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.

Cultivated for more than 10,000 years, wheat (Triticum) is one of the world’s most widely grown and important crops. Wheat has sustained humans for thousands of years in a multitude of ways. In recent years, there is a global movement to revive wheat landraces. Landraces are typically adapted to a local area and to traditional farming systems. This paper examines the revival of wheat landrace, einkorn (Triticum monoccoccum L. subsp. monoccoccum) through a case study of Turkey, a center of agricultural domestication and diversity of wheat, and contemporary wheat landrace conservation initiatives. While there is a growing literature on the role of niche markets and urban consumers in the alternative food movement, there is limited literature examining the interaction of actors in decision-making processes that balance subsistence and market motivations. By highlighting two current initiatives to revive ancient wheat, einkorn, in northwest Turkey, the rural and urban centers of Bolu and Kastamonu, this paper discusses the transformation of a neglected and underutilized crop only known in local markets to a health food in the supermarket shelves, restaurant menus, and baker shops. The data comes from multiple field trips carried out between 2007 and 2022 in Turkey, each ranging from four weeks to four months. To ensure diversity in the sampling, the research aimed to gather perspectives mostly from six main sub-populations: (1) farmers, (2) local non-profits, (3) international organizations, (4) the private sector, (5) the government, and (6) consumers. The paper further considers the role of individual and collective action by a multitude of actors in the wheat landrace value chain that have ensured access to high quality wheat landrace seeds, promoted the taste of einkorn among urban consumers, created innovative value-added products, and financed the production and marketing of einkorn. This paper argues that while the motivations of these actors are diverse, their actions that span over a decade complement each other and provide room for dialogue and collaborations. These collaborations are critical to foster sustainable organic food systems and agro-ecological transition, and further support global Sustainable Development Goals: a healthy environment, livelihoods of small farmers, and well-being of both urban and rural communities.

In a world where food production is overwhelmingly run by companies and institutions with transnational ties, artisanal food production remains a conceptual and empirical terrain requiring scholarly elaboration. Unlike identical and mass production, this post-industrial, locally sourced, and less-mechanized way of producing develops a holistic approach from the cultivation of the main ingredients until the completion of the final product. In chocolate, it is from tree to bar; in wine, from vineyard to glass. With the rise in artisanal, which can be read as the quality turn, cultivation and production became more connected than ever. Hence, the scholars working on artisanal, the movement that highlights the necessity of producing high-quality products that reflect their unique tastes, structures, and values, focus on who produces food, how current producers relate to the land, and how they articulate economic, political, and moral bonds via their food production. With the quality turn in Turkey’s wine industry in the early 2000s, the number of post-industrial entrepreneurs who share similar traits—secular, globally-connected, well-educated, and upper(middle)-class—started establishing wineries primarily in the country’s West. In their narratives, they transcend the capitalist definition of “investment” that primarily forefronts economic gain by claiming to participate in the common good with their mode of production and form of investment. Stating to revive/augment the production in rural areas, they form their sentiments and economic gain on the socioeconomic well-being of people from various social strata. Stemming from my 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in which I worked as a cellar worker in a small-scale and quality-oriented winery in Turkey’s Northwest, I question artisanal production's role and artisans' effect in determining the social, economic, and political changes in cultivation and production. Focusing on Turkey’s first wine tourism trail, I uncover how the market for quality wine in Turkey has emerged through the country’s developmental and secular aspirations, despite various bureaucratic and legislative complications. In this presentation, by mainly focusing on the labor configuration within a winery and who gets to be called an artisan, I will discuss how artisanal products are commodified and thus express capitalist relations regarding value, accumulation, and market. To this end, along with explaining what it means to produce wine in Turkey, my goal is to analyze the “common good” narrative that wine producers construct and show the novel moral configurations of alternative markets within/under capitalism.

Starting in the early 2000s, the Turkish governments has passed a new series of neoliberal agriculture reforms. Among these, the 2006 seed law, implemented with a 2018 decree, captured the attention of scholars, activists, and civil servants. This seed reform effectively prohibited the market sale of traditional seed varieties that had not been certified, withheld agriculture support to farmers who cultivated using non-registered seeds, and limited the seed certification process to commercial seed breeders. In the wake of the seed law, many initiatives, activist networks, and spaces have flourished to create alternative material and discursive spaces for the cultivation, exchange, and preservation of traditional landraces, often referred to as “local seeds,” or “ancestral seeds.” From seed-exchange festivals to community seed banks, small-scale producers’ markets, and agriculture cooperatives support, multiple institutional actors have effectively reframed the cultural salience of agricultural seeds in the backdrop of a perceived crisis of conventional high-input agricultural markets and technologies. At the same time, the preservation of non-registered seeds, and their valorization as cultural objects of heritage and place-making, remains entangled in existing structures of agriculture production, markets, and seed-breeding and are, I argue, inseparable from them. Based on participant observation and interviews with seed breeders, scientists, activists, cultivators, and municipal bureaucrats in the Aegean region, this paper seeks to analyze the divergent and overlapping discourses and practices that have created the category of the local seed in the contemporary moment. As an exploratory paper framing research that is in process, the focus of this analysis is the construction of value and valuation processes, and open-ended question of where a seed begins and where it ends. The paper also seeks to connect to the flourishing critical scholarship of agricultural practices, markets, futures, and politics in Turkey and beyond, including work on seeds, heritage, migration, and displacement, to analyze claims of resistance and the imagination of “alternative” world expressed through different actors’ practices and discourses of seed-saving and exchange.

The number of geographical indications (GIs) in Turkey has skyrocketed in the last few years: more than 1000 out of the total 1525 GI legislations have been issued since 2020. In parallel with the growing interest in “local” food among consumers, GI has become a crucial label for indicating an alternative to industrial and placeless food production. Yet the recent explosion of the GIs barely satisfies this concern of certifying alternative “local” food products. This presentation will start with a brief overview of the potential of the GIs in terms of alternative local food networks. After situating the legal regulations on the GIs in Turkey against this background, I will focus on a particular case, Kars Kaşar cheese, which was certified as a GI in 2015. Unlike most of the others, this legislation has been acquired through a participatory process by a group of scientists, farmers, cheesemakers, and development officials who unexpectedly collaborated for many years before the official legislation was issued. Relying on my long-term involvement in this network since 2013 and my 18-month ethnographic research between 2017-2019, my analysis reveals that the participation of small dairy farmers and cheesemakers who own rural artisanal dairies in the province enabled the legislation to challenge the food safety regulations that favor the industrialization of dairy production through Pasteurization of rural Turkey. In the last section of my presentation, I highlight that while the Kars Kaşar cheese has gained a considerable reputation in the previous decade, GI use is still not widespread among the producers due to the pressures of large industrial dairies situated in the Organized Industrial Zone of Kars province. Hence, I will suggest that GIs in Turkey not only suggest some “false alternatives” but also point to the structural obstacles that prevent the alternatives from thriving.