Localized Food Production and Consumption Practices in the City. Social Relations through Non Conventional Food in Oaxaca, Mexico

Abstract

The objective of this article is to illustrate the potentiality of food practices in the establishment of social relations. Based on an ethnographic study undertaken in the city of Oaxaca of those involved in the AgroSano food production project and linked to it through a responsible consumption group called El Tenate Básico, the perspectives that explain these productive practices and forms of consumption as a form of resistance against the global food industry are interrogated. A counter-dominant vision is proposed that emphasizes the importance of practices that embody vital concerns such as producing and procuring clean, locally sourced food. This experience shows how the organization of a group of people to produce food has triggered the localized appropriation of environmental and health care ideals outside transnational corporations or public policies as entities that organize food production and consumption. Emphasis is placed on the emergence of a way of practicing and imagining different forms of producing and eating that reduce the gap between producers and consumers in the urban sphere and empirically interrogate totalizing ideas such as the power of the global food regime.