Food for Change: the Politics and Values of Social Movements

Concern about our food system is growing, from the costs of industrial farming to the dominant role of supermarkets and recurring scandals about the origins and content of what we eat.

Food for Change documents the way alternative food movements respond to these concerns by trying to create more closed economic circuits within which people know where, how, and by whom their food is produced.

Jeff Pratt, Peter Luetchford and other contributors explore the key political and economic questions of food through the everyday experience and vivid insights of farmers and consumers, using fieldwork from case studies in four European countries (France, Spain, Italy and England). Food for Change is an insightful consideration of connections between food and wider economic relations and draws on a rich vein of anthropological writing on the topic.

Jeff Pratt is Senior Research Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Class, Nation and Identity: The Anthropology of Political Movements (Pluto, 2003).

Pete Luetchford is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Fair Trade and a Global Commodity: Coffee in Costa Rica (Pluto, 2007).