCs, territoriality and terroir, food
miles, foodsheds, locality, bioregionalism and local food movements.
These terms take on divergent geographical, spatial, symbolic, material,
social, technological, moral and commercial meanings, and as such, require
explanation.
SFSCs and terroir were both used to convey a return to ‘authentic’
traditionally farmed landscapes. Literature on SFSCs focused on the cre-
ation of niche, regional markets that added value to the product through
specific quality definitions and conventions, such as labelling and certifica-
tion, that highlight difference, and thus desirability, of the product
(Renting et al. 2003; Ilbery and Maye 2000). These products were valued
through place, as expressed through the French terms ‘territoriality’ and
terroir: to capture “the ecological and cultural relationships that a food
system has within its territorial context” (Sonnino and Marsden 2006:
63). Such places were “usually rather small, whose soil and microclimate
impart distinctive qualities to food products” (Barham 2003: 131). In
Europe, food product origins are provided through designated quality
labels referred to as the ‘Protected Designation of Origin’ or the ‘Protected
Geographical Indication’ (Ilbery and Kneafsey 2000). Although SFSCs
may imply a shortened trade relationship between a distinct rural land-
scape and urban consumers, the distance travelled by SFSCs may in fact be
extensive, as origin labelling allowed products to travel large distances
while remaining symbolically local (Goodman et al. 2011). Also referred
to as ‘specialty food products’ by Brian Ilbery and Moya Kneafsey (2000:
8 F. EDWARDS

220), the processes behind re-localised food products could broaden the
commodification of place and region through food. Examples included
direct sales of niche specialty markets, CSAs and farmers’ markets, while
emerging online technologies, such as those used by fair trade, could pro-
vide a glimpse into the lives of workers and conditions of production
(Goodman et al. 2011).
Alternatively, the term, ‘foodsheds’, was based on the concept of
‘watershed’: a naturally and spatially defined area that represents both the
biological resources and the people who work with these resources to pro-
duce food (Renting et al. 2003). This definition set itself apart from AFNs
as foodsheds needed to be located where there were adequate resources to
grow sufficient food. Reference to foodsheds was found in literature on
eco-communitarianism in North American AFNs (DuPuis and Goodman
2005). Goodman et al. (2011: 68) acknowledged differences between
‘local’ and ‘locality’: as while locality foods may be consumed in place,
they could travel by mobilising cultural signifiers, such as the accreditation
of regional attributes, to be consumed by distant consumers in the mar-
ketplace. Furthermore, the term, ‘bioregionalism’, as applied by Sonnino
and Marsden (2006: 77) was used to embed and revalue regional produce
in competition with products from the conventional market.
The local turn was also interpreted as ‘defensive localism’, a term coined
by Michael Winter (2003) that referred to a politics of protectionism. In
its extreme form, defensive localism could “stress the homogeneity and
coherence of ‘local’, in patriotic opposition to heterogeneous and destabi-
lising outside forces”, creating a local ‘other’, becoming “elitist and reac-
tionary, appealing to narrow nativist sentiments” (Hinrichs 2003: 37).
Hence AFNs could mean many different things to different people for
different purposes—stretching from commercial profit with products trav-
elling from afar through to geographically entrenched, environmental
practices.
These two initial trajectories of AFNs revealed a conflation of character-
istics between different types of AFNs. AFNs represented a loose mix of
actors, activities, philosophies and diets that formed an eclectic group in
opposition to the dominant, global, industrial food system. Local pitted
itself against global, slow against fast, and quality against junk food, while
placing a face on products that were otherwise faceless and placeless to add
value by way of region and production for an other-than-purely economic
purpose. Hence, AFNs were deployed as an umbrella term to state what
they were not, rather than what they were.
 1 INTRODUCING FOOD RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS 9

As a result, AFN literature tended to inconsistently apply concepts and

overgeneralise terms that ignored specific historical, social, biological and
political contexts. Such conflations confused understandings, weakening
arguments in favour of alternatives and undermining actions to develop
the efficacy of AFNs. Furthermore, the dualistic and reductionist place-
ment of practices into mainstream conventional or alternative systems
could be misleading (DuPuis and Goodman 2005; Hinrichs 2000;
Sonnino and Marsden 2006). As acknowledged by Angela Tregear (2011:
424), in reality “food systems rarely operate exclusively within these artifi-
cially circumscribed boundaries, they dip into, or borrow from, diverse
logics over time”.
Examples of the confusion of terms in addition to the various versions
of local discussed above included the conflation of ‘local’ with justice
(Goodman et al. 2011: 24; Wilson 2013), and the imprecise application of
‘alternative’ that could refer to alternative governance, financing, product
characteristics or alternative motivations of participants (Tregear 2011).
Brandon Born and Mark Purcell (2006) identified potential issues for the
assumption of local as desirable in the ‘local trap’. The local trap acknowl-
edged how strategies may produce unexpected outcomes that may not be
beneficial, instead suggesting that specific strategies must be geared
towards each unique food system. The local trap conflated scale with desir-
able food system outcomes, treating “localization as an end in itself rather
than as a means to an end” (ibid.: 196). To overcome this issue, desired
outcomes must be clearly articulated with planned strategies to meet their
set goals rather than only being pitched at a particular scale. So too could
the local trap obscure other options that might be more suitable, be they
local (still a possibility), regional, national or global. Born and Purcell
acknowledged that rather than focus only upon scale, perhaps it is the
politics of those who are empowered that should instead be examined.
Such a twist of focus raised questions of: What outcomes are most likely to
result from a particular scale? Who would these strategies benefit? Would
other scales be better suited to meet the desired outcomes of the food
movement?
The conflation of local with justice also warrants interrogation. For
example, local does not necessarily support social or environmental justice
outcomes. Furthermore, it was unclear as to what kind of justice actors
referred to: communitarian, anti-corporate, liberal egalitarian or another
form of justice altogether? Additional questions followed: Who
10 F. EDWARDS

participates in seeking this justice? Who or what will benefit from achiev-
ing such justice? Who is included in or excluded from the fight for change?
A second criticism of AFNs emerging from this trajectory was that of
their exclusivity, racism and elitism, where the boundaries that separated
alternative from conventional food systems could exclude participation.
Although discourse often aspired to social equitable goals, in practice
AFNs were criticised for privileging white, middle-class ‘do-gooders’ to
instigate, access and control alternative means of production. For exam-
ple, Goodman et al. (2011: 14) recognised that “local is not an innocent
term” where the definition of what is considered local and who decides
this definition, homogenises and silences alternative views and practices,
with “food movement activists tend(ing) to draw upon one or other of
these perspectives rather than recognising the tensions between them”
(Goodman et al. 2011: 29). Hence, localism was not always democratic or
representative of local communities (Allen et al. 2003). Likewise, who
deemed what was ‘quality’ often also excludes. A politics of perfection
incorporated both class and race aspects in defining what is ‘good food’
and who can be trusted to provide it (Goodman et al. 2011).
Scholars from North America also spoke of the ‘whiteness’ of AFN
spaces. Access to AFN activities may be limited on racial grounds as people
involved in AFNs tend to “have the wealth to buy organic, the inherited
or schooled knowledge about nutrition or the environment and they are
politically liberal to left” (Slocum 2007: 522). Alison Hope Alkon and
Christie Grace McCullen (2011) amongst others document that it is
mainly “whites” who comprised most of California’s organic farmers
(Allen 2004) and who dominated attendance at farmers’ markets (Payne
2002) and CSA programmes (Hinrichs 2000).
However, more than simply outnumbering people from different racial
backgrounds, AFN spaces were also “coded white” (Guthman 2008) rep-
resenting forms of “racialised space” (Kobayashi and Peake 2000) where
whiteness “carries with it a set of ways of being in the world, a set of cul-
tural practices often not named as ‘white’ by white folks, but looked upon
instead as ‘American’ or ‘normal’” (Frankenberg 1993: 4). These spaces
reflected an “affluent, liberal habitus of whiteness” (Alkon and McCullen
2011: 939) based upon and supported by the struggles of small-scale,
white farmers who existed in “the white farm imaginary”; “an agrarian
narrative specific to whites while masking the contributions and struggles
of people of color in food production” (Alkon and McCullen 2011: 945).
 1 INTRODUCING FOOD RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS 11

Such imaginaries were upheld through mutually reinforcing behaviours in

white AFN spaces.
These criticisms of AFNs over the last two decades have prompted the
emergence of two additional trajectories which I recognise here: the rise
of AFNs in the Global South and AFNs as social welfare.

