Journal of Rural Studies 19 (2003) 1–7
Editorial
The quality ‘turn’ and alternative food practices:
reflections and agenda
1. Introduction
The ‘turn’ to quality associated with the proliferation
of alternative agro-food networks (AAFNs) operating
at the margins of mainstream industrial food circuits has
stimulated a significant body of research, and this
Journal has played a prominent role in its dissemination
(Morris and Young, 2000; Ilbery and Kneafsey, 2000;
Hinrichs, 2000). These introductory comments offer
some reflections on this growing sub-field and its
conceptual repertoire, a brief overview of the following
collection of papers, and some suggestions for future
research.
A newcomer to rural studies could be forgiven for
thinking that this recent flood of AAFN scholarship is a
contemporary variant of rural sociology’s long devotion
to local community research (Mormont, 1990; Phillips,
1998; Day, 1998; Liepins, 2000).Certainly the notion of
community is enjoying something of an academic
revival, particularly in the aftermath of the gradual
shift in European rural policy towards a territorial
endogenous development model (Ray, 1998; Ward and
McNicholas, 1998). Genealogical affinities aside, much
AAFN research complements this renewed interest in
the local, and often is determinedly micro-analytical and
ethnographic in its investigation of place-based and
socially embedded alternative food practices. At this
level, embeddedness, trust and place are among the key
concepts deployed to understand the quality ‘turn’ in
food practices. Here, quality evokes the cultural but, it is
suggested, without seriously qualifying the production-
centred political economic analysis of AAFNs.
Elsewhere in the social sciences, struggles to appro-
priate the notions of embeddedness and trust have
drawn economic sociology and heterodox economics
into productive dialogue on the sources of institutional
change and modes of economic coordination (Wilk-
inson, 1997). These exchanges also informed the ‘new’
industrial geography literature on Marshallian indus-
trial districts and the competitive resilience of certain
regional economies, notably Third Italy, in a globalizing
world economy (Scott, 1988; Storpor, 1992; Amin and
Robins, 1990; Amin and Thrift, 1992; Harrison, 1992).
The analytics of social embeddedness and trust in
shaping economic activity is a prominent theme in the
0743-0167/02/$ - see front matter r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 7 4 3 - 0 1 6 7 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 0 4 3 - 8
European debate on economy–culture relations in
economic geography (Crang, 1997; Sayer, 1997, 2001;
Ray and Sayer, 1999; Gregson et al., 2001).
Although these parallel literatures and debates have
furnished operational concepts, their wider themes and
problematics have exerted relatively little influence in
AAFN research. For example, Granovetter’s (1985)
reworking of Polanyi’s (1944) concept of social embedd-
edness, although widely utilized, has tended to escape
close interrogation and theoretical refinement. Among
the few exceptions, several early explorations of the role
of AAFNs in endogenous rural development did draw
critically on meso-level theories, notably Jonathan
Murdoch’s (2000) review of the network paradigm,
which builds on the distinction by Marsden et al. (1990)
between ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ forms of rural
development. Meso-level explorations of network the-
ories, including actor-network theory, more recently
have given way to convention theory, and the typology
developed in Salais and Storpor’s (1992) ‘worlds of
production’ version of this perspective to frame the
‘turn’ to quality as a contested process of transition
(Murdoch and Miele, 1999, 2002; Murdoch et al., 2000).
That is, a movement from the ‘industrial world’, with its
heavily standardized quality conventions and logic of
mass commodity production, to the ‘domestic world’,
where quality conventions embedded in trust, tradition
and place support more differentiated, localized and
‘ecological’ products and forms of economic organiza-
tion.
In the main, however, writing on AAFNs has not
refined or developed these meso-level theoretical per-
spectives. Embeddedness, trust, place and their variants
continue as the conceptual touchstones but in the service
of empirically grounded analyses of alternative food
practices, institutional mechanisms of rural governance
and policy, and the potential of AAFNs as engines of
rural economic dynamism.
Although these general observations broadly hold
across AAFN scholarship, there is a significant lack of
congruence on several points between the North
American and European literatures. Despite a common
micro-analytic repertoire, real differences emerge in the
ways in which micro-studies are linked to intermediate
levels of analysis. In a nutshell, North American
2 Editorial / Journal of Rural Studies 19 (2003) 1–7
research typically is in conversation with activist circles,
academic and lay, and is concerned pre-eminently with
the oppositional status and socio-political transforma-
tive potential of AAFNs, whereas European research
focuses more strongly on incremental institutional
change and is addressed, explicitly or implicitly, to an
audience of policymakers.
