Beyond Alternative Food Networks

Italy's Solidarity Purchase Groups

Cristina Grasseni

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780857852281
• eBook ISBN: 9780857852298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica pubblica a livello agricolo

Food activism is core to the contemporary study of food - there are numerous foodscapes which exist within the umbrella definition of food activism from farmer's markets, organic food movements to Fair Trade. This highly original book focuses on one key emerging foodscape dominating the Italian alternative food network (AFN) scene: GAS (gruppi di acquisto solidale or solidarity-based purchase groups) and explores the innovative social dynamics underlying these networks and the reasons behind their success. Based on a detailed 'insider' ethnography, this study interprets the principles behind these movements and key themes such as collective buying, relationships with local producers and consumers, financial management, to the everyday political and practical negotiation involving GAS groups. Vitally, the author demonstrates how GAS processes are key to providing survival strategies for small farms, local food chains and sustainable agriculture as a whole.
Beyond Alternative Food Networks offers a fresh and engaged approach to this area, demonstrating the capacity for individuals to join organised forms of alternative political ecologies and impact upon their local food systems and practices. These social groups help to create new economic circuits that help promote sustainability, both for the environment and labor practices. Beyond Alternative Food Networks provides original insight and in-depth analysis of the alternative food network now thriving in Italy, and highlights ways such networks become embedded in active citizenship practices, cooperative relationships, and social networks.

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Alternative Provisioning Networks

BACK TO BASICS?

In 2007 I moved back to my childhood neighborhood. It was a very different neighborhood than the one I grew up in, as I could see it now from the point of view of a mother of two. The area had gentrified in one sense, desertified in another. The number of food shops had halved—there were seven bars but only two grocery shops within walking distance, one of which was often closed and not very freshly supplied, as the elderly lady who owned it only worked an erratic part-time schedule. The other one was selling potatoes and cherries at boutique prices and was definitely well beyond my purse-power. A few steps further away was a fresh meat shop that soon closed down. For meat, we were left with the not-so-fresh supplies of a Spar chain, which served the ageing housing estate surrounding it at monopoly prices. It was a different life from the popular neighborhood of Loreto where I had lived the previous five years. There, I could go on a swift walk in between breast-feedings and forage Sicilian bread, iron-rich horse meat, fresh groceries, and feel-good patisseries for prices higher than those of the supermarket but still affordable. My second child grew fast, and we soon were ready to send him to nursery school in the new neighborhood.

It was one of the nursery school teachers, Claudia (a pseudonym), who invited me to join a GAS. It was the end of 2008. She simply said, “I am going to join the GAS group of the Time Bank.¹ We are meeting tomorrow night at the public library. Will you come?” I did. I knew my way to the unpretentious neighborhood public library, basically a place to go and read newspapers for free and entertain the kids on dated books and linoleum floors. Sitting around the spartan table in school chairs, I was greeted with no specific welcoming ritual by Gisela, the group coordinator, and briskly introduced as a friend of Claudia. I think I may have presented myself as a resident of the neighborhood, and working at Bergamo University, but there was no particular round of self-introductions. There were about twenty people present, mostly middle-age women, two (including Gisela) with their husbands. The meeting was matter of fact. Gisela had a list of issues to go through: firstly they discussed their likes or dislikes of particular products currently under trial, particularly olive oil from Lake Garda. Then the yearly schedule for circulating orders was reshuffled—I realized I had just missed a number of once-per-semester rounds (especially rice, cleaning materials, and canned food), which had happened late in the fall. Then, a couple of people explained their problems with being a product referent for one rather than the other thing: transporting rice was a problem for the current referent, who had a small car. The Parmesan producer was a long way away, and its referent had to organize a one-day car trip on purpose to go and collect orders. Arrangements were made to include the travel expenses in the rice and Parmesan price that group members would pay for their share. I wasn’t particularly told what to do. I was simply reassured that after a few meetings everything would be clearer, that I did not have to take on any responsibility for now, and that I would receive invitations to join the collective orders by e-mail. I gave my e-mail address to Gisela, did not sign anything, was not even sure of everyone’s name by the end of the evening, and left with Claudia when the meeting came to a close after a couple of hours. She, too, was a bit disoriented. “Don’t worry, it will all fall into place in due course,” she reassured me.