Trajectory 3: AFNs in the Global South

A third criticism of AFNs was the separation between AFNs in the Global
North and South. The study and practice of AFNs was mainly restricted to
affluent countries, such as Europe and North America. However, African
agro-food scholars amongst others (Crush et al. 2011; Shillington 2013)
recognised the existence and importance of AFNs in the Global South,
introducing a third trajectory to AFN literature. The inclusion of the
Global South in AFN literature goes beyond an exclusive global geo-
graphical focus to acknowledge experiences from the Global South, open-
ing up lines of enquiry to investigate crucial relationships between the
Global North and South. Caryn N. Abrahams (2006: 7) argued that AFN
literature should “incorporate a ‘theorising back’ from South to North”
(Hughes 2005: 502), to re-appraise analysis to look beyond “northern,
geographically and socially exclusive, elitist perceptions” (Abrahams
2006: 30).
Southern AFNs paralleled those in the North by exhibiting characteris-
tics of SFSCs, quality, slow, local and cultural foods and produce from
direct farm sale. Likewise, southern AFNs represented an “entire food
supply system that, in part or fully, contests or opposes the dominance of
conventional food networks within urban areas of the developing south”
(Abrahams 2006: 6-7). However, southern AFNs differed to their north-
ern counterparts as their focus was not a celebration of (alternative) con-
sumption (Goss 2004), “a lifestyle statement” (Abrahams 2006: 5), or a
“romanticised return to the local” (ibid.: 20) but instead centred their
motivations around survival, cultural diversity, food poverty and insecurity.
Southern AFNs broadened the remit of northern AFNs to include
grassroots-led urban and peri-urban agriculture, local and cultural food
provisioning networks that catered for the urban poor, and cultural and
religious modes of provisioning (Abrahams 2006). However, there was
some concern among academics about the solution for food security (that
emerged from a rural development perspective) being increased urban
production, precluding the validity of other AFN initiatives (Crush et al.
12 F. EDWARDS

2011). For example, David Satterthwaite (in Battersby 2012: 143), recog-
nised that “far more attention needs to be paid to the myriad of other ways
in which hunger can be reduced and how these can be supported, fast”.
This “myriad of other ways” included informal markets, street traders,
food vendors and non-market approaches, such as receiving food from
neighbours, the sharing of meals, eating food provided by others and the
borrowing of food (Battersby 2012).
The study of southern AFNs was often included within the informal
sector and rural development literature. The informal sector was also
referred to as the irregular, black, hidden, shadow, parallel or underground
economy, involving criminal activities and survival strategies that were
transferred from developing to developed nations by poor, migrating pop-
ulations. However, Manuel Castells and Alejandro Portes (1989) acknowl-
edged that this definition was dated, biased, narrow and misleading, and
while the informal sector does include criminal activities, it also created
opportunities for alternative economic spaces that can support innovation.
In a more positive light, the ETC Group (2013: NP) referred to such
informal food channels as the ‘peasant food web’, where ‘peasant’ was
used to describe “all those who produce food mostly for themselves and
their communities whether they are rural, urban, or peri-urban farmers,
ocean or freshwater fishers, pastoralists or hunters and gatherers”. Here,
web refers to “the complex of supportive interconnections shared by peas-
ants and communities” (ibid.).
Furthermore, informal food sources were not insubstantial. A survey
conducted in 11 African cities found that 70% of residents in low-income
neighbourhoods regularly purchased food from the informal market or
street vendors (Frayne et al. 2010). In terms of production, the extent and
significance of southern AFNs was difficult to ascertain both due to their
unregulated and undocumented state and due to the focus on commer-
cially profitable monocrops. For example, peasants grew around 7000
crops but the industrial food chain was interested in only about 150 crops
(ETC Group 2013).
Importantly, southern AFNs did not represent simply another form of
remnant informal economy. Instead, they occupied an alternative space as
a reaction against increasingly dominant and inadequate supermarket pro-
visioning, and to obtain previously unavailable cultural foods (Abrahams
2006; Brückner 2021). Southern AFNs broadened the focus from AFNs
as a “hankering for the rural idyllic, or the often elitist quest for conscience-­
quenching food” (Abrahams 2006: 28) to consider issues of survival,
 1 INTRODUCING FOOD RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS 13

poverty and cultural diversity—issues that are increasingly relevant for

residents in developing and developed worlds alike.

Trajectory 4: Social Welfare AFNs

A final criticism of AFNs was the corrosive influence of the capitalist mar-
ket on activist goals. Many AFNs tended to sit within the ‘alternative’
capitalist market, such as quality or ‘green’ niche market models. Capitalist
market AFNs were criticised for reinforcing unequal power relationships
and dynamics, rather than changing them. The status quo was achieved in
different ways, through commodification, individualisation, scale and con-
flation. The process of commodification prioritised economic values over
use, and social and environmental justice values, resulting in one com-
modity being pitched against another in order to compete in the market-
place. In other words, through the valorisation of place and quality,
market-based AFNs were set up to pitch characteristics of local against
local, and quality against quality for only one winner. This market-led,
economic-biased value model cannot address the politics behind the “new
forms of commodification of territoriality” (Goodman et al. 2011: 17)
that it created. Within a specialist market niche, this competitive quality
turn often excluded those it was originally established to help. For exam-
ple, the poorest producers of fair trade who were unable to meet the inter-
national quality standards required for participation.
The shortness or localness of an AFN also presumed that greater knowl-
edge is exchanged between producer and consumer, contributing to rais-
ing “the veil of the commodity fetish” (Goodman et al. 2011: 5, 36).
However, this acquired knowledge also redistributed responsibility to the
consumer, placing them under the burden to buy their way to a fairer food
system. Rather than deliver greater knowledge and insight about how the
food system operates, this individualisation of responsibility through cus-
tomers’ dietary choices instead diverted attention away from the embed-
ded political, economic and infrastructure issues within the capitalist,
industrial food system (Harris 2009).
Furthermore, as an AFN became integrated—or mainstreamed—within
the capitalist marketplace with their sales extending beyond the local to a
global level, they faced further obstruction in revealing their specificity of
place and politics. Economic geographer, Ash Amin (2002: 397) argued
that such distanced food networks required a reintroduction of politics,
specifying a need for a shift from place-based knowledge to a
14 F. EDWARDS