Perhaps reflecting their relative exclusion from policy
circles, North American researchers have strong the-
matic links and normative commitments to the social
movements contesting mainstream, corporate industrial
agro-food systems and the hegemonic agricultural
techno-scientific complex. In this arena, AAFNs figure
as material and symbolic expressions of alternative eco-
social imaginaries, as the public furore over the
regulation of organic agriculture in the United States
revealed in such bold relief (Vos, 2000). With this
significant exception of concrete institutional struggle,
however, the North American literature on AAFNs
returns insistently to the central question of their
capacity to wrest control from corporate agribusiness
and create a domestic, sustainable, and egalitarian food
system (Allen, 1999; Buttel, 1997; Kloppenburg et al.,
1996).
In contrast, European AAFN research is situated
within a wide-ranging public debate on food safety,
agricultural policy reform and contested trajectories of
rural economy and society. Periodic food ‘scares’,
opposition to genetically modified foods, and the recent
severe outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the UK
have kept these debates in the public eye. In more
specific institutional terms, European research is con-
textualized by the announced, though so far halting, re-
orientation of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)
away from its virtually exclusive sectoral emphasis on
agricultural production questions towards a wider, more
endogenous, and multi-dimensional concept of rural
development. This re-orientation was heralded by the
European Commission report, The Future of Rural
Society (1988) and the redirection of Community
Structural Funds to declining rural areas, followed by
a raft of subsequent policy declarations (Gray, 2000).
The slow process of CAP reform was initiated by the
MacSharry reforms of 1992 and carried on by Agenda
2000, which introduced the Rural Development Regula-
tion (1257/99), the so-called ‘second pillar’ of the CAP
(Lowe et al., 2001).
These policy debates, and the frictions and resistances
they engender, provide the mise en scene for the
advocacy by some European scholars of AAFNs as
the dynamic, innovative expression of the ‘new’ rural
development. That is, as precursors of a new paradigm
of rural development (Ploeg et al., 2000; Marsden et al.,
1999), which marks the transition away from the
putatively ‘exhausted’ and crisis-ridden model of con-
ventional industrial agriculture.
The oppositional ‘voice’ of European research is
heard primarily in the characterization of AAFNs as
sources of resistance to the disruptive effects of global
competition (Murdoch and Miele, 1999, 2003). By re-
embedding rural food practices in regional eco-social
relations, it is suggested that AAFNs create ‘new
economic spaces’ that are more capable of withstanding
the countervailing, disembedding forces of globaliza-
tion, unfettered markets, an increasingly complex
division of labour, and corporate power (Sayer, 1997,
2001).
Although this overview does not do justice to the
complex and nuanced analyses of AAFNs found in the
North American and European literatures, their differ-
ences can be represented, grosso modo, in terms of the
relative emphasis given to these new organizational
forms as bearers of transformative political change, on
the one hand, and as exemplars of an alternative
institutional model of rural development, on the other.
2. Workshop papers
The papers collected here were first presented at a
workshop, International Perspectives on Alternative
Agro-Food Networks: Quality, Embeddedness, Bio-Poli-
tics, held at the University of California, Santa Cruz in
October, 2001. The workshop was prompted by the
growing salience of ‘quality’ foods and associated
institutional innovations, including direct marketing,
short food supply chains, local food systems, and the
renewed legitimization of artisanal food practices and
regional cuisines. Contributors were variously invited to
interrogate the operational concepts deployed in local
case-studies of quality food practices, explore the new
bio-political spaces being created by the quality ‘turn’,
and to situate these developments on a broader
international canvas. Although the papers certainly
mirror the traits and directions of the rapidly evolving
literature on quality foods and AAFNs identified above,
the expectations of the workshop have borne substantial
fruit in the present collection.
The principal analytical categories marshalled to
explicate the quality ‘turn’—quality, embeddedness,
and the local—are all constructs whose material and
symbolic meanings are vigorously contested. Indeed, it
is precisely the difficulty of deciphering these meanings
and their complex expression in social behavior,
organizational forms, discourse and power relations
that defines the theoretical and empirical challenge
presented by the ‘turn’ to quality in food practices. The
following collection of papers scrutinizes these concep-
tual categories in different locales and geo-political
scales but, as socio-material constructs, these notions
are intrinsically ambivalent, contingent and dynamic.
