Colin Anderson

Local sustainable food systems have captured the popular imagination as a progressive, if not radical, pillar of a sustainable food future. Yet these grassroots innovations are embedded in a dominant food regime that reflects productivist, industrial, and neoliberal policies and institutions. Understanding the relationship between these emerging grassroots efforts and the dominant food regime is of central importance in any transition to a more sustainable food system. In this study, we examine the encounters of direct farm marketers with food safety regulations and other government policies and the role of this interface in shaping the potential of local food in a wider transition to sustainable agri-food systems. This mixed methods research involved interview and survey data with farmers and ranchers in both the USA and Canada and an in-depth case study in the province of Manitoba. We identified four distinct types of interactions between government and farmers: containing, coopting, contesting, and collaborating. The inconsistent enforcement of food safety regulations is found to contain progressive efforts to change food systems. While government support programs for local food were helpful in some regards, they were often considered to be inadequate or inappropriate and thus served to coopt discourse and practice by primarily supporting initiatives that conform to more mainstream approaches. Farmers and other grassroots actors contested these food safety regulations and inadequate government support programs through both individual and collective action. Finally, farmers found ways to collaborate with governments to work towards mutually defined solutions. While containing and coopting reflect technologies of governmentality that reinforce the status quo, both collaborating and contesting reflect opportunities to affect or even transform the dominant regime by engaging in alternative economic activities as part of the ‘politics of possibility’. Developing a better understanding of the nature of these interactions will help grassroots movements to create effective strategies for achieving more sustainable and just food systems.

Agroecology has been proposed as a key building block for food sovereignty. This article examines the meaning, practices and potentials of ‘transformative agroecology learning’ as a collective strategy for food system transformation. Our study is based on our qualitative and action research with the European Coordination of Via Campesina to develop the European Agroecology Knowledge Exchange Network. This network is linked to the global network of La Via Campesina and builds on the strong experiences and traditions of popular education in Latin American peasant movements. Rather than focusing on agroecology education as a process of individual learning, we analyse how a transformative agroecology education can be strengthened as a critical repertoire of action used by social movements to advance food sovereignty. Our analysis contributes a new theory of transformative agroecology learning based on four key characteristics or qualities: horizontalism; diálogo de saberes ; combining practical and political knowledge; and building social movement networks. While these different elements of transformative agroecology learning were present across EAKEN, they were unevenly developed and, in many cases, not systematized. The framework can help to strategically and reflexively systematize and strengthen a transformative agroecology learning approach as a key building block for food sovereignty.

Local sustainable food systems have captured the popular imagination as a progressive, if not radical, pillar of a sustainable food future. Yet these grassroots innovations are embedded in a dominant food regime that reflects productivist, industrial, and neoliberal policies and institutions. Understanding the relationship between these emerging grassroots efforts and the dominant food regime is of central importance in any transition to a more sustainable food system. In this study, we examine the encounters of direct farm marketers with food safety regulations and other government policies and the role of this interface in shaping the potential of local food in a wider transition to sustainable agri-food systems. This mixed methods research involved interview and survey data with farmers and ranchers in both the USA and Canada and an in-depth case study in the province of Manitoba. We identified four distinct types of interactions between government and farmers: containing, coopting, contesting, and collaborating. The inconsistent enforcement of food safety regulations is found to contain progressive efforts to change food systems. While government support programs for local food were helpful in some regards, they were often considered to be inadequate or inappropriate and thus served to coopt discourse and practice by primarily supporting initiatives that conform to more mainstream approaches. Farmers and other grassroots actors contested these food safety regulations and inadequate government support programs through both individual and collective action. Finally, farmers found ways to collaborate with governments to work towards mutually defined solutions. While containing and coopting reflect technologies of governmentality that reinforce the status quo, both collaborating and contesting reflect opportunities to affect or even transform the dominant regime by engaging in alternative economic activities as part of the ‘politics of possibility’. Developing a better understanding of the nature of these interactions will help grassroots movements to create effective strategies for achieving more sustainable and just food systems.

In this dissertation, I re-examine the relationship between knowledge and virtue in Plato's dialogues. I argue that "knowledge" in the dialogues is not defined in opposition to "desire" but rather involves "desire" as a constitutive component and that "knowledge" has affective and "erotic" aspects. As a point of reference, I examine Aristotle's brief arguments against the Socratic identification of episteme and arete . I argue that they rest on epistemological and psychological assumptions that Socrates need not accept: viz., a differentiation between "theoretical" and "practical" knowledge, and a differentiation between the faculty of thought and of desire. If these presuppositions are rejected, then "knowledge" in the Platonic dialogues is "prior" to a distinction between "theory" and "practice." In the third chapter, I defend this view through an examination of knowledge in the Socratic dialogues as a determinate disposition which has both discursive and non-discursive manifestations. I first show that this is true for common examples of tekhne, and second that there is no evidence that it does not equally hold for moral "knowledge." This requires, however, a re-interpretation of the place of the elenkhos in the Socratic practice of philosophia. We must not be misled by the centrality of definitions in the elenkhos, to conclude that "knowledge" is adequately described as propositional knowledge. Instead, the object of "knowledge" is a being, and hence "knowledge" is "non-propositional." The second part of this dissertation contains some preliminary attempts to develop this analysis of "knowledge" and to forestall some possible objections. In the fourth chapter I examine the three passages in which Socrates differentiates between a "maker's" and a "user's" knowledge and I show that the "knowledge" which Socrates identifies with "wisdom" unifies theoretical and practical comportments. The fifth chapter contains an examination of the dependence of knowledge on the education of our desires in the Republic. In the final chapter I show how this conception of "knowledge" understood as the telos of philosophia determines philosophical practice through an examination of the relationship between desire and dialectic in the Phaedo.