“non-territorial way of viewing place politics”. So did the individualisation

of actions within green consumerist AFNs often overlook the causes, spe-
cific contexts, pressures, desires and underlying politics that informed con-
sumer choices. Such superficial approaches often resulted in providing
“relatively apolitical strategies such as patronising and creating alternative
food businesses” (Alkon and Guthman 2017: 1).
This criticism of the capitalist market on AFN activist goals revealed
one more dominant trajectory to AFN literature: projects that were based
within the social economy. The social economy has changed in definition
over time and place. In general terms, it referred to community organisa-
tions in the third sector that prioritised social and, often, environmental
needs before profit. John Pearce characterised the first sector as profit ori-
ented, geared for private interests and commercial trade; the second sector
as non-trading to include state provided public services; and the third
sector involving both trading and non-trading, including community-­
based and social ownership, upholding principles of self-help, mutual obli-
gation and social benefit (cited by Amin 2009: 4). Where the variance lies
then was in the degree of autonomy and empowerment embodied within
these social organisations. To ask, did they exist merely to respond to gaps
of need left by the state? Were they malleable according to state funding
requirements for continued existence, or did they go beyond these limita-
tions to work in non-standardised ways to provide self-help, capacity
building and social integration? In this book, I refer to ‘social welfare’ as
services provided by, or reliant upon funding from, the state, and ‘social
economy’ as alternative economic organisations aimed at improving envi-
ronmental and social justice goals, of which the solidarity economy
is a part.
Amin (2009) also recognised that the social, environmental, political
and geographical context of the social economy affected how it developed,
what was expected of it, and determined whether it sat either between or
beyond the state and the market. For example, in societies of inequality
and upheaval, the social economy may have served as a remedy against
capitalism, while in societies that were well functioning, it might have
complemented and built on its success to increase social power.
For social welfare AFNs, it was this former state that was apparent,
where food-related community groups were established to remedy issues
of social inequality and injustice resulting from inadequacies in the capital-
ist system. Social welfare AFNs were affected by the power structure and
institutional frameworks of the capitalist system, often remaining
 1 INTRODUCING FOOD RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS 15

dependent on a constant stream of grants and resources in order to sur-

vive. These AFNs sat within the non-market economy with activities
including community gardens, food security or social justice projects. In
his work on urban agriculture projects in the USA, Nathan McClintock
(2014) discussed how the responsibility of care shifted in the roll out of
neoliberalisation from the government to charities and community organ-
isations. There, many urban agriculture projects were based in disadvan-
taged zones, surviving on little income and relying on volunteer support.
McClintock spoke of “privatisation, marketisation, market-friendly re-­
regulation, flanking mechanisms and shifting discourse to self-sufficiency
and personal responsibility” (2014: 154) that placed responsibility on
individuals and their communities. Food in these AFNs took on a dis-
course of “a public good” requiring equitable distribution (McClintock
2014: 148). Hence, these urban agriculture projects “serve as another
type of subsidy: the subsidisation of capital or, more specifically, of capital-
ist accumulation” (McClintock 2014: 148). In other words, by providing
free food while using minimal government funding, the capitalist system
was relieved of the necessity to pay an adequate wage to cover food or
taxes to support an adequate social welfare system.
I witnessed examples of this capitalist-dependent AFN in attending
multiple conferences, workshops and events over close to 20 years in the
sustainable food movement. In many cases, attaining funding was dis-
cussed as a determining factor for the success of AFN initiatives, dominat-
ing all other aspects of discussion. A focus on funding often overlooked
the power of the people to access or provide that funding, and how those
factors determined where information flowed, who chose its form, and
which initiatives would succeed. As a result, the shape, scale and success of
AFNs may be heavily steered by their dependence on funding sources that
lie within the remit of the state and the influence of the marketplace.
Rather than be able to transform the system, social welfare AFN models
focused social change on local, individualised, scattered sites of responsi-
bility and care. In a study ‘to bring good food to others’ through student
fieldwork at food insecurity organisations, Julie Guthman (2008) described
how—rather than improving people’s diets—the students’ actions instead
diverted attention from addressing broader structural issues that created
and maintained these food injustices. Instead, Guthman suggested that
students should perhaps adjust their efforts for societal change, such as by
addressing issues from ‘redlining’—neighbourhoods in the USA, often
consisting of racial and ethnic minorities and low-income residents, where
16 F. EDWARDS

services are withheld due to being deemed as being hazardous to invest-

ment. Other alternatives included “investing in urban renewal, expanding
entitlement programs, obtaining living wages, along with eliminating tox-
ins from and improving the quality of the mainstream food supply”
(Guthman 2008: 443).
These approaches can be interpreted in radically different ways.
Capitalist-dependent AFNs often rely on the efforts of volunteers in their
desire to establish new opportunities. In this case, the capitalist system
enables action through subsidising partial costs yet does not take respon-
sibility for resolving societal problems. In this sense, capitalist support
could be considered restrictive and exploitative. However, capitalist
involvement may be tolerated when funding is perceived to allow partial
community control of food production, resulting in the revaluing of food
and enabling people to escape from alienation in capitalist employment
through volunteering. Alternatively, in a socialist approach the govern-
ment nationalises goods and services to pay everyone a fair wage, includ-
ing providing adequate incomes to cover peoples’ basic living costs. These
actions—as demonstrated in Chap. 3—can also play out in many complex
directions. Finally, Gibson-Graham’s community economy approach
argues that societal needs can be met largely outside of the normal pro-
cesses of capitalism. Many AFNs sit between these economic models, both
moving in and out of economic states while often existing in hybrid states,
retaining aspects as suits their situation and ability.
The degree to which the cup is full or empty in these approaches is
imbricated in the specific needs, motivations, contexts and politics of the
people practising these food resistance actions. These trajectories and per-
spectives of AFNs and their emergent criticisms are played out and under-
stood through the lived experiences of people from the food resistance
movements covered in this book. These case studies largely extend beyond
initiatives based in the First World that cater to an elitist, individualist,
white middle-class consumer, to instead focus on collective actions from
around the world in resistance to the social and environmental inequities
and costs from the industrial food chain. With many of these case studies
being urban-based, I next turn my focus to the city.
 1 INTRODUCING FOOD RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS 17

Why Cities?
Cities now house more than half of the world’s population becoming a
focal point for possible sustainable and equitable futures. Currently unsus-
tainable, cities represent highly consumptive sites that rely on constant
supplies of imported food, raw materials and external energy while pro-
ducing large amounts of waste. Furthermore, developing world cities are
rapidly increasing in size and consumption, standing to further exacerbate
an already unsustainable situation. Cities also contribute to ozone deple-
tion, land degradation, loss of biodiversity and the destruction of coastal
zones (Bulkeley 2013). For example, urban consumption in 2020 contrib-
uted to more than 65% of the world’s energy consumption and to more
than 70% of human-made carbon dioxide emissions (Benato 2020;
Vidal 2018).
Although people move to cities to improve their well-being, they often
remain in conditions of poverty. Poor city dwellers experience greater
issues of food access than rural dwellers, as they are dependent on purchas-
ing nearly all their food. As such, people must be able to earn enough
money to afford food while food needs to be available to buy at affordable
prices (Carty and McGrath 2013). Furthermore, common food sources in
cities, such as supermarkets and fast-food chains, offer a diverse selection
of products that include energy-dense, nutrient-poor and highly processed
foods (Hawkes 2008). Some city dwellers find themselves in ‘food des-
erts’, areas where they are unable to access adequate nutritious food
sources.
In recent years, there has been a convergence towards western-style
diets that are rich in fat and refined carbohydrates leading to nutritional
inequalities. This nutrition transition exhibits a declining intake of cereals
and legumes and increased consumption of convenience foods, meat, fats,
salt and sugar (McMichael 2001). When combined with other factors such
as car reliance, busyness, changing forms of leisure and aggressive junk
food marketing, this westernised diet can lead to obesity that in turn con-
tributes to cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and some cancers, as well as
high blood pressure and cholesterol (Hawkes 2008). Obesity is now a
major global issue—in 2016 over 650 million adults were obese, while
globally obesity almost tripled between 1975 and 2016 (WHO 2021).
Urban concerns have prompted a growth in urban-based research and
international policies. Cities were recognised as one of the United Nation’s
Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 and were cited as a crucial factor
18 F. EDWARDS

in the European Union Green Deal in 2019. While some scholars believe
cities represent all that is unsustainable, many others take the perspective
that cities can offer much towards resolving environmental justice and
sustainability challenges, where urban food production can supplement
diets with local, fresh and chemical-free produce and participation in food
activities can improve social, mental and physical health (e.g., see Alaimo
et al. 2008; Wakefield et al. 2007). Hence urban-based food resistance
movements are well placed to mobilise resources, to improve health, to
reduce environmental consumption and pollution and to improve liveli-
hoods, whilst advocating for social and environmental justice.