That is, the quality ‘turn’ is not singular or monolithic,
 Editorial / Journal of Rural Studies 19 (2003) 1–7
with a unique set of constitutive elements, meanings and
politics.
Such ambivalence and contingency emerge with
particular clarity in the paper by Becky Mansfield on
the international surimi seafood industry. Adopting a
relational approach, Mansfield’s analysis highlights the
interactive, mutually constitutive nature of the
biophysical and social entities which are translated
into three different quality assemblages. These appar-
ently disembedded activities, in fact, are intimately
embedded in their respective relational, socionatural
networks. In the Latourian sense of network (Latour,
1999), these assemblages interactively engender
transformations in biophysical and social realities,
and so shape the biology of fish, their biogeography,
the structure of the fishing industry and consumption,
for example. In other words, quality is to be understood
as a relational materiality that is transacted and
produced ‘in relation’ by these socionatural exchanges.
Seemingly poles apart, there are striking parallels to be
drawn between the production of quality in this sector
of wild-caught foodstuffs and the quality constructions
enacted in the modulated ‘domestic worlds’ of terroir in
France and ‘good food’ in South-West Ireland discussed
in the papers by Beth Barham and Colin Sage,
respectively.
Mansfield’s treatment of quality construction and
embeddedness in the global surimi seafood industry
belies the widespread association of quality food
products with specific local ecologies, histories and close
interpersonal relations. This association is commonly
attributed to heightened consumer anxieties about food
safety and demands for greater transparency in produc-
tion practices, traceability, and other modalities of
quality assurance. The premises and omissions found
in this juxtaposition of quality, place and ecological
embeddedness are teased out by several papers in this
collection. These reveal, if further persuasion were
needed, that the ‘local’ is not an innocent term (Harvey,
1996).
In his paper on ‘the new food economy’, identified by
some writers with quality consumerism and the rise of
organic foods, Michael Winter challenges the isomorph-
ism between organics and local embeddedness implicit in
claims that ‘‘quality food systems are being reembedded
in local ecologies’’ (Murdoch et al., 2000, p. 108). In a
case-study of five rural areas in England and Wales,
Winter and his colleagues were surprised to find that
purchases of conventionally produced local foods were
more common than those of organic foods. Winter
situates this finding within ideologies of ‘defensive
localism’ and suggests that local food purchases acquire
totemic significance in terms of support for local
farming. As Winter concludes, ‘‘Far from heralding an
alternative post-global green future,ythe turn to local
food may cover many different forms of agriculture,
3
encompassing a variety of consumer motivations and
giving rise to a wide range of politics’’.
The conflation of the quality ‘turn’ to local food with
organic produce also is unsettled by Clare Hinrichs’
paper on efforts to relocalize the Iowa food system,
symbolized here by the Iowa-grown banquet meal. This
heartland of intensive commodity production provides
an unexpected yet fascinating terrain for localized food
systems and explorations of the ‘‘fractures between the
spatial, the environmental and the social’’. As Hinrichs
observes, these fractures can accommodate conserva-
tive, reactionary politics, imbued with nativist senti-
ments, rather than the progressive, moral and
associative economy so often imputed to localized food
systems on the strength of their social embeddedness.
Regional identity constructed around local food, in this
case the Iowa-grown banquet meal, can engender a
‘‘defensive politics of localization’’ that obscure differ-
ence, inequalities and social exclusion. Hinrichs’ analysis
thus complements Winter’s paper, sounding a salutary
cautionary note that ‘‘The differing political inflections
in food systems localization begin with the spatial
referent for ‘local’ but vary in how they attend to social
and environmental relations’’.
The forging of regional cultural identity also is the
theme of Colin Sage’s study of ‘good food’ networks in
South-West Ireland. The notion of ‘regard’ (Offer, 1997;
Lee, 2000) is used to frame the strands of personal
interaction, reciprocity and moral authority that pro-
duce value and cultural meaning, and in which
producers and consumers of ‘good food’ are entangled.
Biographies of ‘key individuals’ illustrate critical nodal
points in these material and symbolic exchanges, and
reveal the complex interplay between place and moral
authority that underlies the reproduction of this ‘good
food’ network. The economic and regulatory pressures
weighing on organic farmers, artisanal food producers,
short food supply chains and local markets in the
struggle to reembed regional production–consumption
relations also emerge strongly in Sage’s account.
