Food Justice and Alternative Organizations: A Comparative Case Study of Local Food Hubs in France and the United States

This paper presents a part of a PhD research in progress, on alternative food systems or food justice initiatives in France and the United States. It compares different cases of organizations that develop local food hubs (or circuits courts in French), which can be defined as direct-to-consumer food chains with no to one intermediary. In a socio-historical approach, we look at emerging devices of such food hubs, which according to our current hypothesis combine platform technology with social inclusion and justice narratives. Our research is set at the crossroads between the sociology of food, that of organizations and the study of alternative food systems, with a view to shed light on their nature as well as their emancipatory and transformative potential with respect to dominant economic and food systems. The cases we compare are organizations that are based on various cooperative, nonprofit and commons models, who all share the objective of serving groups that can be defined as marginalized, based on criteria pertaining to class, age, race and gender (e.g. BIPOC or black, indigenous and people of color, women, LGBTQ+, young, small farmers, popular classes). We center our focus on the intermediation work that is conducted by diverse actors within these food hubs, which comprises of organizational, outreach, institutional and advocacy work. We thus also explore the institutional contexts in which such work is framed and being undertaken, in particular those that pertain to the funding of such organizations (i.e. market and/or State institutions). Overall, the aim is to document, through a focus on work, the political and social struggles that permeate such local food hub organizations. Finally, we would also like to discuss community research within such organizations, since our first findings show that it is a central issue for them in terms of economic (in)dependence and emancipation.