Case Studies in Australia, Venezuela and Catalonia

The first case study begins in 2005 in Melbourne, Australia, with
freegans—people who choose to consume food that would otherwise go
to waste to protest overconsumption and hunger in the west. I discuss two
freegan case studies: members of Food Not Bombs (FNB), an activist
community kitchen and free meal programme; and the practice of dump-
ster diving (DD), where people choose to eat garbage from rubbish bins
to protest waste (Edwards 2005). Through their actions, freegans chal-
lenge traditional assumptions of consumption, health, justice and the use
of space. Their activities represent the radical edge of a food waste con-
tinuum that has since extended to include formalised food redistribution
and commercial enterprises. The freegan case study illustrates that change
was happening and in the most unlikely places. However, realising that
freegans’ actions were contained within an urban subculture in a western
context, I turned my sights to researching a food resistance movement
that engaged in multi-level, structural food system changes.
Venezuela’s food sovereignty movement represented a key strategy in
an attempted national transition from a capitalist-based economy to what
former president Hugo Chávez Frias called ‘Socialism of the Twenty-First
Century’: a post-capitalist society based on social equality, inclusion,
endogenous development, participative democracy and a socialist ethics
“based on love, solidarity and equality” (Harnecker 2010: 27). In field-
work conducted from 2009 until 2012, I explored collaborative grassroots-­
government food security and food sovereignty programmes in three
cities—Ciudad Bolívar, Merida and Caracas. While the potential of these
strategies was unable to be fully realised due to nationwide unrest, this
 1 INTRODUCING FOOD RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS 19

case study revealed potential strategies and highlighted potential political

impacts of large-scale food systemic change.
The final case study led me to Barcelona, Catalonia, where citizens were
creating autonomous spaces in which to critique capitalist pressures and to
establish alternatives based on food practices. Three anti-capitalist exam-
ples that share urban governance practices were explored: Can Masdeu
(CMD), an alternative living and education centre on the fringe of
Barcelona; L’Aixada, a consumer cooperative that supported ethical pro-
duction; and La Xarxa D’Aliments (La Xarxa), a food recycling grassroots
activity based within an occupied bank—the latter two located in the sub-
urb of Gràcia in northern Barcelona. In contrast to many urban or even
national AFNs, these examples were relatively long-lived, offering insights
as to how horizontal governance approaches could sustain participants’
lifestyle politics within a capitalist society. I commenced fieldwork in
Barcelona in 2016, where my initial research of three months extended to
four years of intermittent independent research with food activist
communities.
While these three case studies were opportunistic—taking research
opportunities as they arose—I did steer them to follow a thread of interest
throughout: the creation and maintenance of alternative food practices in
resistance to the capitalist system. From their eclectic selection, these case
studies opened and deepened research into food resistance movements
overall: exploring possibilities for engagement, experimenting with strate-
gies to scale up, institutionalising and targeting structural change, and
interrogating how horizontal governance and alternative consumption
strategies could sustain alternative practices within cities.

Ethnographies of Food Resistance Movements

I applied a range of methods from cultural anthropology to explore and
give a voice to participants in these diverse and often hidden practices. A
qualitative case study approach was used to ask ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions.
This approach was preferable to qualitative research methods, such as sur-
veys and historical studies, as holistic contextual data was essential for
understanding the complexity of this topic.
I practised ethnography at all sites ranging from three months up to
three years. Ethnographic fieldwork strives to provide a holistic context of
everyday experiences over time to draw out deeper understandings that go
beyond “front stage behaviour” (Goffman 1959), where respondents may
20 F. EDWARDS

alter their actions depending on their audience. Such detailed long-term

participant-observation allows the researcher to identify discrepancies
between what people, communities and institutions may say and do
(Hammersley and Atkinson 2007). As part of the ethnographies, I partici-
pated in numerous related activities, including dumpster diving, collective
garden working days, visiting numerous farming sites, where I recorded
my observations as thick description: not only writing down facts but also
a commentary and interpretation of the data over time (Geertz 1973).
When participating at these activities, I used snowball sampling to identify
and recruit key participants. In addition, I conducted formal semi-­
structured interviews to follow up key themes, asking open-ended ques-
tions to encourage participants to elaborate on their perspectives and
experiences. All interviews were taped, with selected recordings tran-
scribed and coded. Pseudonyms were used to anonymise identities.
Informal conversations were also held to discover broad categories of cul-
tural meanings, to identify shared values across the groups, and to estab-
lish and maintain a healthy rapport with the activists (Fetterman 2010).
In qualitative research, the researcher is recognised as the instrument
through which the collection and analysis of data is culturally and socially
mediated and negotiated (Arzubiaga et al. 2008; Patton 2001). Hence, it
is recognised that anthropologists’ “perspectives are never completely
neutral” (Counihan and Siniscalchi 2014: 5), where: “In the social sci-
ences, there is only interpretation. Nothing speaks for itself” (Denzin
1994: 500). Furthermore, anthropologists interpret data differently as
they encounter different stages of liminality in the field. When they enter
the field, they are stripped of their identity and social status. They next
enter a liminal period, co-existing between two socio-cultural worlds; to
finally reach a stage of assimilation and acceptance within another society
(Van Gennep 1909). This final stage engenders trust, and thus a greater
authenticity of data exchange, between respondents and the anthropolo-
gist. In this latter phase, an anthropologist lessens their bias of cultural
ethnocentricity as they become embedded in local cultural practices.
Language acquisition, the uptake of social cues, and the pace and duration
of the research, further influences the degree and impact of these stages.
By applying methods such as reflexivity, anthropologists consider their
personal and cultural influences in the collection, interpretation and writ-
ing up of the data. Such “interpretation of interpretation” (Alvesson and
Sköldberg 2000) adds additional layers of analysis to the final
ethnography.
 1 INTRODUCING FOOD RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS 21

I acknowledge my presence in the field, and my subsequent influence in

the production of knowledge. To honour this process of reflexivity, I
would like to briefly introduce myself. I am an Australian female of
Caucasian descent with a working-class background. I began this research
in my late 20s and now have almost 20 years’ experience working as an
academic researcher in just and sustainable cities, food systems and social
change. Over this time, I have conducted additional research on these
themes to what is included here—all of which has further developed my
understanding of food resistance movements. These experiences included
volunteering for many not-for-profit sustainability organisations, conduct-
ing research in related fields of health, sustainable design, planning and
climate change adaptation, participating in numerous international net-
works, and managing international projects to research and implement
sustainable food systems in diverse urban settings. I am a native English
speaker with an intermediate level of Spanish language. The degree in
which I was able to immerse myself within the field varied, as did my posi-
tion of privilege and power, altering as I improved my language skills,
gained contacts, and became more accepted at the research sites.

The Book Structure

Looking ahead after this brief background to food resistance movements
and AFNs, Chaps. 2–4 provide a brief historical context, followed by nar-
rative and analysis of each of the three food resistance case studies. Analysis
adapts to the pertinent desires, goals and emerging themes of each case
study. This approach therefore follows no pre-determined or externally set
path or objective, but instead highlights themes that are meaningful to
each specific food resistance cause. Subsequent themes that emerge
include: diverse alternative consumption practices of anti-consumerist,
socialist, ethical and degrowth practices, and spatial characteristics of food
resistance movements, such as how space is occupied, shared and regu-
lated. Chapter 5 looks back on these experiences over almost two decades
to focus on the rise of the food waste movement to examine trajectories of
socio-environmental change. This chapter asks, what have food resistance
movements achieved, and what can be learnt from their experiences?
Chapter 6 draws together areas for future research across the diverse case
studies to identify the next steps for achieving just and sustainable food
system change.
22 F. EDWARDS

Conclusion
Food resistance movements resist capitalist processes that perpetuate social
and environmental injustices. Building on criticisms of AFNs, they seek to
establish alternatives that prioritise social justice and environmental sus-
tainability values that go beyond elitist, individualist, racist and capitalist
engaged approaches. This book focuses on urban-based food resistance
movements, representing potentially powerful sites for social mobilisation,
experimentation and impactful solutions. I next describe the freegan food
waste movement in Australia: a radical practice that emerged in the early
2000s to protest waste and overconsumption in the west.