In time, I got to know that in other GAS groups of the Bergamo area the protocol for acceptance was stricter and more elaborate and that this had become a source of conflict specifically between my own group and a longer-established group, as a result of which the two groups decided to go each its own way. In the other group, new members were admitted only after six months of apprenticeship or coaching (accompagnamento), during which they were assigned to a supervising senior member of the group. This did not happen to me. This late realization gave me the sense of how deeply varying gasista experience must be, even at a short distance within different groups and even more so among different regions, where GAS etiquette draws on distinctive associative cultures and experiences. I acquired the sense of our anarchic difference by picking up cursory and half-chuckling references during meetings, such as, “imagine what the others would say if they knew that we buy this product through a cooperative!” The joyful anarchy was also spelled out by the freedom of each to invest what one could in the group—both in terms of time and in terms of money spent. For example, the GAS I had joined was formally the solidarity purchase group of Bergamo’s Time Banks, but GAS activity was carried out separately from the Time Bank.² I, for instance, was an active member of the GAS but not of the Time Bank. I was asked, of course, if I wished to join, but I was too poor in time.

I debated with my husband why, in his opinion, the nursery school teacher would invite me, and not other mothers, to attend the GAS meeting. We concluded that we probably came across as alternative in our own right: we all wore secondhand clothes, did not particularly care for our appearances, did not buy the children designer clothes or electronic games, and not know what was on television; we evidently had a more-than-usual gender-balanced family ménage, with my husband doing his share of child-caring (probably much more than 50%). Nevertheless, I, not my husband, got invited to the meeting. The overwhelmingly female attendance of the GAS meeting reminded me that in my society women are still expected to be the ones in charge of provisioning for the family.

AN ANTHROPOLOGIST LOOKS AT ALTERNATIVE
PROVISIONING NETWORKS

I came to position myself as a researcher of the GAS movement after prolonged research on traditional dairy farmers in northern Italy. My perspective on alternative provisioning networks did not come then from an interest in global justice grassroots activism but from participant observation of the complex processes of standardization in Alpine agriculture (Grasseni 2011a). In my research experience, I often witnessed the heritigization and patrimonialization of natural and cultural resources as part of their rediscovery and reevaluation (Grasseni 2011a, 2012a,b,c).³ This is why I became interested in the limits and potentials of new consumer-driven networks in creating sustainable alternatives for farmers.

Over the last decade, my ethnographic research has mainly focused on community-based approaches to local development vis-à-vis the deskilling and technification of rurality, specifically in the case of dairy farming in the Italian Alps. I focused on tacit knowledge, place-making, and immaterial patrimony (2007, 2009a, 2009b) and raised concerns about the social as well as environmental sustainability of models of development based on the marketing of local foods as heritage (Grasseni 2014). The problems I highlighted were the impact of techno-scientific standardization on local practices and the market pressure to commmodify recipes, festivities, and foodstuffs. This line of research also included a critical assessment of the local impact of breed improvement programs, agricultural aid, and EU-sponsored consortia for local development such as the various editions of the Leader project and the associated local action groups (Grasseni 2004, 2007). I concluded that a great diversity of skills, local cultures, and networks required case-by-case consideration when trying to adapt local patterns of production to global standards and urban markets.

Over time, my ethnography followed the objects of the momentous transformation that my field was undergoing: namely as regarded cows and cheese, their breeders and cheese-makers. Through participant observation, I developed a research agenda on the reinvention of food. I argued that this included a significant reshaping of the ethics and politics of consumption, which involved both “consumers and producers in new market relations” (Carrier and Luetchford 2012). Reinventing food also meant drawing new boundaries and fueling fights around naming strategies, geographical indication, and niche products (Paxson and West 2012). I was observing traditional mountain farmers in the Alps as they were confronted by more and more stringent “audit cultures” (Strathern 2000): visits by the breeders’ association representatives to update their herd census, perform quality checks on their milk, make assessments regarding loans for bigger sheds, so as to accommodate their bigger, “improved” cows, the introduction of milking parlors, and so on. Moreover, for my friends in the field, positioning oneself successfully within the new “global hierarchy of value” (Herzfeld 2004) required the ability to cast oneself as “modern and progressive peasants,” but also as the witnesses and the “saviors” of authentic mountain traditions. This capacity did not only include a fair amount of social performance but also liaising with local politicians and trade union consultants to apply for European agricultural aid or local development projects. In the case of my fieldwork site, my hosts and friends were increasingly appearing in local, even national, media, casting their public peasant persona into the global heritage scenario while scaling up their business locally. My rural informants were, in a sense, “seeing bifocally” (Peters 1997): I was witnessing the emergence of a new local elite, the prominent testimonials of traditional cheese-making, guests of the Slow Food Salone del Gusto—the biennial food fair in Turin—as well as of the accompanying global peasant happening, Terra Madre, held under the auspices of the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity.