Key individuals have an equally prominent role in the
study of alternative food initiatives (AFIs) in California
by Patricia Allen and her colleagues. Taking a direct
approach to the question of the ‘tectonic’ potential of
AFIs to transform agro-food systems, their analysis
examines the agendas and strategies for change articu-
lated by the leaders of these organizations. The
preliminary results reported here suggest that this
metaphor of structural change is not shared by AFI
leaders but is rather a product of academics’ idealized
framing of AFI activities. In these interview findings,
ecologically sound food systems are given clear pre-
cedence over goals of social justice, and the authors
report a related preference for entrepreneurial, market-
based solutions emphasizing the diversity of food choice
over more politicized, entitlement approaches to change.
4 Editorial / Journal of Rural Studies 19 (2003) 1–7
This neo-liberal orientation underlines the conclusion
that ‘‘In general, California AFI organizations are
working to develop alternatives within the overall
structure of the current agrifood systemy’’
The tensions evident in academic debates on AAFNs
and sustainable agriculture movements regarding their
role as catalysts of change in food systems also inform
Neva Hassanein’s contribution. This paper, leavened by
her activist experience, provides an exploratory analysis
of a pragmatic, incrementalist approach to change. This
discussion is grounded in Tim Lang’s (1999) notion of
food democracy and the activities of the Toronto Food
Policy Council are seen as an auspicious attempt to
institutionalize its practice. Although these conceptual
and organizational initiatives are embryonic, Hassanein
makes a persuasive case for the view that ‘‘the
thoughtful practice of pragmatic politics and the
development of a strong food democracy will be keys
to transformation in the long run’’.
Fair Trade also is built on a transformative impera-
tive, emerging from left politics and international
solidarity movements in the 1960s and 1970s as a
project to challenge and displace conventional channels
of international trade. In tracing more recent develop-
ments, Marie-Christine Renard argues that the ‘alter-
native’ status of Fair Trade is endangered by its
increasing utilization of mainstream retail distribution
circuits, its commercial success, and the imitative
‘ethical’ labeling strategies of multinational corpora-
tions, nation-states and multilateral organizations.
Renard explores the growing contradictions between
the original transformative mission of the Fair Trade
project, on the one hand, and the pragmatic goal of
enlarging Northern markets for fair trade products, on
the other. Renard’s discussion of these tensions is
framed in bleak relief by the unprecedented crisis in
international coffee markets.
The international commodity interface between Eur-
ope and Third World countries also concerns Susan
Freidberg, but her two case-studies are deployed to
demonstrate the continuing significance of historical
cultural and geo-economic conditions in structuring
contemporary global agro-food networks. That is, the
fresh produce export–import trade linking the UK and
Zambia and France and Burkina Faso ‘‘must be situated
in circuits of commerce and patronage that were
established under colonial rule and have been largely
reinforced by postcolonial development aid’’. Fried-
berg’s historically informed ethnography reveals how
these modern commodity networks follow ‘‘in the deep
ruts worn by earlier relations of domination and
extraction, on both a macro and micro-scale’’.
This optic also brings the concept of quality, social
embeddedness, and trust into sharper critical perspective
by emphasizing that their significance in orchestrating
economic activity depends crucially on the unexamined
premise of a ‘‘relatively homogeneous techno-normative
landscape for collective action’’. As Friedberg observes,
apart from case-studies of Fair Trade, the literature on
networks, quality conventions, and artisanal production
and marketing systems is narrowly ethnocentric in its
focus on North America and Western Europe. In the
absence of a common landscape of shared behaviorial
norms, moral economies, and institutional protections
against risk, trust provides a problematic foundation for
quality food networks. In the transnational and
transcultural trade in perishable produce between
Europe and Africa, Friedburg argues that ‘‘what is
described as a trust relationship is often just a situation
where one or both parties has no choice but to hope for
luck or mercy. This is perhaps especially true when
major retailers seek ‘quality’ in countries and regions
where producers have few alternative sources of income.
Economies of qualityyare not necessarily less exploi-
tative than others’’.