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to go with you, Tsarévich, to seek the rose without prickles that
stings not; but I will give you good advice: pray do not forget,—do
you hear—do not forget what I tell you.” The Tsarévich promised to
remember. “At some distance from hence,” continued she, “as you
go to seek the rose without prickles that stings not, you will meet with
people of very agreeable manners who will endeavour to persuade
you to go with them. They will tell you a great many entertainments,
and that they spend their time in innumerable pleasures. Do not
believe them: they lie. Their pleasures are false, and attended with
much weariness. After them you will see others who will still more
earnestly press you on the same subject. Refuse them with firmness,
and they will leave you. You will then get into a wood. There you will
find flatterers who by agreeable conversation, and every other
means, will endeavour to draw you out of your proper way. But do
not forget that you have nothing to do but to seek one flower, a rose
without prickles that stings not. I love you, and will send my son to
meet you, who will help you to find the rose without prickles that
stings not.” Khlor, having heard the words of Felítsa, asked her: “Is it
so difficult to find the rose without prickles that stings not?” “No,”
answered the Sultana, “it is not so very difficult to an upright person
who perseveres firmly in his intention.” Khlor asked if ever anybody
had found that flower. “I have seen,” said Felítsa, “peasants and
tradesmen who have as happily succeeded in this pursuit as nobles,
kings or queens.” The Sultana having said this, took leave of the
Tsarévich. The starshiná, his tutor, led him to seek the rose without
prickles that stings not; and for this purpose let him out at a wicket
into a large game park.
On entering the park, Khlor saw a vast number of roads. Some
were straight, some crooked, and some full of intricate windings. The
child did not know which way to go, but on seeing a youth coming
towards him, he made haste to meet him and ask who he was. The
youth answered: “I am Razsúdok (Reason), the son of Felítsa. My
mother sent me to accompany you in your search for the rose
without prickles that stings not.”
The Tsarévich thanked Felítsa with heart and lips and, having
taken the youth by the hand, informed himself of the way he should
go. Razsúdok said with a cheerful and assured look: “Fear naught,
Tsarévich, let us go on the straight road, where few walk though it is
more agreeable than the others.” “Why do not all keep the straight
road?” said the Tsarévich. “Because,” replied the youth, “they lose
themselves and get bewildered in the others.” In going along, the
youth showed Khlor a very beautiful little path, and said: “Look,
Tsarévich! This is called the Path of the Nonage of Well-Disposed
Souls. It is very pretty but very short.”
They pursued their way through a wood into an agreeable plain,
through which ran a rivulet of clear water. On the banks they saw
troops of young people. Some were sitting on the grass, and others
were lying under the trees. As soon as they saw the Tsarévich, they
got up and came to him. One of them with great politeness and
insinuation of manner addressed him. “Give me leave,” said he, “to
ask you, sir, where you are going? Did you come here by chance?
Can we have the pleasure of serving you in anything? Your
appearance fills us with respect and friendship, and we are ravished
with the number of your brilliant accomplishments.” The Tsarévich,
recollecting the words of Felítsa, replied: “I have not the honour to
know you, and you also are unacquainted with me. I therefore
attribute your compliments to your politeness, and not to my own
merits. I am going to seek the rose without prickles that stings not.”
Another of the company joined the conversation, and said: “Your
intention is a proof of your talents. But oblige us so far as to favour
us with your company a few days, and to take a share in the
inimitable pleasures which we enjoy.” Khlor told him that he was
restricted to a time, and that he could not delay lest he should incur
the Khan’s displeasure. They endeavoured to persuade him that rest
was necessary for his health, and that he could not find a place for
this purpose more convenient, nor people more inclined to serve
him. It is impossible to conceive how they begged and persuaded
him. At length the men and women took each other by the hand, and
formed a ring about Khlor and his conductor, and began to leap and
dance, and hinder them from going farther; but while they were
whirling themselves about, Razsúdok snatched Khlor under his arm
and ran out of the ring with such speed that the dancers could not
catch hold of them.
 Having proceeded farther, they came to Lentyág[139] Murza (the
sluggard chief), the chief governor of the place, who was taking a
walk with his household. He received Khlor and his conductor very
civilly, and asked them into his lodging. As they were a little tired,
they went in with him. He desired them to sit down on the divan, and
laid himself by them on down pillows covered with old-fashioned
cloth of gold. His domestic friends sat down round the walls of the
chamber. Lentyág Murza then ordered pipes, tobacco and coffee to
be served. Having understood that they did not smoke nor drink
coffee, he ordered the carpets to be sprinkled with perfumes, and
asked Khlor the reason for his excursion into the game park. The
Tsarévich answered that by the order of the Khan he was in quest of
the rose without prickles that stings not. Lentyág Murza was amazed
that he could undertake such an arduous attempt at so early an age.
Addressing himself to Khlor: “Older than you,” said he, “are scarce
equal to such a business. Rest a little, don’t proceed farther. I have
many people here who have endeavoured to find out this flower, but
have all got tired and have deserted the pursuit.” One of them that
were present then got up and said: “I myself more than once tried to
find it, but I tired of it, and instead of it I have found my benefactor
Lentyág Murza, who supplies me with meat and drink.”
In the midst of this conversation Lentyág Murza’s head sunk into a
pillow, and he fell asleep. As soon as those that were seated about
the walls of the room heard that Lentyág Murza began to snore, they
got up softly. Some of them went to dress themselves, some to
sleep. Some took to idle conversation, and some to cards and dice.
During these employments some flew into a passion, others were
well pleased, and upon the faces of all were marked the various
situations of their souls. When Lentyág Murza awoke, they again
gathered around them, and a table covered with fruit was brought
into the room. Lentyág Murza remained among his pillows, and from
thence asked the Tsarévich, who very earnestly observed all that
passed, to eat. Khlor was just going to taste what was offered by
Lentyág Murza, when his conductor pulled him gently by the sleeve,
and a bunch of fine grapes which he had laid hold of fell out of his
hand and was scattered upon the pavement. Recollecting himself
immediately he got up, and they left Lentyág Murza.
Not far from this they spied the house of a peasant, surrounded by
several acres of well-cultivated ground, on which were growing
several kinds of corn, as rye, oats, barley, buckwheat, etc. Some of
this corn was ripening, and some only springing up. A little farther
they saw a meadow on which horses, cows and sheep were grazing.
They found the landlord with a watering-pan in his hand, with which
he was watering the cucumbers and cabbage set by his wife. The
children were employed in clearing away the useless weeds from
among the garden stuffs. Razsúdok addressed them: “God be with
you, good people!” They answered: “Thank you, young gentlemen,”
and they made a distant bow to the Tsarévich as to a stranger; but in
a friendly manner they addressed Razsúdok: “Be so kind as to go
into our dwelling: your mother the Sultana loves us, visits us and
does not neglect us.” Razsúdok consented and with Khlor went into
the yard. In the middle of the yard there stood an old and lofty oak,
under which was a broad and clean-scraped bench, with a table
before it. The landlady and her daughter-in-law spread a table-cloth,
and placed on the table a bowl of buttermilk, and another with
poached eggs. They set down also a dish of hot pancakes, soft-
boiled eggs, and in the middle a good bacon ham. They brought
brown bread, and set down to everyone a can of sweet milk, and by
way of dessert presented fresh cucumbers and cranberries with
honey.
The landlord pressed them to eat. The travellers, who were
hungry, found everything excellent, and during supper talked with the
landlord and landlady, who told them how healthily, happily and
quietly they lived, and in all abundance suitable to their condition,
passing their time in country work, and overcoming every want and
difficulty by industry. After supper they spread on the same bench
mats, and Razsúdok and Khlor put their cloaks on the mats. The
landlady gave to each a pillow with a clean pillow-slip; so they lay
down, and being tired they soon fell asleep.
In the morning they got up at daybreak, and having thanked their
landlord, who would have nothing for their lodging, they pursued
their journey. Having got about half a mile, they heard the sound of
the bagpipe. Khlor wanted to go nearer, but Razsúdok hinted that the
bagpipe would lead them out of their way. Curiosity got the better of
Khlor, and he went up to the bagpipe, but when he saw the mad
pranks of disfigured drunkards staggering about the piper, he was
terrified, and threw himself into the arms of Razsúdok, who carried
him back to the road.
Having passed through a grove, they saw a steep hill. Razsúdok
told Khlor that the rose without prickles that stings not grew there.
Khlor, oppressed with the heat of the sun, grew tired. He began to
fret, said there was no end to that road, how far it is, and asked if
they could not find a nearer way. Razsúdok answered that he was
carrying him the nearest way, and that difficulties are only to be
overcome by patience. The Tsarévich in ill-humour cried out,
“Perhaps I shall find the way myself!” waved his hand, doubled his
pace, and separated himself from his guide.
Razsúdok remained behind and followed slowly in silence. The
child entered a market town where there were few who took notice of
him, for it was a market-day, and everybody was engaged in
business in the market-place. The Tsarévich, wandering among carts
and traders, began to cry. One person who did not know him passed
by, and seeing him crying said to him: “Have done crying, you little
whelp; without you we have noise enough here.” At that very
moment Razsúdok had overtaken him. The Tsarévich complained
that they had called him whelp. Razsúdok said not a word, but
conducted him out of the crowd. When Khlor asked him why he did
not talk with him as formerly, Razsúdok answered: “You did not ask
my advice, but went to an improper place, and so don’t be offended
if you did not find the people to your mind.” Razsúdok wished to
prolong his speech when they met a man, not overyoung, but of an
agreeable appearance, surrounded with a great many boys. As Khlor
was curious to know everything, he called one of the boys, and
asked who the man was. “This man is our master,” said the boy; “we
have got our lesson and are going to take a walk,—but pray where
are you going?” The Tsarévich told him that they were seeking the
rose without prickles that stings not. “I have heard,” said the boy,
“from our master an explanation of the rose without prickles that
stings not. This flower signifies nothing more than virtue. Some
people think to find it by going byways, but nobody can get it unless
he follows the straight road; and happy is he that by an honest
firmness can overcome all the difficulties of that road. You see before
you that hill on which grows the rose without prickles that stings not;
but the road is steep and full of rocks.” Having said this, he took his
leave and went after his master.
Khlor and his guide went straight to the hill, and found a narrow
and rocky track on which they walked with difficulty. They there met
an old man and woman in white, both of a respectable appearance,
who stretched out their staffs to them and said: “Support yourselves
on our staffs and you will not stumble.” The people thereabouts told
them that the name of the first was Honesty, and of the other Truth.
Having got to the foot of the hill, leaning on the staffs, they were
obliged to scramble from the track by the branches, and so from
branch to branch they got at length to the top of the hill, where they
found the rose without prickles that stings not. He made haste to the
Khan with the flower, and the Khan dismissed him to the Tsar. The
Tsar was so well pleased with the arrival of the Tsarévich and his
success that he forgot all his anxiety and grief. The Tsar, the Tsarítsa
and all the people became daily more fond of the Tsarévich, because
he daily advanced in virtue. Here the tale ends, and who knows
better, let him tell another.

