Paper short abstract:

Solidarity economies is a concrete utopia taking shape in Greece around alternative food distribution systems. The paper focuses on this food activism to explore its anti-crisis features.

Paper long abstract:

Sidelining market middlemen in food distribution has become a core issue in food activism. In crisis-ridden Greece, the social movement around it claims 'solidarity' as its organizing theme. Anthropological literature on crises can benefit from approaches that assess grassroots cooperatives formed during periods of capitalist recession, to address food distribution. This paper examines the relationship between Greece's solidarity economy and food-distribution cooperatives, and argues that the latter is a development of the former in the future plans of people struggling against the crisis. It elucidates the distribution of agrarian produce, in ways that side-line market middlemen. This is done by ethnographically analyzing the distribution of food without middlemen, an organized social response against the crisis. The paper makes a case for there being a need to pay more attention to the (alternative) alliances and networks operating in the distribution sector in food studies. It will point out how participants engaged in initiatives related to the solidarity economy tend to imagine that their activities are inspired by larger aims and claims than the immediate significance of their material actions.