| dc.description.abstract | The alternative food movement has grown in scope and influence in recent decades. However, its legitimacy and efficacy as a social movement has been critiqued because it lacks a cohesive agenda. Taking one widely agreed upon goal of the movement, to (re)localize food systems, as a starting point, this thesis examines alignments, divergences, and tensions amongst people working to achieve that goal in New York’s Hudson Valley region. As an engaged anthropologist active in this movement, I attend to how food system activism articulates with race, class, and sexuality. Placing the ideals of (re)localizing food systems in a specific historic, geographic, and sociopolitical landscape grounds my analysis and brings debates about (re)localizing food systems into conversation with settler colonial theory. My methodology prioritizes the production of situated knowledges and so adds nuance to existing anthropological research on alternative food systems. Through ethnographic research with chefs, cider makers, laborers, philanthropy professionals, farmers, and seed keepers, I document differing values evidenced by varied praxes of future making. Engaging Bloch’s theories of educated hope and concrete utopias, my analysis of these praxes demonstrates how orientations to the past and the future shape food system advocacy, and I propose two broad categories of future making: determinate and indeterminate. Ultimately, I endorse indeterminate future making, with all of its false starts and idiosyncrasies, as more capable of generating the transformative changes necessary to address the complex and intersecting existential crises of this era. Rejecting the call for a unified agenda, I argue that the proliferation and contestation of utopian food thinking and food projects strengthen the alternative food movement. | en_GB |
