Integrating Values into the Food System: How to Scale Alternative Food Initiatives (Part 2)

Monday, 7 July 2025: 09:00-10:45
Location: ASJE025 (Annex of the Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences)
RC40 Sociology of Agriculture and Food (host committee)

Language: English

The values in agrifood contexts often include intangible principles like solidarity, equality, sustainability, and mutual trust, but their exact meanings and implications can vary widely. Alternative food initiatives like community-supported agriculture, food co-ops, farmers' markets, and the slow food movement advocate these values beyond economic considerations, which they believe are underrepresented in the mainstream food system. Addressing the shortcomings of the mainstream food system, which is often criticized for contributing to multiple global crises, requires integrating the values upheld by these alternative food initiatives on a broader scale.

Scaling alternative food initiatives necessitates an engagement with the use and benefits of standardization. Agrifood standards can generalize and aim at ensuring quality in various forms, including ecological, traditional, and regional aspects, within the corporately governed food system. However, sociologists have highlighted the challenges and unintended consequences of standardization endeavors and scaling efforts in numerous ways.

This session aims to explore these complex interrelations, clarify the meanings of values within agrifood contexts and where valuing modes arise, and examine the possibilities for standardization. Together the contributors of this session will deepen the theoretical and/or empirical understanding of the values and modes of valuing they uphold within agrifood studies, as well as the connections between values, standards and scaling.

Session Organizers:
Rike STOTTEN, Sociology, Austria and Nadine ARNOLD, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
Oral Presentations
Strategic Scaling in Alternative Food Initiatives: Expanding Neo-Materialist Movements through Institutional Engagement
Stefan WAHLEN, University of Giessen, Germany; Francesca FORNO, University of Trento, Italy; Mikko LAAMANEN, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway
Multi-Scalar Analysis of Transformational Adaptation in a Coconut-Producing Region in the Philippines
Winifredo DAGLI, University of the Philippines Los Baños, Philippines; Helen HAMBLY, University of Guelph, Canada; Craig JOHNSON, University of Guelph, Canada
Grafting Sustainable Values Together with Geographical Indications in Norway
Atle Wehn HEGNES, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway
Organizing Markets for the Valuation of Bean Cultivars in France
Tara DOURIAN, Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRAE), France
Distributed Papers
Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) and Urban Food Prosumption in Indonesia: A Case Study in Bandung Urban Areas
Meidesta PITRIA, Kyoto University, Japan; Shuji HISANO, Kyoto University, Japan
Challenges of Alternative Food Initiatives in India: A Case of Community Supported Agriculture Confarm, Telangana
Archana PATNAIK, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India; Ushoshi BANDYOPADHYAY, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India