FOOTNOTES:

[136] A sort of tents made of mats; also a kind of covered

waggon used for travelling in Russia.
[137] An elder.
[138] From a word meaning choleric.
[139] From a word meaning indolent.
 Prince Mikháylo Mikháylovich Shcherbátov.
(1733-1790.)
Prince Shcherbátov derived his origin from St. Vladímir, and
united in his person a love of the ancient order of things and
the prerogatives of the nobility with a refined liberalism, the
result of an education according to Western ideas. In the
sixties, Catherine II. entrusted Prince Shcherbátov with the
arrangement of the archives of Peter the Great, and the result
of his labours in this direction was the publication of a number
of chronicles and documents referring to various periods of
Russian history. Then he wrote a History of Russia from the
most ancient times to the election of Mikhaíl Fedórovich, in
seven volumes. Though not distinguished for elegance of
style, it deserves especial mention as the first native history in
which not only native sources were thoroughly ransacked, but
the facts were properly co-ordinated in a philosophical
system. His sympathies for the old régime led him to
emphasise the dark side of the period following the reform of
Peter the Great, and he elaborated his theory in a work On
the Corruption of Manners in Russia, which was so bold in
laying bare the immorality of the Court at his time that he did
not dare to publish it. It first saw the light in London in 1858,
where it was issued by Herzen. In another work, Journey to
the Land of Ophir, by Mr. S., a Swedish Nobleman, he
developed his ideas of what a monarchy ought to be, in the
manner of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia. This work was first
published a few years ago.

