Ethical Eating in the Postsocialist and Socialist World

3. Placing Alternative Food Networks: Farmers’ Markets in Post-Soviet Vilnius, Lithuania

69 chapter 3 Placing Alternative Food Networks Farmers’ Markets in Post-Soviet Vilnius, Lithuania renata blumberg This morning the market is slower than usual, but there is a steady flow of customers. A middle-aged woman takes her time examining the tomatoes at a stand. She comments that the tomatoes look beautiful and that her grandchildren would surely like to have some. The seller (a farmer) shows no response to the customer’s attempt at ingratiation, but answers clearly when the customer asks for the price of the tomatoes. “Five litas per kilo,” she says. The customer replies: “How expensive!” After a few moments of silence, the customer attempts to negotiate a lower price, but the seller won’t decrease it. No sale is made. —Field notes, farmers’ market in Vilnius, August 18, 2010 Farmers’ markets have experienced growing popularity in Europe and North America in recent years, in many ways becoming emblematic of new trends to foster alternatives to industrially produced, processed, and marketed food. Activists and scholars alike imagine farmers’ markets as ideal places for reconnectioninasystemthathashistoricallyproducedgreaterandmoresophisticated degrees of disconnection between producers and consumers of food. Farmers’ markets serve as meeting points for “alternative” food networks, supply chains that circumvent conventional modes of distribution and that often operate under an alternative logic (Watts et al. 2005). Markets are also places with their own cultures that develop within various geopolitical economic contexts, a factor that may influence the extent to which markets as places can bridge divides between the rural and urban, and consumers and producers. The short description of a typical and mundane interaction at a farmers’ market in Vilnius with which I begin this chapter reveals some of the dynamics 70 . renata blumberg andcomplexityofmakingconnectionsandforgingmutuallybeneficiallinkages between two opposed positions: those of buyer and seller of a commodity. In addition, the vignette highlights how going to the market is a social practice that is embedded within cultural meanings and negotiations. In Lithuania, the market isone ofthe only placeswhere bargainingover produce isan acceptable, andevenexpected,practice.Yetdespitethesignificanceofmarketsassocialand economic spaces, predominant scholarly accounts of farmers’ markets, which have typically been centered in North America and Western Europe, have not sufficiently taken into account how different histories of production and consumption influence the emergence and practices of farmers’ markets. I argue that the recent notable growth of farmers’ markets in Lithuania needs to be understood in its cultural and spatial context. In my examination of the new farmers’ markets in Vilnius, Lithuania, I elucidate the kind of connections that are being forged and the ways in which social and spatial histories and practices of consumption and production influence those connections. In so doing, I highlight the ongoing importance of economic and social transformations in post-Soviet space. Beginning with a critique of existing literature on farmers’ markets, I then propose a relational understanding of place that can improve our understanding of farmers’ markets in different sociospatial contexts. I analyze this perspective first by considering trajectories of food production and consumption in Lithuania and then by situating those trajectories in relation to the rapid development of new food retail spaces over the past twenty years. Finally, I focus on the making of “new” spaces for “local” food, including farmers’ markets , which I argue must be analyzed in relation to existing retail spaces, especially regular markets, where certain kinds of social practices and spatial narratives have emerged and solidified. My analysis is based on seven months of fieldwork in Lithuania between 2009 and 2011, and draws on structured and semi-structured interviews with farmers and consumers in alternative food networks, interviews with policy makers, participant observation, and discourse analysis of media and texts. spatialities of farmers’ markets Much research has analyzed the recent emergence and growth of farmers’ markets in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe (Åsebø et al. 2007; Connell et al. 2008; Hinrichs 2000; Holloway and Kneafsey 2000; Kirwan placing alternative food networks . 71 2004;Sage2003).IntheUnitedKingdom’slandscapesofconsumption,farmers’ markets “represent a new and distinctive dimension” (Holloway and Kneafsey 2000: 286) that owe their emergence and success to consumer awareness and interest in healthy and ecological consumption. Although markets have always existed, and the post–World War II dominance of supermarkets may be a historical anomaly, new farmers’ markets are distinguished from their traditional antecedents by their emphasis on such notions as quality, locality, organics,specialtygoods,andpremiumprices.Significantly,scholarshavefound that consumers...