Peasant food is being discovered and gentrified in Italy at a time of significant socioeconomic decline, which is sharply felt both in urban neighborhoods and in postindustrial wastelands. Turin itself, the seat of Slow Food international events, is a city at the foot of the Alps in significant postindustrial transformation, encircled by a peri-urban helter-skelter dissemination of factory warehouses and rural pockets. Many social experiments take shape in the face of the socioeconomic challenges presented by deindustrialization, food desertification, and the pauperization of the urban working classes. I was drawn to alternative food networks as new practices of place-making at the urban/rural interface. I decided to join the circles of the “ethical” consumers to critically analyze what my rural informants interpreted straightforwardly as yet another urban fad—just another way of longing for the rural idyll (cf. Grasseni 2003). To this, some of my mountain friends quite cynically played up their own role of “authentic” peasants. Elsewhere, I tell the story of how I found myself in Turin’s Slow Food Salon in October 2010, left alone selling cheese at a Slow Food Presidium stand, while my farmer friends flocked to an installation featuring themselves next door. Their voices and faces were being video-projected on a screen of fake milk, during a milk-curdling demonstration for children and families, using spotless copper cauldrons while instructions and entertainment reached the audience via headphones (Grasseni forthcoming).

These new “relationships of the market” (Strasser 2003), which urban consumers and marginalized peasants seek to establish—not without ambivalences and misunderstandings on both parts—represent an important aspect of what I am analyzing as a reinvention of food at the foot of the Alps. I increasingly came to see this conjuncture as an opportunity of establishing new economic circuits, within which each party—producers and consumers—could gain while redefining development on its own terms. GAS activism is key to this reinvention. My own reading of Italy’s solidarity purchase groups as alternative provisioning networks comes from this ethnographic viewpoint. My thesis is that a substantial part of the relational, practical, and theoretical work done by GAS activists is that of reinventing food (Grasseni 2011a, 2012b). As David Goodman argues, the provisioning of quality food per se is by and large an elitist social phenomenon: “In short, there is a strong class dimension to the social relations of consumption of the ‘organic’, the ‘local’, the ‘regional’, and the ‘alternative’ ” (2012: 189). This kind of “alternative food economy,” in fact, is indistinguishable from “territorial valorization” as a “market-oriented developmental imaginary” (2012: 194). Nevertheless, in my experience solidarity economy networks such as those of GAS try to imbue critical consumption with a further transformative role, that of constituting collaborative networks with proximal farmers.

The ethnographic narrative that unfolds over the following chapters identifies solidarity purchase groups as an example of solidarity economy and locates significant nodes, layers, and emerging patterns of collaboration across different networks. A key role is played by individuals with more than one associative affiliation, sometimes with a history in political, social, or environmental activism. As an example, one such network, Cittadinanza Sostenibile in Bergamo, was initiated as a study group in December 2007 on the topic of “Shopping for Human Rights,” with the aim of supporting Sicilian entrepreneurs who resist the practice of paying the local mafia rackets as a form of extorted insurance. As I argue in Chapter 5, this project offered a meeting ground for a range of activists who had seldom the opportunity of regularly sharing ideas, readings, and discussions about alternative provisioning and its significance. This forum quickly developed into a network whose first common project was that of mapping the different and nascent experiences of solidarity economy in the Bergamo area. It then developed into a self-standing network of solidarity economy (Rete di Economia Solidale [RES]⁴) whose president, a gasista herself, comes from previous experience in an environmentalist association. Cittadinanza Sostenibile further generated a working group on citizenship markets, which is currently managing gasista farmers’ markets in the Bergamo area.