ON THE CORRUPTION OF MANNERS IN RUSSIA

Ancient families were no longer respected, but “chins” and deserts

and long service. Everybody was anxious to get some “chin,” and as
it is not given to everybody to distinguish himself through some
meritorious act, many tried through flattery and subserviency to the
Emperor and the dignitaries to gain that which merit gave to others.
By the regulations of the military service, which Peter the Great had
newly introduced, the peasants began with their masters at the same
stage as soldiers of the rank and file: it was not uncommon for the
peasants, by the law of seniority, to reach the grade of officer long
before their masters, whom, as their inferiors, they frequently beat
with sticks. Noble families were so scattered in the service that often
one did not come again in contact with his relatives during his whole
lifetime.
How could there remain any manliness and firmness in those who
in their youth trembled before the rod of their superiors; who could
not obtain any honours except by servility; and who, being left
without the active support of their relatives, without union and
protection, were left alone, at any time liable to fall into the hands of
the mighty?
I must praise Peter the Great for his attempts to eradicate
superstition in the observances of the divine Law, for indeed
superstition is not a worship of God and the Law, but rather a
desecration; to ascribe to God improper acts is nothing but
blasphemy.
In Russia they regarded the beard as a physical attribute of God,
for which reason they thought it a sin to shave it off, thus falling into
the heresy of anthropomorphism. They proclaimed everywhere
miracles, needlessly performed, and holy images, whose properties
were rarely attested; they encouraged superstitious worship, and
increased the revenues of corrupt servants of the Lord. All that Peter
the Great endeavoured to abolish: he promulgated ukases for the
shaving off of beards, and by means of the Spiritual Reglement put a
stop to false miracles and visions, as well as improper gatherings
near the holy images on the crossroads. Being convinced that the
divine Law demands the preservation of the human race, and not its
uncalled-for destruction, he by a decision of the Synod and all the
Patriarchs granted a dispensation to eat meat during the fast, in case
of necessity, particularly in the service on the seas, where people are
subject to scurvy; he ordered that those who, by such abstinence, of
their own free will sacrificed their lives and became subject to
diseases resulting therefrom, should be cast into the water. All that is
very good, only the latter thing is a little too severe.
But when did he enact that? When the people were not yet
enlightened, and by thus abating the superstition of the
unenlightened, he at the same time deprived them of their faith in the
divine Law. This act of Peter the Great is to be likened to the act of
the unskilled gardener who lops the watery branches of a weak tree,
that absorb its sap. If the tree were well rooted, this lopping would
cause it to bring forth good and fruitful branches; but, being weak
and sickly, the cutting off of the branches that imbibed the external
moisture through its leaves and fed the weak tree causes no healthy
and abundant growth of new branches, nor does the wound heal up,
but there are formed cavities that threaten the destruction of the tree.
Similarly the lopping off of the superstitions has been injurious to the
fundamental parts of faith itself: superstition has decreased, but so
has also faith; there has disappeared the slavish terror of hell, but
also the love of God and His divine Law; and the manners that were
formerly corrected by faith have lost this corrective and, lacking any
other enlightenment, soon began to be corrupted.
With all the reverence that I have in my heart for this great
monarch and great man, with all my conviction that the weal of the
Empire demanded that he should have other legitimate children than
Alexis Petróvich as heirs of his throne,—I cannot but censure his
divorce from his first wife, née Lopúkhin, and his second marriage to
the captive Catherine Aleksyéevna, after his first wife had been sent
to a monastery. This example of the debasement of the sacred
mystery of marriage has shown that these bonds may be broken
without fear of punishment. Granted that the monarch had sufficient
cause for his action, though I do no see it, except her leaning for the
Monses, and opposition to his new regulations; but what reasons of
State led his imitators to do likewise? Did Paul Ivánovich Eguzínski,
who sent his first wife into a monastery and married another, née
Galóvkin, have any reasons of State for getting heirs by breaking the
divine Laws? Not only many high dignitaries, but those of lower
ranks, like Prince Borís Sóntsev-Zasyékin, have also imitated him.
 Although Russia, through the labours and care of this Emperor,
has become known to Europe and has now weight in affairs, and her
armies are properly organised, and her fleets have covered the
White and Baltic seas, so that she has been able to conquer her old
enemies and former victors, the Poles and Swedes, and has gained
fine districts and good harbours; although the sciences, arts and
industries began to flourish in Russia, and commerce to enrich her,
and the Russians were transformed from bearded men into clean-
shaven ones, and exchanged their long cloaks for short coats, and
became more sociable and accustomed to refinement; yet at the
same time the true attachment to the faith began to disappear, the
mysteries fell into disrepute, firmness was weakened and gave way
to impudent, insinuating flattery; luxury and voluptuousness laid the
foundation for their domination, and with it selfishness began to
penetrate the high judicial places, to the destruction of the laws and
the detriment of the citizens. Such is the condition of morals in which
Russia was left after the death of the great Emperor, in spite of all his
attempts, in his own person and through his example, to ward off the
encroachment of vice.
Now let us see what progress vice has made during the reign of
Catherine I. and Peter II., and how it has established itself in Russia.
The feminine sex is generally more prone to luxury than the male,
and so we see the Empress Catherine I. having her own court even
during the life of her husband, Peter the Great. Her chamberlain was
Mons, whose unbounded luxury was his first quality that brought him
to a shameful death; her pages were Peter and Jacob Fedórovich
Balkóv, his nephews, who during his misfortune were driven from the
Court. She was exceedingly fond of ornaments, and carried her
vanity to such an excess that other women were not permitted to
wear similar ornaments, as, for example, to wear diamonds on both
sides of the head, but only on the left side; no one was allowed to
wear ermine furs with the tails, which she wore, and this custom,
which was confirmed by no ukase or statute, became almost a law;
this adornment was appropriated to the Imperial family, though in
Germany it is also worn by the wives of burghers. Does not this
vanity seem to indicate that when her age began to impair her
beauty, she was trying to enhance it by distinctive adornments? I do
not know whether this opinion was just, and whether it was proper
for the Emperor to appear every hour of the day before his subjects
in a masquerade dress, as if he lacked other distinguishing
adornments.
 Vasíli Petróvich Petróv. (1736-1799.)
Petróv was the son of a poor clergyman. He studied in the
Theological Academy at Moscow, where he was made a
teacher in 1760. Through Potémkin, his friend, he was
presented to the Empress, who, in 1768, appointed him her
private translator and reader. In 1772 he was sent to England,
where he soon acquired the language. In London he
translated Milton’s Paradise Lost and made a careful study of
Addison, especially of his Cato. Petróv wrote a large number
of adulatory odes, now long forgotten; he showed more talent
in his satires, which he wrote in England, and in which the
influence of the English writers whom he studied may be
perceived. The following ode, probably his best, is from Sir
John Bowring’s Specimens of the Russian Poets, Part II.

ON THE VICTORY OF THE RUSSIAN OVER THE TURKISH

FLEET[140]

O triumph! O delight! O time so rich in fame

Unclouded, bright and pure as the sun’s midday flame!
Ruthenia’s strength goes forth—see from the sea emerge
The Typhons of the north!—The lightning, in its might,
Flashes in dazzling light,—
And subject is the surge.

They wander o’er the waves,—their eye impatiently

Seeks where the Moslem’s flag flaunts proudly o’er the sea:—
“’Tis there! ’Tis there!” exclaim the brave, impatient crowd,—
The sails unfurled,—each soul with rage and courage burns,—
Each to the combat turns:
They meet,—it thunders loud!
I see from Ætna’s rocks a floating army throng:
A hero,[141] yet unsung, wafts the proud choir along,—
The masts, a fir-tree wood,—the sails, like outspread wings.
List to the shoutings! See the flash! They thunder near.
Earthquakes and night are there,—
With storm the welkin rings.

There January speeds,—there Svyatosláv moves on,

And waves and smoke alike are in the tempest thrown;
And there the ship that bears the three-times hallowed[142] name,
And Rostisláv and Europe, there triumphant ride;
While the agitated tide
Is startled with the flame.

Evstáf, in fire concealed, scatters the deathlike brand,

And earth and heaven are moved, and tremble sea and land;
And there, a mountain pile, sends round the deeds of death,
As if Vesuvius’ self in combat were engaged,—
While other mountains raged,
And poured their flaming breath.

The roar, the whiz, the hum, in one commingling sound,

The clouds of smoke that rise, and spread and roll around;
The waves attack the sky in wild and frenzied dance;
The sails are white as snow; and now the sun looks on,
Now shrouds him on his throne,
And the swift lightnings glance.

Hard proof of valour this,—the spirit’s fiery test:

Fierce combat, grown more fierce,—bear high the burning breast!
See on the waves there ride two mountains, fiery-bound,
Ætna and Hecla, loose on ocean’s heaving bed,—
The burning torches spread,
And ruin stalks around.
Ocean, and shore, and air, rush backward at the sight,
The Greek and Turk stand still, and groan in wild affright;
Calm as a rock the Russ is welcoming death with death;
But ah! destruction now blazes its fiery links,
And even victory sinks
Its heavy weight beneath.

O frightful tragedy! A furnace is the sea,—

The triumph ours,—the flames have reached the enemy:
He burns, he dies in smoke, beneath the struggle rude
The Northern heroes sink, with weariness oppressed,
And ask a moment’s rest,
As if they were subdued.

And whence that threatening cloud that hangs upon their head?
That threatens now to burst? What? Is their leader dead?
And is he borne away, who all our bosoms warmed?
He fell,—there lies his sword,—there lie his shield and helm.
What sorrows overwhelm
The conqueror disarmed!

Oh, no! He wakes again from night,—he waves his hand,

Beckoning to the brave ranks that mourning round him stand:
“My brother!” cried he—“Heaven! And is my brother gone?
Their sails unfurl! My friends, oh, see! oh, see! They fly,—
On,—‘Death or vengeance!’ cry,
On, on to Stamboul’s throne!”

