Paper short abstract:

The ethnography follows a group of Romanian small-scale producers and peasant activists attached to Slow Food and Via Campesina international movements, attempting to capture how they relate to the repertoires of morality proposed by the two global movements.

Paper long abstract:

The Romanian food landscape is still negotiating with its past identification as Europe's 'grain barn' and struggling with the socialist legacy of collectivization and food rationalization. İn the last few years, while trying to fit under the EU's Common Agricultural Policy and under neoliberal economıc models, some Romanian food stakeholders have been attempting to widen the range of legitimate models of production and consumption.

Transformations in the food market have seen a shift from the postsocialist consumption patterns to a re-centralisation of the figure of the peasant or the semi-subsistence farmer in the food chain as the embodiment of a set of values and morality. Delegitimized for the past decades, confronted for a long time with the stigma of precariousness and often positioned in the gray economy, the peasant was deemed an uncomfortable hindrance in Romania's path to modernisation and Europeanization. Representing over 90% of the total of farmholds in Romania, some of the subsistence and semi-subsistence farmers are currently finding their voice on the national food agenda by occupying a stable niche of local gourmet 'quality' foodstuffs that eliminates many of the sources of uncertainty in the foodchain. İ am analyzing how the involvement with Slow Food and Via Campesina of a small network of such farmers in Transylvania provides them with acces to global knowledge fluxes and to a repertoire of strategies to avoid the trappings of the economic crisis.

By refering to their story, I am discussing a possible route from victim to winner in the global capitalist model of economy.