We Have Real Value. Let’s Call That Out: Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and Food Citizenship

• In Event: 2483 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 03. Environmental Social Movements

Abstract

The Student Farming Enterprise Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) offers possibilities for understanding how individual students get involved in constructing a local food system. This paper begins with a discussion of CSA, as a local food system, and the multiple meanings imbued in local food. This discussion is then linked to the notion of “food citizenship” that is emerging from the literature on local food systems as alternative food networks and movements. Through a close examination of the Student Farming Enterprise program, this paper explores the notions of citizenship and offers insights into how producers and consumers become food citizens.

The student farming program makes use of a food system by bringing production and consumption back to the local level. The student farmers and consumers support sustainability, which leads to the interpretation of their practices as an expression of food citizenship. Moreover, CSA provides alternative responses to conventional problems, which have implications for food movements.

Accordingly, the Student Farming Enterprise Program can be analyzed according to three aspects: using CSA as a social insurance, interpreting local food in CSA, and positioning producers and consumers in the context of food citizenship. CSA is a model of production, distribution and consumption of organic and local food, which creates a food community and establishes relationships between producers and consumers. This paper concentrates on how CSA contributes to a fundamental rethinking of the relationship among food, economics, and community. It explores how local food produced in CSA creates multiple meanings between producers and consumers. This leads to an analysis of how experiences of producers and consumers shape food citizenship.

Author

• Choonhee Woo