Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) are a system of food provision which is considered as the embodiment of the Sustainable Development (SD) agenda. They typically operate counteractively to conventional food networks (CFNs) seeking to reconnect all members in the supply chain through ethical and sustainable engagements. They are grounded by the theoretical underpinnings of quality conventions (Murdoch, 2000; Thévenot, 2002) and embeddedness notions such as alterity, valorisation, and appropriation (Dansero & Puttilli, 2014; Kirwan, 2004). Many scholars have focused on exploring AFNs in various contexts, initially focusing on binary notions of dichotomy between AFNs and CFNs, then developing discourse in terms of assessing hybridity (Holloway et al., 2006; Maye, 2013; Ponte, 2016; Renting, Marsden, & Banks, 2003; Tregear, 2011). Recent studies have indicated the potential for further research concerning social media based AFNs (Bos & Owen, 2016; Reed & Keech, 2017; Wills & Arundel, 2017). Therefore a contribution in terms of further understanding this issue arises from this thesis. The research was conducted in the midst of the referendum for the UK to withdraw from the European Union, the subsequent ‘leave’ vote resulting in a level of uncertainty in terms of policy implications. One policy implication may be that the UK will have to readdress the way it engages and supports its food and agriculture sector post-Common Agricultural Policy, therefore this research comes at a timely juncture. This research adopts an interpretivistic epistemological stance, with a constructivist ontological position. Social network analysis (SNA) of Twitter connections was conducted in order to assess connectivity and density of the AFN that was present in Chester and its region. Content analysis of this network was then conducted in order to understand SD related terms and shortlist pertinent actors for further analysis. Interviews were conducted with nine actors from this network in order to critically evaluate their perceptions of SD from an online and offline perspective. The results of the SNA suggest that the AFN of Chester and its region was not particularly well connected in terms of density. However, the SNA was a useful data collection tool, especially concerning the replicability and transferability of participant selection strategy. Further results suggested that there was a need for more organisational structures to support AFNs in becoming more mainstream and collaborative. It was also clear that there was still a degree of opposition between CFNs and AFNs, despite hybridity. A final finding of the research is the consideration of smart localism. The implications of this research are discussed, along with suggestions for future research including; the need to better understand leadership, relations between AFNs and CFNs, the role played by intermediates, and the expansion of social media based research.

While scholars and activists have analyzed the consequences of a largely white, middle-class membership in the alternative food movement, lesser consideration has been given to the relationship food has with gentrification processes. On Chicago's West Side, alternative food spaces such as gardens, restaurants and farmers markets are staking a physical and cultural claim in longstanding communities of color. Food is perhaps unique and more powerful than prior initiators of gentrification such as art due to its mundane, everyday qualities that intersect with its ability to uphold class distinctions. Using qualitative interviews, participant-observation and a literature review, I will examine how alternative food contributes to and is a form of resistance against the uprooting of longstanding Puerto Rican and Mexican communities on Chicago's West Side. Readers who have an investment in the alternative food movement must be conscientious of these tensions and consider resisting gentrification by creating inclusive, intercultural food spaces.

Alternative food systems (AFSs) are so defined because they purport to challenge a value or ameliorate a negative impact of the dominant conventional food system (CFS). Short food supply chains (SFSCs) are a type of AFS whose alterity is defined by socially proximal economic exchanges that are embedded in and regulated by social relationships. This relational closeness is argued to have benefits with respect to economic, environmental, and social sustainability. However, it would be a mistake to assume that AFSs and CFSs are paradigmatically differentiated or that their structures engender particular outcomes. The first article traces a misguided attempt to find indicators of success for farms participating in short food supply chains. The effort was misguided, because in designing the original study there was an assumption that producers participating in these AFSs shared similar goals, values, and definitions of success. The true diversity of these variables was discovered through the analysis of eighteen semi-structured interviews with Burlington and Montpelier area farmers who participate in SFSCs. This diversity motivated an exploration of the origins, common applications, and recent academic skepticism regarding assumptions of the relationship between certain food systems structures and broader food systems outcomes. The second article undertakes to develop a framework for exploring the actual motivations of SFSCs farmers and challenging common AFS assumptions. A framework that differentiates motivations guided by formal and substantive rationality is used to code the aforementioned data. Common themes amongst the responses are discussed demonstrating that producer motivations for participating in AFSs can be diverse, contradictory, and subject to change.

