Abstract
In the last two decades, an increasing number of Turkey’s secular and educated middle-class and upper-middle-class urbanites have turned to sustainable ways of living, consuming food grown without synthetic inputs, organizing in alternative food networks, and moving to the countryside to take up ecological farming as a livelihood. This phenomenon unfolds against the rising popularity of sustainably procured food, and a larger trend whereby urbanites with capital invest in farming and marketing. It is thus important to differentiate the political motivations of actors who seek to create alternatives to the conventional agri-food system from the sphere of capitalist branding. In other words, what distinguishes a producer who is in the business solely for profit from one who engages in farming as a radical act? On the consumer side, what distinguishes an organic store from a consumer cooperative?
Based on eighteen months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in western Turkey in urban and rural settings between 2018 and 2021, this paper suggests that specific discourses and practices employed by activist consumers and producers expose the radicality of their actions. Through a detailed description of these discourses and practices, I show how food activists seek to rework value and create unconventional socialities around food. On the one hand, they challenge the primacy of economic value and prioritize instead moral values such as locality and community to the extent possible given the neoliberal agricultural economy within which they operate. On the other hand, I demonstrate how participants of these networks seek to build alternative socialities along the supply chain. They aim to achieve this via a discourse of responsibility that encourages consumers to forgo the convenience and comfort of conventional markets by summoning them to exert labor into production and consumption processes. Oftentimes, such responsibility extends to a call for prefigurative collective action, enacted in the form of organizing in cooperatives and food provisioning groups as an antidote to the individualization of expected behavior change that characterizes neoliberal politics. Despite its emphasis on displaying the root causes of radicality, this presentation also remains attentive to shortcomings by focusing on moments in which these activist networks fail to resist capitalist appropriation and create a wider radical public, especially due to their insularity and lack of economic accessibility.
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