Asymmetries between globalizing agro-food systems
and export-dependent food networks re-emerge in
Richard Le Heron’s paper, which explores the changing
nexus of food governance, global market quality
specifications, and export supply chain management in
the ‘‘neo-liberal economic space’’ and ‘‘meta-regulatory
context’’ in which New Zealand’s agro-food sectors are
situated. The different facets of this nexus are revealed
by three case-studies: the debate catalyzed by the recent
Royal Commission on Genetic Modification on food
governance and new forms of regulation consonant with
New Zealand’s participitation in globalizing food
markets, the response of corporate organic export
networks to international certification standards, and
the negotiation of new quality norms in the sheepmeat
supply chain to comply with UK supermarkets’
demands for production to precise specifications. Taken
individually, these cases are illustrative of ‘‘a watershed
in regulatory strategy’’, ‘‘the rise of audit-type technol-
ogies’’ of governance, and ‘‘a more formalized contrac-
tual framework’’ of farmer–processor relations,
respectively. However, Le Heron makes a compelling
argument that these governance questions possibly have
paradigmatic implications insofar as New Zealand is an
exemplar of a wider, neo-liberalizing project, involving
new principles and institutional forms of economic
coordination.
The local is the initial scale of analysis in Beth
Barham’s discussion of food governance based on the
notion of terroir and its institutionalized expression in
the French policy regulating labels of origin (appelation
d’origin control!ee, or AOC labels). However, as Barham
relates, the conventions of quality governing this
intimate, bounded ‘domestic world’ of immemorial
landscapes and inherited craft knowledges have pur-
chase at larger scales through both commercial relation-
ships and international trade policy disputes. Thus the
 Editorial / Journal of Rural Studies 19 (2003) 1–7
recent European Union labeling scheme (2081/92),
modelled on the French tradition and which confers
Protected Designation of Origin on food products, is
rejected by the US as a breach of WTO principles.
Barham’s analysis emphasizes not only the situational
characteristics of terroir, entangled in the histories of
people and place—‘‘cohabited nature’’, ‘‘cohabited
landscape’’ as she puts it—but also the role that the
state and extra-local institutions must play in protecting
and valorizing the intellectual property rights of this
socionatural quality assemblage. The paper concludes
with some reflections on the possibility of transplanting
this strategy of territorial valorization to food networks
embedded in other cultures.
The papers assembled in this collection address the
configuration of alternative and conventional agro-food
networks at different geo-economic and geo-political
scales, utilizing operational concepts drawn mainly from
economic sociology and, though less prominently, other
network theories. These varied spatial locations empha-
size that the social embeddedness of AAFNs, even in its
quintessential local expressions, is framed by dynamic
interaction with extra-local processes and actors,
whether multinational retail multiples or international
regulatory regimes. This awareness invites critical
analysis of the political economy of these emergent
economic forms, their integration at larger scales, and
role in reconfiguring trajectories of rural development.
3. Future research themes
These reflections on the quality ‘turn’ in food
practices and the foci of the Santa Cruz workshop
papers suggest several topics for further research.
In view of its conceptual centrality, and developments
in correlate fields, the notion of social embeddedness
requires markedly more scrutiny in the rural studies
literature. Some interesting theoretical lines of inquiry
are revealed by recent interrogations of this concept in
economic sociology and economic geography. Thus in
her critique of embeddedness and its ‘‘largely unchal-
lenged position as the central organizing principle of
economic sociology’’, Krippner (2001, p. 775) argues
that this concept has been deployed in ways that
privilege a single aspect of social life—the drive to
connectivity—which for analytical purposes is examined
in isolation from the broad constellation of social forces.
The danger here is that the market is defined against the
social economy and characterized in terms of ‘disem-
bedded’ arm’s length transactions, which are ‘‘presumed
to proliferate where social relations are absent. In
contrast, embedded ties defy market logic, inhabiting
spaces where social relations are dense and well
developed’’. (Krippner, 2001, p. 795).
5
An attendant risk, and one present in the AAFN
literature, is that new localized economic forms are seen
uncritically as precursors of an associative economy by
virtue of their embeddedness in interpersonal ties of
reciprocity and trust. However, the dualism implicit in
this formulation frames such ties in unidimensional
terms, obscuring social inequalities and the relations of
power at work in these activities. As Hinrichs (2000)
observes, to assume that the local embeddedness of
economic forms precludes exploitative commodified
relations and instrumental behavior ‘‘conflates spatial
relations with social relations’’ (p. 301).
As a protagonist in the economy–culture debates in
economic geography, Sayer (2001) critiques the litera-
ture on embeddedness, networks and trust as a cultural
gloss which legitimates ‘‘a softer treatment of capital-
ism’’ (p. 700). It does so by neglecting powerful
disembedding forces (Sayer, 1997) and its tendency ‘‘to
play downysystem imperativesywhich even the most
embedded economic relations may not manage to
survive’’ (Sayer, 2001, p. 700). In addition, the embed-
ding of economic practices in relations of trust ‘‘is often
adapted to the system pressures of market forces,ymay
be instrumentally constructed to protect the pursuit of
self-interesty[and] often involves relations of domina-
tion, some of them based on gender, class or race’’ (p.