He fled. O hero! Peace! There is no cause for grief,—

He lives,—thy brother lives, and Spiridóv, his chief!
No dolphin saved them there,—it was the Almighty God,
The God who sees thy deed, thy valour who approves,
And tries the men He loves
With His afflictive rod.
The dreadful dream is passed,—passed like a mist away,
And dawns, serene and bright, a cloudless victory day:
The trump of shadeless joy,—the trump of triumph speaks;
The hero and his friend are met, and fled their fears;
They kiss each other’s cheeks,
They water them with tears.

They cried, “And is our fame, and is our glory stained?

God is our shield,—revenge and victory shall be gained!
We live,—and Mahmud’s might a hundred times shall fall;
We live,—the astonished world our hero-deeds shall see,
And every victory
A burning fleet recall.”

Whence this unusual glare o’er midnight’s ocean spread?

At what unwonted hour has Phœbus left his bed?
No, they are Russian crowds who struggle with the foe,
’Tis their accordant torch that flashes through the night.
Sequana, see the might
Of Stamboul sink below!

The harbour teems with life, an amphitheatre

Of sulphurous pitch and smoke, and awful noises there.
The fiends of hell are loose, the sea has oped its caves,
Fate rides upon the deep, and laughs amidst the fray,
Which feeds with human prey
The monsters of the waves.

See, like a furnace boils and steams the burning flood,

’Tis filled with mortal flesh, ’tis red with mortal blood;
Devoured by raging flames, drunk by the thirsty wave,
The clouds seem palpable,—a thick and solid mass,—
They sink like stone or brass
Into their water-grave.
Thou ruler of the tomb! Dread hour of suffering,
When all the elements,—drop, Muse, thy feeble wing!—
Hell, with its fiends, and all the fiends that man e’er drew
There mingled,—Silence, veil that awful memory o’er!
I see the hero pour
The tears of pity too!

O Peter! Great in song, as great in glory once,

Look from thy throne sublime upon thy Russia’s sons!
See, how thy fleets have won the palm of victory,
And hear the triumph sound, even to the gate of heaven,—
The Turkish strength is riven
Even in the Turkish sea.

Thee Copenhagen saw, the Neptune of the Belt;

Now Chesma’s humbled sons before thy flag have knelt.
The helpless Greeks have fled,—thy banner sees their shore,
Trembling they look around, while thy dread thunder swells,
And shakes the Dardanelles,
And Smyrna hears its roar.

Ye Frenchmen![143] Fear ye not the now advancing flame,

Recording, as it flies, your own, your country’s shame?
In the dark days of old, your valiant fathers trod
In the brave steps of Rome, towards lands of Southern glow;
Ye fight with Russians now,
Beneath the Moslems’ rod.

Where innocence is found, there, there protection wakes;

Where Catherine’s voice is heard,—there truth, there justice speaks:
A ruler’s virtues are the strength and pride of states,
And surely ours shall bloom where Catherine’s virtues stand.
O enviable land!
Glory is at our gates.
Soar, eagle, soar again, spring upward to the flight!
For yet the Turkish flag is flaunting in the light:
In Chesma’s port it still erects its insolent head,
And thou must pour again thy foes’ blood o’er the sea,
And crush their treachery,
And wide destruction spread!

But fame now summons thee from death to life again,

The people’s comfort now, their glory to maintain;
The hero’s palm is won.—Now turn thee and enhance
The hero’s triumphs with the patriot’s milder fame.
O Romans! Without shame
On Duil’s spoils we glance.

We’ll consecrate to thee a towering marble dome!

From yonder Southern sea, oh, bring thy trophies home,
Bring Scio’s trophies home,—those trophies still shall be
Thy glory, Orlóv! Thine the records of thy deeds,
When future valour reads
Astrea’s victory!

Oh, could my wakened Muse a worthy offering bring!

Oh, could my grateful lyre a song of glory sing!
Oh, could I steal from thee the high and towering thought,
With thy proud name the world, the listening world I’d fill!
And Camoens’ harp be still,
And Gama be forgot!

Thine was a nobler far than Jason’s enterprise,

Whose name shines like a star in history’s glorious skies:
He bore in triumph home the rich, the golden fleece;
But with thy valour thou, and with thy conquering band,
Hast saved thy fatherland,
And given to Hellas peace.
But oh! My tongue is weak to celebrate thy glory,
Thy valiant deeds shall live in everlasting story,
For public gratitude thy name will e’er enshrine,—
Who loves his country, who his Empress loves, will throw
His garland on thy brow,
And watch that fame of thine.

But when thou humbledst low the Moslem’s pride and scorn,
And bad’st her crescent sink, her vain and feeble horn,
And pass’dst the Belt again, with songs and hymns of joy,
Who that perceived thy flag, in all its mightiness,—
What Russian could repress
The tears that dimmed his eye?

I see the people rush to welcome thee again,

Thy ships, with trophies deep, upon the swelling main;
I see the maidens haste, the aged and the young;
The children wave their hands, and to their father turn,
And thousand questions burn
On their inquiring tongue.

“Is this the eagle proud of whom we have been told,

Who led against the Turks the Russian heroes bold,
And with their warriors’ blood the azure ocean dyed?
Is this our Orlóv,—this with eagle’s heart and name,
His foe’s reproach and shame,
And Russia’s strength and pride?”

Oh, yes! Oh, yes, ’tis he! The eagle there appears,
And ocean bears him on, as proud of him she bears:
And see his brother too, who led to victory, there—
And Spirídov, whose praise all ages shall renew,
And Greyg and Ilín too,—
The heroes, without fear.
But wherefore do I rest,—what fancies led me on?
The glorious eagle now to Asia’s coast is flown,
O’er streams, and hills, and vales, he takes his course sublime,
My eye in vain pursues his all-subduing flight.
O vision of delight!
O victory-girded time!

And heaven, and earth, and sea have seen our victories won,
And echo with the deeds that Catherine has done;
The Baltic coasts in vain oppose the march of Paul,
Not the vast North alone, but all th’ Ægean Sea
Shall own his sovereignty,
And the whole earthly ball!

FOOTNOTES:

[140] At Chesma, where, on July 26, 1770, the Turkish fleet

was destroyed.
[141] Count Orlóv, commander of the fleet.
[142] Ship named The Three Saints.
[143] An agent of the French Government had fortified the
Dardanelles.
 Mikhaíl Matvyéevich Kheráskov. (1733-1807.)
The son of a Wallachian emigrant, Kheráskov served in
succession in the army, the Kommerz-Kolleg (Ministry of
Finances) and the Moscow University, where he was first
Director and later Curator. He began to write early, and for
half a century produced a very large number of poems in
every imaginable field of the pseudo-classic school. They now
appall us with their inane voluminousness, but in his day he
was regarded as a great poet, a veritable Russian Homer. His
best heroic epics are his Rossiad and Vladímir Regenerated.
The first, containing some ten thousand verses, celebrates
the conquest of Kazán by Iván the Terrible; the second, of
even more imposing length, tells of the introduction of
Christianity into Russia. Though containing some fine
passages, these epics reveal too much the influence of Vergil
and Tasso, and make rather dreary reading.

FROM THE “ROSSIAD”

I sing Russia delivered from the barbarians, the trampled power of

the Tartars, and their pride subdued, the stir of ancient mights, their
labours, bloody strife, Russia’s victory, Kazán destroyed! How from
the circle of those times, the beginning of peaceful years, a bright
dawn has shone forth in Russia!
Oh, thou gleamest above the radiant stars, spirit of poetry! Come
from thy heights, and shed over my weak and dim creation thy light,
thy art and illumination! Open, O eternity, to me the gates of those
habitations where all earthly care is cast away, where the souls of
the righteous receive their rewards, where fame and crowns are
deemed a vanity, where before the star-sprinkled altar the lowest
slave stands in a row with a king, where the poor man forgets his
misery, the unfortunate his grief, where every man will be equal to
every other. Eternity, reveal thyself to me, that with my lyre I may
attract the attention of the nations and their kings!