The compromised, colonized discourse of alternative food

This article examines how and to what extent the alternative food movement (Ant), in its various incarnations, has effectively disrupted a food discourse space dominated and ordered by the global-industrial food system. The movement has achieved many particular victories school gardens here, healthier canteen lunches there; shorter food supply chains here, local-product labeling there; organic cultivation practices here, and at least a little composting there and some people view the collection of these victories as the beginning of a larger, more general one, They will give testimony to how the food movement might have "succeeded." This article, instead, is about how it has not. Though the AFM gathers very many members of diverse provenance and priority and earns widespread attention as an object of scholarship (see Ashe, 2013 for a review), I submit that it is profaned precisely by its alterity. The AFM'S celebrated achievements are bounded by and within an epistemology of blindness (Santos, 2009, 2014), and, blind to its philosophical intoxication, the movement's successes only reinforce that which they move against. What I denounce here is not the entire alternative food movement story, to be sure, and the empirical base from which I draw its example, New York City's institutionally ruddered "alterity," is a pointer to that story's substance rather than a total capture of it. Still, New York's example and all that I denounce along with it comprise a major part of the AIM, a powerful part that emerges from within the epistemic centers of the world-system (Waller stein, 2011) and is privileged or burdened with all the cognitive, political, social, and economic prerogative that this entails, Futility and failure, however, are not stories readily told or sold, and these are parts of the alternative food movement's reality too little pronounced. In this paper, I protium ice them: the alternative food it:Lovell:Lent, or at least those parts of it bound to the epistemic promises of the modern world-system's centers, is a Trojan horse.