698).
Where Sayer (2001) warns that ‘‘we should be
suspicious’’ of the cultural inflections associated with
the notion of embeddedness, Gregson et al. (2001) see
this theoretical category as being deployed by political
economy-inspired economic geographers in order to
control ‘‘the terms of engagement with culture’’ (p. 623)
in ways which privilege economy over culture. On this
view, culture is invoked variously as local milieu,
embeddedness, networks and knowledge/learning pro-
cesses, but it is incorporated analytically ‘‘as an add-in
to assist in the explanation of phenomena and activities
seen as primarily economic’’ (p. 623). These categories,
as utilized within the political economy tradition,
support instrumentalist readings of culture as an
environmental resource and its spatial analysis as
‘‘bounded and relatively stable’’, with the corollary
that, as an environmental attribute, ‘‘economy and
culture get to be interwoven only in the specificities of
particular placesy’’ (p. 628).
Without reviewing these economy–culture debates at
length, the economic geography literature clearly affords
agro-food studies some promising avenues of engage-
ment. For example, the critique by Gregson et al. (2001)
of instrumental analyses of local milieu, embeddedness
and networks resonates strongly with their deployment
in AAFN research. Spatial valorization is the dynamic of
Ray’s (1998) ‘‘culture economy’’ approach to rural
development, it infuses analyses of embedded short food
supply chains and other AAFNs, and is the foundation
6 Editorial / Journal of Rural Studies 19 (2003) 1–7
of claims that these innovative economic forms and
practices represent a new rural development paradigm
(Ploeg et al., 2000; Marsden et al., 1999).
Sayer’s (2001) stricture that ‘‘The focus on embedd-
edness can inadvertently produce an overly benign view
of economic relations and processesy’’ (p. 698) also
merits close attention in the AAFN literature. This
caution is particularly relevant for evaluations of rural
development strategies based on territorial value-added,
market-led prescriptions. In general, scholarship in this
sub-field has focused overwhelmingly on the supply side
of the quality ‘turn’, and farm families and on-farm
innovation are analytically central. The silences and
erasures associated with this positionality and related
cui bono issues urgently need more critical assessment.
Finally, the asymmetrical focus of research on
AAFNs and the quality ‘turn’ on the production
‘moment’ in agro-food circuits has led to the serious
neglect of consumption, ‘‘with consumers cast in
stratified, market research terms, without ‘agency’ or
meaningful everyday practices’’ (Goodman and DuPuis,
2002, p. 9). This omission is all the more glaring insofar
as the expansion and reproduction of AAFNs, by
definition, depends on their capacity to reconfigure
producer–consumer relations. Conceptually, this re-
quires that consumers be acknowledged as active,
relational partners in the transformation of agro-food
practices. In repairing this omission, recent efforts to
locate food production and consumption in a symme-
trical analytical framework indicate possible ways
forward (Tovey, 1997; Lockie and Kitto, 2000; Good-
man and DuPuis, 2002; Whatmore and Stassart, 2001).
These thoughts on future research themes call for
more critical scrutiny of key concepts, closer interaction
with parallel debates in economic sociology and
economic geography, and greater analytical attention
to consumption and consumers. These points are made
as constructive suggestions in the expectation that the
vibrant literature on AAFNs and the quality ‘turn’ will
continue to extend its engagements with social theory,
activist communities, different agro-food circuits, and
rural policy constituencies. The papers which follow
exemplify the promise of this new terrain for rural
studies.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Michael Goodman for sharing ideas
about the UC Santa Cruz workshop and helping in its
early organization. I am grateful to Elisabeth Nishioka
and Bryana Britts, whose professionalism and adminis-
trative skills were critical to the success of the workshop.
Financial support from the UCSC Center for Global,
International and Regional Studies, the Center for
Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, and the
Division of Social Sciences is gratefully acknowledged.
Finally, my editorial efforts have been enhanced
immeasurably by the advice of Viv Cloke, and the
unstinting and insightful contributions from the ‘in-
visible college’ of colleagues who refereed papers for this
issue.
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David Goodman
Department of Environmental Studies, University of
California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA