Encounter on a home-delivered raw milk route

Abstract

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Local food practices are an increasingly visible as acts of resistance to the mainstream food system. Some characterize these initiatives as a quiet social movement while others view them as utopian and fairly innocuous alternatives to an ever encroaching capitalism. Despite a heated debate, few in-depth empirical studies of specific local food initiates exist. This dissertation contributes to these themes through an ethnography of a home-delivered raw milk route. Paying attention to both producers and consumers on the milk route, I use cultural analysis to explore the how and why of participation in this local food project. Drawing on narratives, interviews and participant observation from the milk route, I argue that the local food movement's 'coming into being' as a moral imagining, as the representation and practice of food choices rather than the discipline of progressive food politics, emphasizes the ambivalent context of late-capitalism, its instability and uncertainty in relation to knowing how and what to eat.