Alternative food networks (AFNs) have become a common response to the socioecological injustices generated by the industrialized food system. Using a political ecology framework, this paper evaluates the emergence of an AFN in Chiapas, Mexico. While the Mexican context presents a particular set of challenges, the case study also reveals the strength the alternative food movement derives from a diverse network of actors committed to building a “community economy” that reasserts the multifunctional values of organic agriculture and local commodity chains. Nonetheless, just as the AFN functions as an important livelihood strategy for otherwise disenfranchised producers it simultaneously encounters similar limitations as those observed in other market-driven approaches to sustainable food governance.

The food provision system of today has been argued to be unsustainable with large scale production, price-pressure and outbreaks of diseases. Many consumers in the EU and Sweden are reacting to these issues and are becoming increasingly interested in finding local food alternatives that they consider to be safer and of higher quality. However, the small local food producers due to scarce budgets and marketing skills have problems in reaching this target market. Partly due to this, there has been an emergence of Alternative Food Networks (AFN) within which producers come together to get assistance in marketing and sales. Social media has emerged as a phenomenon that is argued by marketing scholars to be a highly useful tool to spread information in a cost-efficient way. Therefore, this study seek to answer the explorative question: “How do Alternative Food Networks use social media in order to help small local food producers reach the market?” The main purpose of the thesis is to explore and develop an understanding of how the emerging AFNs use social media to promote small local agricultural producers and help them in reaching the market. This will be done by investigating AFNs as Small-Medium Enterprise (SME) marketing networks, and how these operate in terms of the theoretical areas external marketing communication, coordination of the SME marketing network, segmentation practices and sales promotion. The theoretical contribution is to see how AFNs work in terms of these areas, and the practical implications will be to give advice on how AFNs should use social media to improve these areas. The study is done in an exploratory manner, and the data collection has been performed in accordance with qualitative research. This has been done through seven semi-structured interviews with respondents from six different AFNs in Sweden that are active on social media. The conclusions of this study shows that AFNs value the use of social media, however they utilize this tool to a varied degree. The AFNs use it to inform and to interact with their customers. Social media does not seem to be very actively incorporated into network communication or monitoring. The AFNs have many ideas about who their customer groups are, and in some cases these have been identified specifically on social media, which has been used to some extent for targeted advertising. The AFNs position themselves as a “good” food alternative. In sales promotion the AFNs mainly promote their events on social media, and have also promoted discounts to some extent. The study provides new theoretical knowledge in the area of marketing through social media by SMEs like AFNs. Practical implications for the AFNs are discussed, which mainly involve increasing the time spent on social media as a mainly free and powerful marketing tool.

This thesis unpacks the social life of an alternative food "thing". It is empirically grounded in an intensive ethnography and draws on the conceptual resources of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to narrate alterity as it is manifest in an alternative food network (AFN). Following and tracing British Organic Biodynamic (BOB) wheat, the research weaves through the seed (from breeding to certification), the grain crop's cultivation, harvest and milling, and the final transformations from flour to real bread and its consumption. The storying of the BOB wheat's social life, its social relations and subsequent transformations reveals a persistent blurring of formal distinctions separating 'nature' and 'culture', humans and nonhumans, and production and consumption. Most importantly, it disrupts the traditional categorization of food networks as either 'conventional' or 'alternative'. The analysis of the BOB wheat's social life betrays the imagined purity of alterity of this supposed alternative food network, unveiling a heterogeneous web of hybrid actants and multiple performances of wheats. The analysis reveals a conflict within the BOB wheat network, by demonstrating how performances that are presented as deeply incommensurable are nevertheless inextricably and intimately connected. Consequently, 'conventional', and some 'more-than-conventional', performances threaten to undermine the BOB wheat networks' legitimacy as an AFN. Further, they intimate an ontological impurity that threatens the very possibility of alterity. Accordingly, my analysis narrates the BOB wheat network's efforts to stabilize alterity and expand the collective, through the purification of these incommensurable versions of the wheat. Ultimately, this process of purification works to persistently reconstitute modern ontological binaries, specifically the alternative-convention bifurcations of food networks. To conclude I suggest that this purification, the making and manifesting of alterity, is woven through the contemporary biopolitical dispositive - persistently circulating and remaking, Modern ontological framings of reality as well as the moral and ethical values therein.

