Alternative Food Networks: how artisan cheese reconnects producer, consumer and nature

Slapikaite, Asta

4. term

European Studies, Master

2017

2017-11-01

111 pages

The conventional agro-food system is a great achievement of the 21st century, involving industrialization and globalization of the food sector and complex food supply chains. On the one hand, it provides a great variety of food emerging from different parts of the world; on the other hand, it disconnects people from the places where food is grown. The industrial food system is also connected with climate change processes through unsustainable agricultural practices, long transportation distances and other factors. Different production processes and artificial additives in the food as well as in animal feed are connected with outbreaks of food scares such as BSE and the contamination of eggs with the insecticide fipronil. This causes governments and consumers alike to question the safety of the food system. Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) emerged as a response to negative economic, social and ecological effects in the conventional food system. The European Commission (EC) has also started to pay more attention to the importance of the agro-food sector relocalization by shortening supply chains. Short food supply chains (SFSCs) are seen as a means to reconnect production and consumption practices, and also as a way to increase food quality. In this master thesis, small-scale farming is analyzed in a rural Lithuanian context, taking the example of local artisan cheese producers. These small-scale cheesemakers form alternatives to the conventional modes of food provisioning by producing cheese from the raw milk of their own animals kept in their farms and then selling it directly to the consumers or through a single intermediary. The theoretical lens of this thesis is post-structuralism, which sees all actors as relational. The Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) is a tool used to research relationality among humans and non-humans. This paper aims at discovering how different actors interlink in AFNs through the lens of the ANT and how this relationality shapes the Lithuanian as well as the European food system.

Alternative Food Networks ; Short Food Supply Chain ; Actor-Network-Theory ; small-scale farming ; artisan cheese ; Lithuania

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