This timely book provides a critical review of the growth of alternative food networks and their struggle to defend their ethical and aesthetic values against the standardising pressures of the corporate mainstream with their "placeless and nameless" global supply networks. It explores how these alternative movements are "making a difference" and their possible role as fears of global climate change and food insecurity continue to intensify.

Part 1 1. Introducing Alternative Food Networks, Fair Trade Circuits and The Politics Of Food 2. Coming Home To Eat? Reflexive Localism and Just Food 3. Bridging Production and Consumption: Alternative Food Networks as Shared Knowledge Practice Part 2: Alternative Food Provisioning In Britain And Western Europe: Introduction And Antecedents 4. Rural Europe Redux? The New Territoriality and Rural Development 5. Into the Mainstream: The Politics Of Quality 6. Changing Paradigms? Food Security Debates and Grassroots Food Re-Localization Movements in Britain and Western Europe Part 3: Alternative Food Movements In The US: Formative Years, Mainstreaming, Civic Governance And Knowing Sustainability 7. Broken Promises? US Alternative Food Movements, Origins and Debates 8. Resisting Mainstreaming, Maintaining Alterity 9. Sustainable Agriculture as Knowing and Growing Part 4: Globalizing Alternative Food Movements: The Cultural Material Politics of Fair Trade 10. The Shifting Cultural Politics of Fair Trade: From Transparent to Virtual Livelihoods 11. The Price and Practices of Quality: The Shifting Materialities of Fair Trade Networks 12. The Practices and Politics of a Globalized AFN: Whither the Possibilities and Problematics of Fair Trade? 13. Concluding Thoughts