Sustainable Food: Growing Carrots and Community

Abstract

It could be said that local organic food is flavour of the month. In recent years there has been a growing interest in the phenomenon of ‘alternative agro-food networks’, and locally-sourced organically-produced food has been proposed as a model of sustainable consumption. The claimed benefits include rural regeneration, livelihood security, cutting food miles and carbon dioxide emissions from transport, social embedding, community-building, and increasing connection to the land. Consequently, the recent revival of localised food supply chains and the rise in demand for specifically local organic produce has been described as a move towards a more sustainable food and farming system in the UK, and has driven the explosion of a grassroots movement of niche direct marketing outlets (farmers markets, farm shops, and veggie box subscription schemes) where consumers buy directly from growers. Are these consumers actively engaged in creating new food supply chains based upon alternative values to the mainstream? Are they constituting more sustainable systems of food provision, and if so, what is the potential for these niche initiatives to influence the wider regime of mainstream supermarket-dominated food supply chains? Are consumers expressing ecological citizenship, and is this the source of their motivation to consume more sustainably?

Changing food purchase habits can dramatically alter the climate change impacts of our lifestyle. In its implications, it is comparable with the decision to abandon air travel (Goodall, 2007: 230).