Short abstract:

Collective food procurement networks in European cities produce a shared language and imagery about food sustainability, health, and urban inclusion. However these voyages of self-transformation get seldom inscribed in policy and have so far failed to change food systems’ markets and politics.

Long abstract:

This paper explores how “different ways of assembling things give rise to different social relations”, as per the panel call, with reference to urban food systems. Building on the ERC-funded project ‘Food Citizens?’ (www.foodcitizens.eu), the paper will show how different Collective Food Procurement Networks (CFPN) address the scale of their practices, and how and if they could be considered “self-managed social movements”. The ways they value and approach volunteer work, crafting food, and gardening skills also implies considerations of solidarity and diversity among and within their networks. The project’s i-doc (https://www.foodcitizens.eu/idoc/) allows navigating fifty case studies in Poland, the Netherlands and Italy (in the cities of Gdansk, Rotterdam and Turin) to juxtapose and contrast what kind of communities CFPNs create and how they relate and compare with each other. This paper will add the PI’s insights from ethnographic fieldwork personally conducted in the Netherlands, to consider how self-managing, craft, and social participation go hand in hand in discourses of sustainability, focusing in particular on individual and collective bodies and health, and more-than-human life and well-being. Defining an appropriate scale and pace includes, among the ‘new traditions’ created, as suggested by the panel call, a rediscovered celebration of taste, artisanship, and pleasure in food preparation and conviviality, where the materiality of food, tools, spaces, and rhythms plays an important part. Less so though, do CFPN impact sustainability politics. The market, and global (food) economies remain the orthodox frame of reference for policy-making and for the management of organizations.