Gli scenari agricoli europei rivelano un crescente interesse per le filiere corte come strumento di promozione dei sistemi alimentari locali. Nonostante i piccoli agricoltori siano la spina dorsale dell'agricoltura europea, gli interventi politici e legislativi che si sono susseguiti nei decenni non hanno sufficientemente tutelato ne promosso la loro attuale posizione in ambito socio-economico. Il presente lavoro mira a fornire un'approfondita analisi del ruolo delle filiere corte all'interno del quadro normativo europeo per comprendere se l’attuale legislazione sostiene o piuttosto inibisce questi sistemi alternativi di produzione e distribuzione alimentare. Muovendo dall'esame della pletora di definizioni attribuite alla filiera corta e soffermandosi su una revisione critica delle più significative riforme della PAC, in particolare alla luce della strategia 'Farm to Fork', vengono identificate nuove priorità che appaiono più favorevoli ai piccoli agricoltori. Lo studio è arrichito da un confronto tra l'approccio adottoato dell'UE - caratterizzato principalmente da strumenti di hard law e misure top-down -, e quello della California ‘socialmente auto-regolato’, in cui gli 'Alternative Food Movements' e le strategie bottom-up sono attori principali nella regolamentazione della filiere corte e del loro impatto sulla comunità. Lo scopo finale é quello di identificare potenziali elementi utili che, se adottati, potrebbero migliorare il modello europeo. / European agricultural landscapes are undergoing fundamental changes, revealing an increasing interest in Short Food Supply Chains as a tool to promote local food systems and products. Despite small farmers are the backbone of agriculture in the EU, both policy leadership and legal interventions have been not sufficiently fostering their position in the socio and economic today’s narrative. The study aims at providing an extensive analysis of the role of SFSCs within the EU legal framework to understand whether EU legislation supports or rather inhibits these alternative systems of production and supply. Moving from the examination of the plethora of SFSC definitions to a critical revision of the most significant CAP reforms, especially in the light of the ‘Farm to Fork’ strategy, new priorities that seem more favorable to small farmers are identified. The study is enriched by a comparison between the EU legal approach - mainly characterized by hard law instruments and top-down measures -, and the Californian ‘socially self-regulated’ approach, where Alternative Food Movements and bottom-up strategies act as the main player in regulating SFSCs and their impact on the community with the aim of identifying potential insights that could improve the EU model.

Over the past decade, concerns regarding food safety and access to and control over food have become widespread in South Korea and are often associated with concerns over the global agri-food system. Large consumer cooperatives that have memberships that can exceed 800,000 members have emerged as a popular and effective way of addressing these concerns. Yet, these important alternatives to the global agri-food system have received little attention by researchers and policymakers alike. This study investigated attitudes towards an ongoing agricultural and rural crisis and food concerns for consumers and farmers in South Korea. Further, the roles of consumer cooperatives in addressing this crisis and as an alternative to the global food system were documented. Surveys were conducted with 412 conventional consumers and 452 consumers that were members of consumer cooperatives as well as 166 conventional farmers, and 118 farmers that grow food for these cooperatives. In addition, 11 Korean food experts that reflect a wide diversity of stakeholder interests including government, NGO, universities and farmers were also interviewed. Korean consumers identified that freshness was the most important factor when they purchase foods, followed by food safety and price. It seemed that the global agri-food system is unlikely to address these consumer concerns. Public rallies that raised concerns about the import of beef from the US reflected widespread public resistance to agricultural globalization and the pursuit of economic liberalization by the Korean government. Participants perceived that government policies neglected domestic agriculture and were the primary cause of low rate of food self-sufficiency in Korea. Both conventional farmers and member farmers strongly opposed policies that promote industrial economic growth at the expense of local farmers and food systems. Farmers in this study were generally highly critical of the global agri-food system, especially those that were relatively young and well educated. Member farmers benefitted from their relationships with consumer cooperatives, and earned an 11-30% premium compared to farmers that sell their products to large retail markets. Korean consumer cooperatives represent an important frame for building alternative food systems and for promoting cooperation between consumers and farmers into the future. / February 2016

