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We began this book by laying out some of the major changes we see taking place in our relationship to food and agriculture. From the contentious politics aimed at rectifying injustices around global trade to the debates over scale-appropriate production and processing, contests over the future of food and agriculture are thriving. Few topics evoke the passion and controversy as do those involving our food. Because of the breadth and intensity of these contests, we contend that substantive change is taking place in our food system.If we gage change by the degree of communication,conflict,and tension surrounding a topic,then we indeed stand at the threshold of a new day in agriculture. Food is forcing us to raise socially uncomfortable questions about who we are, how we treat one another, how we coexist with nature, and who we will become as a society. The chapters in this volume speak to the diversity and depth of these changes.Perhaps more important,these chapters speak to the ways in which agency is exercised in contemporary society. Contemporary agrifood systems entail new relationships and dynamic patterns of interaction that set us qualitatively apart from previous forms of agriculture. Our job as sociologists is to glean the patterns, threads, and commonalities that link, or segregate, these interactions. Given the changes described in this volume, we might expect to find unidimensional change. In other words,we might expect to find historical continuity in the agrifood system that achieved hegemonic status in the latter half of the twentieth century. On the contrary, the central theme we have identified is the emergence of a contradictory agrifood system. This contradiction emerges from the diversity of human agency. We might conclude from the findings presented in these chapters that agency is being employed in such a way as to fashion a multitiered food conclusion: from mindful eating to structural change Wynne Wright and Gerad Middendorf system (Goodman ). On the one hand, we have seen global agribusiness giants continuing to pursue a bulk commodity food system based on the industrial manipulation of raw inputs.The fruits of the modernized productivist system are low-cost foods for the masses, with dysfunctional consequences hidden from the view of most consumers. The deleterious effects in this model are monumental, as the chapters in this volume have attested, but resistance to the industrial agrifood system should not be understated. Partly in response to the unsustainability of commodity agriculture, grassroots efforts aimed at regionalizing or embedding the agrifood system have become a growth industry. Some of these initiatives include agrifood systems that are imbued with multiple values and are more differentiated, less opaque, and more participatory than the dominant system. Finally, we note the existence of hybrids of these two forms of agriculture,such as Fair Trade networks.Early chapters in this volume described cases that drew our attention to the exercise of agency that appears to be bringing about some degree of systemic change. The chapters by Johnston, Shreck, Munro and Schurman, and Skladany presented compelling examples of agency as a form of individual resistance, collective mobilization,and institutional realignment.Perhaps the most hopeful of all the chapters is Johnston’s investigation of the Toronto-based good food box (gfb) scheme. Her work teaches us that agency directed toward reducing food insecurity can accomplish meaningful structural change, but can simultaneously be embedded with contradictions. At the same time that the gfb makes strides toward moving food away from its commodity form and reconstructing it as a basic human right, it can exemplify a form of “bourgeois piggery.” Johnston found that the gfb contained elements of a counterhegemonic challenge to the global agrifood system, but at the same time it retained neoliberal principles of consumer sovereignty. In Shreck’s study of the Fair Trade banana network we see similar contradictory tendencies at work. While efforts to bring equity into the marketplace are growing, transformative change remains somewhat remote; little penetration into the status quo seems to be occurring. Like the participants in Johnston’s gfb scheme, individuals were drawn to this consumption model as a way of bypassing the current system and redistributing wealth from the global North to the global South in the name of social equity. As it is currently configured, however, Fair Trade appears to present little challenge to the hegemony of the commodity system. Munro and Schurman define agency as activism in the form of a collective and sustained critical analysis of agricultural biotechnology,which,upon 274 the...

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