A plethora of new forms of food chains have emerged in recent decades. They include initiatives such as farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture, solidarity purchase groups, pick-up-your-product, and the like. They tend to present themselves as being different from—and often explicitly in opposition to—the “conventional” organization of the food chain. They have attracted considerable interest both in the social arena and in the academic world, where they are usually known under the heading of “Alternative Food Networks” (AFNs). On one hand, they are part of an emerging trend of consumption patterns that distance themselves from mass products and seek variety, naturalness, freshness, and authenticity in what has been called the “quality turn”. On the other hand, some of them lie in a social and political stream that regards mass production with suspicion and is opposed to the existing agro-food system. Several social and political issues are connected with AFNs’ existence and functioning. The most important are what could be termed the “food culture” and the environmental implications of food production and distribution. The conventional food system is faulted for its anonymity, the fungibility of food, and the lack of connection with the local area and producers, so that nothing is known about how and by whom food is produced. This, as the argument goes, has destroyed the age-old links between people and the food they eat that have arisen as a result of the coevolution between natural local resources, cooking technology, and evolving taste, thus creating a local culture of food. The conventional food system, as its critics claim, has provided cheap food at the expense of the environment, encouraging the intensification of large-scale agricultural production, the lavish use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the growth of huge factory farms, and global logistic chains for transporting food over long distances. Hence the emphasis on local food, seen as a way of reducing the environmental impact of long-distance transport (the “food miles” argument) and as a source of renewed cultural links that can restore meaning to food. Some authors and organizations also view AFNs as a way of supporting small farmers.

The so-called food studies have been attempting to single out AFNs’ “alternativeness” with regard to sustainability, quality, and accessibility. Several definitions of AFNs have been proposed, with both descriptive and normative aims. In the last few years, a growing body of literature has underscored the need to overcome the “alternative-conventional” dichotomy, focusing instead on the multiple, overlapping worlds of food. As has been argued with regard to the topic of quality and food as “moral order”, both demand and supply very rarely engage with single worlds of quality. Symbolic categories, social practices, and organizational forms are constantly blurred. However, the argument continues, this literature has rarely considered these aspects from an empirical viewpoint. We build on these studies, with a specific focus on whole food chains (demand-supply) and with a research design that considers both conventional and alternative food networks. Furthermore, we focus on a key regional context, Piedmont in northwestern Italy, which has played a leading role in the development of AFNs. Piedmont is the region where the Slow Food movement was born and also where the high-end food retailer Eataly opened its first store. It is a region where peasant agriculture in mountain and hill areas lives side by side with intensive agriculture in the flat land. Piedmont is, along with Tuscany, a key region for wine production and exports. But it is also a region where small and organic vineyards flourish. Piedmont is thus a critical case study, namely a context where AFNs have grown apace in recent years and where—for this reason—we can expect to find a sharper difference between the “worlds of food”, “conventional” vs “alternative” chains. Piedmont is thus a strategic site for empirically testing whether, conversely, alternative and conventional food networks overlap. With regard to “food studies”, we share their interdisciplinary perspective but differ from them in believing that the analysis of AFNs should not be separated from the major analytical concerns of the specific disciplines. AFNs are key to shedding light on general research topics, such as the interplay between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, the sociology of markets, the urban-rural divide, environmental challenges, economic viability, and many more.

This perspective has several implications. From the analytical standpoint, unlike most of the literature, we consider the entire chain, from the producers to the end consumers. This is crucial in our view, since a chain obviously results from an interplay between different operators, connecting producers and consumers but also organizing this connection. Only by looking at the chain in its entirety and trying to analyse the different operators’ behaviour and their interplay can an overall vision of how the chain functions be gained.

Second, we compare certain aspects of both alternative and conventional food chains, explicitly exploring their overlapping borders and working mechanisms. This is also important in our view, in particular with an eye to assessing the likely future prospects for AFNs. Whether the conventional chain will be able to imitate its alternative counterparts and provide consumers with desired food attributes that until now have been provided only by AFNs and which attributes will, by contrast, continue to be peculiar to AFNs are questions that can be only answered by an explicit consideration of how conventional chains operate and in particular of the concepts of quality they use in order to respond to consumers’ new demands and the ways they can imitate AFNs in this respect.

Third, we adopt an interdisciplinary perspective that considers economical, sociological, geographical, anthropological, and environmental dimensions. Although there has been some interchange and overlap among different disciplines in the literature on AFNs, most studies have followed specific disciplinary approaches. We have attempted to make a more direct and explicit comparison between different disciplinary approaches and thus achieve a more comprehensive view of these chains that, by their very nature, have economic, social, geographical, and environmental implications. Economic, because even with all their possible alternative meanings, AFNs are nevertheless a form of organization that performs the economic function of delivering food from producers to consumers; social, because these transactions are deeply rooted in social relationships; geographical, because AFNs are connected with the spatial and cultural distance between producers and consumers; and environmental, because the modalities of delivering food have different environmental impacts and because consumers’ and producers’ beliefs and attitudes towards the environment affect these modalities.

The structure of the book follows these premises. The first Part is dedicated to the theories behind the analysis of AFNs. The discussion concerns the definition of AFNs and the criteria of “alternativeness” that are attributed to them and identifies the quality of the relationship among the participants as the main “alternative” characteristic of AFNs.

The following chapters concern the two sides of the chains, namely consumers and producers. Part II is devoted to an analysis of AFNs from the consumers’ viewpoint. Corsi and Novelli discuss the issue in the light of economic theory and review the literature on consumers’ motivations for participating in AFNs. They then investigate a chain that is not particularly “alternative”—farmers’ stands in urban district markets—and a sample of typically “alternative” chains, namely, Solidarity Purchase Groups (SPGs). Corsi and Novelli gauge how much the personal relationship with farmers counts in consumers’ decision to buy from them directly and how much the participation in the SPG is worth for its members. Barbera, Dagnes, and Di Monaco compare consumers’ concepts of quality in the intrinsic and intangible characteristics of food in alternative, conventional, and high-end food chains, arguing that high-end food retailers mimic AFNs in order to fulfil consumers’ desire for “alternative” quality conventions. Tecco and Peano analyse the different mechanisms for gathering information about the environmental impact of products and how they can affect consumers’ behaviour in purchasing fruit and vegetables. Orlando investigates the behaviour of a specific AFN born as a reaction to the economic crisis, especially from the point of view of consumers, concentrating on its strength and the problems it faces in conciliating political stances with the differing constraints and preferences of consumers and producers.

Part III deals with producers in AFNs. Corsi, Novelli, and Pettenati first analyse the characteristics and geographical distribution of farmers engaged in direct sales, whether on-farm or off-farm, and the determinants of their participation in these chains based on observable characteristics, highlighting the diversity of determinants, the technical constraints on engaging in direct sales, and the clustering of farms in specific areas. They then survey the subjective motivations for participation reported by a focus group of producers, who also discuss the consequences that participating in AFNs have brought about in their farms’ setting and operation. Novelli and Corsi identify the voluntary work of members as the main basis for SPGs’ economic viability and sustainability and thus also assess the strength of members’ commitment to their SPGs. Barbera, Dagnes, and Di Monaco deal with the problem of prices and quality convention setting among small-scale producers attending a large district market, showing how producers determine their products’ sales price and how different mechanisms and relationships with customers and among vendors bring about specific conflicts and compromises within and between quality conve...