Alternative food networks (AFNs) are the focus of an ‘explosive growth’ of research in Europe (Goodman 2004), and the term covers a wide range of activities, from food banks, community gardens, and farmers’ markets, to community supported or organic agriculture. However, there is an impasse in differing positions over whether AFNs represent an exclusionary place-based ‘quality turn’ (Ilbery and Kneafsey 2000), or whether they contribute to inclusive local communities, sustainability and food security (Tregear 2011, Kirwan and Maye 2013). This research aimed to clarify these debates, through exploration of UK allotments as a benchmark for AFNs, using the case of Plymouth, SW England. A political ecology perspective of social-ecological systems (Ostrom 2008) was used to investigate the activities, relations and governance involved in allotments and AFNs, organised through the concepts of multidimensional capital assets (Bebbington 1999). This research demonstrates how activities on allotments involve human, social, cultural, natural and political capital assets, encompassing both basic food security and a quality turn towards ‘good food’ (Sage 2003). Taking the long view, it is seen that the relative importance of the different asset dimensions are contingent on wider socio-political settings. Relations on allotments illustrate the building of social capital, which extends to wider communities of interest, practice and place (Harrington et al. 2008), and which involves values of social justice that can be explained as diverse or care economies (Gibson-Graham 2008, Dowler et al. 2010). However, the politics and governance of allotments are largely influenced by neoliberal policies that favour oligopolistic and transnational food systems and restrict urban land allocations for place-based food initiatives. Present-day urban population densities are at levels far higher than envisaged for the original garden cities. Nevertheless, alliances at neighbourhood, city, regional, national and transnational scales are coalescing around the values represented in the original setting up of the UK allotment system: of self-reliance, human-scale settlements and the restorative value of the natural environment. Any realization of the potential contribution of allotments and AFNs to the sustainability and resilience of food supplies for urban populations (Armitage et al. 2008, Folke et al. 2010) ultimately depends on multilevel responses to a large range of challenges. Finally, the thesis contends that, in the present day, evidence is building up around the potential of allotments and many other AFN activities, or place-based food systems, to meet multiple policy objectives through aligned values.

Este experimento teve como objetivo avaliar a utilização do glicerol em substituição ao óleo de soja degomado, como fonte energética alternativa na alimentação de fêmeas suínas em lactação, quanto a sua viabilidade zootécnica e econômica. O estudo foi realizado em delineamento de blocos casualizados, com quatro tratamentos, sendo um com óleo de soja degomado e outros três com níveis crescentes de glicerol (3, 6 e 9%), onde 32 fêmeas foram distribuídas em oito blocos, de acordo com a ordem de parto (3ª a 5ª). Cada unidade experimental foi representada por uma baia contendo uma fêmea, ao início do período experimental, que teve duração de 21 dias. As variáveis analisadas foram: 1) diferentes níveis de inclusão; 2) desempenho zootécnico (consumo diário de ração-CDR e perda de peso-PP); 3) características de carcaça (espessura de toucinho-ET, profundidade de olho de lombo-POL e rendimento de carne magra-RCM); 4) análise da leitegada (peso médio ao desmame e ganho de peso). Além disso, foi realizado o estudo da viabilidade econômica da utilização do glicerol. O consumo diário de ração, a perda de peso, o intervalo desmame cio e as características de carcaça das fêmeas, não apresentaram diferenças estatísticas entre as duas fontes energéticas, bem como suas inclusões. Já o peso ao desmame e o ganho de peso da leitegada, foram melhores estatisticamente no grupo suplementado com óleo de soja degomado, porém não apresentaram diferenças entre os diferentes níveis de glicerol avaliados. De forma geral, a possibilidade da utilização do glicerol como fonte energética alternativa é viável na alimentação de fêmeas suínas lactantes, entretanto, nos níveis estudados, esta utilização é limitante quanto ao desempenho dos leitões e quanto ao preço deste subproduto no mercado. Para uma melhor avaliação do glicerol, são necessários maiores estudos, principalmente no quesito dos seus efeitos sobre a composição láctea de porcas suplementadas com este subproduto. / This experiment aimed to evaluate the use of glycerol as a substitute for crude soybean oil as an alternative energy source in feed for lactating sows, as its zootechnical and economic viability. The study was conducted in a randomized block design with four treatments, one with crude soybean oil and three other with increasing levels of glycerol (3, 6 and 9%), where 32 females were divided into eight blocks, according to birth order (3rd to 5th). Each experimental unit was represented by a box containing a female, at the beginning of the trial period, which lasted 21 days. The variables analyzed were: 1) different levels of inclusion, 2) production performance (daily feed intake and weight loss), 3) carcass traits (backfat thickness, depth of rib eye and lean meat yield, 4) analysis of the litter (weaning weight and weight gain). In addition, the study of the economic feasibility of the use of glycerol was conducted. The daily feed intake, weight loss, interval of weaning estrus and carcass characteristics of females, presented no significant differences between the two energy sources, as well as its inclusions. The weaning weight and litter weight gain were statistically better in the group supplemented with crude soybean oil, but presented no differences between the different levels of glycerol evaluated. In general, the possibility of the use of glycerol as a viable alternative energy source in feed for lactating sows is viable, however, in the studied levels, this use is limiting as to the performance of piglets and on the price of this by-product in the market. For a better evaluation of glycerol, further studies are needed, especially in the issue of their effects on milk composition of sows supplemented with this byproduct.