These networks of networks coalesce around practical agendas and attempt to slowly disenfranchise themselves from consumerism as a taken-for-granted but politically loaded lifestyle (Cohen 2003). This realization will inform most of my ethnography in this book, as my own experience as a gasista revealed much more than individual attempts to buy alternative foods, and in fact moved beyond food. I propose the notion of alternative provisioning networks because it renders the idea that these networks can and wish to impact society through new practices of provisioning and are not just interested in securing quality or niche foodstuffs. Also, provisioning networks cast the provisioners neither as consumers nor as eaters but as people who are collectively engaged in the work, art and business of providing for themselves and their families. In other words, alternative provisioners take good care not only of their food but also of the relational channels that provide it.

LOCATING GAS IN THE LITERATURE AND ON THE GROUND

The relevance of provisioning systems for global sustainability has become more and more apparent in the last couple of decades.⁵ Current global food styles pose a challenge to sustainability and thus set a scene in which various practices of alternative provisioning become globally significant.⁶ Alternative provisioning thus offers examples of social innovation in a context marked by negative financial conjuncture, worldwide ecologic crisis, decreasing soil production, and climate change. From community supported agriculture (CSA) to farmers’ markets or direct-to-customer organic farming formulas, from locally rooted associations such as the French AMAP (associations pour le maintien d’une agriculture paysanne) to globally successful movements such as Slow Food, many alternative foodscapes co-exist (Kneafsey et al. 2008). Sometimes they radically rethink the role of localities in energy provision, such as the Transition Towns of Ireland, United Kingdom, and beyond, while in some cases they impact local economies in important ways, as in the case of some Slow Food presidia (Berlendis 2009, Badii 2012).

In Italy, the Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale are a popular form of social reorganization around the issue of provisioning. Nevertheless, they are only one of a number of projects and initiatives regarding alternative food systems, nationwide and abroad. Another well-known phenomenon that currently stresses the urgent agenda of reinventing provisioning is the capillary associative and commercial enterprise of Slow Food, which originated in Italy. While GAS count probably around 150,000 people, the latter forms an international network of well-informed consumers and professionals (including producers, chefs, food journalists, and restaurant owners).

In France, since 2003, the AMAP have established a contract subscription between farmers and networks of consumers who pay in advance for organic and seasonal crops. While sharing the financial risks, they also participate in the distribution work (Lamine and Perrot 2008). According to its inventor, Daniel Vuillon, during AMAP’s first year of existence in 2003, twenty-five farms provided about four thousand consumers with dairy products, meat, and vegetables in Provence alone. AMAP aim to reeducate local consumers about seasonality and to motivate vocational farming (80% of AMAP producers are allegedly young farmers).⁷ Providing advance payment for crops effectively transforms producers and consumers from anonymous agents who only meet at the market into durable partners, the consumer being both stakeholder and shareowner, involved in planning and sometimes field monitoring and harvesting.

A comparable US experience is that of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), which was established by biodynamic farmers at the end of the 1980s in Western Massachusetts (White 2013). Concerted attempts at scaling up CSA rely mainly on cooperatives and Web retail portals that make organic produce directly available to large urban areas (such as justfood.org and localharvest.com). Food relocalization in local communities, on the contrary, is one of the primary objectives of Transition Towns. The Transition movement is specifically concerned with the challenges of peak oil prices and climate change. “The Great Reskilling” (grow-it-yourself, recycling and reusing) implies achieving food and energy security locally but also lobbying local government.⁸

It is not the ambition of this book to provide a comprehensive or comparative framework regarding the role of the Italian solidarity purchase groups within the vast international scenario of alternative provisioning networks. Nevertheless, a few distinctive traits and specificities can be noted here. Unlike urban community gardeners, for example, direct food production is not one of the most popular practices of GAS. GAS seem to root in congenial social webs, typically at the intersection of urban and rural settings (in other words, in or close to peri-urban peripheries with active farmers, and sufficiently densely populated to facilitate face-to-face networking). Their main activity consists of finding local producers in alternative to large distribution chains, not so much as in substituting themselves for them. The organization of farmers markets, the mapping of sustainable farming in nearby areas, and the deliberation about how t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Alternative Provisioning Networks
• 2 The Reinvention of Food
• 3 Reweaving the Economy
• 4 Networks in Labor
• 5 Seeds of Trust
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Glossary
• References
• Index