Paper short abstract:

Today in Tuscany, small groups of people aim to recreate in their free time the conditions of food production under sharecropping economies, according to an idealized, generational idea of sharing and mutualism, that they feel lost in market economies and mass-consumption.

Paper long abstract:

Today, in Tuscany, small groups of people in their sixties/seventies aim to recreate in their free time (out of their principal occupations) the conditions of food production they experienced when they were children, and their parents worked under sharecropping contracts (since the 1970s-1980s). Persuaded of the genuine nature and sustainability of self-produced food in a time of climate and economic uncertainty, they manage together vegetable gardens, reproducing the social organization of work in sharecropping farms. Especially, they grow and pick their products together, and occasionally involve other friends in big seasonal works (e.g., olive harvest), trying to recreate the mutual, convivial atmosphere that characterized these circumstances when they were children. Also, they offer their products to people they feel intimate/important for them – especially Vinsanto, that maintains its extra-dietary social value.

Food production, circulation and consumption become therefore fields where symbolically reconstructing a context of social relationships and values that these people experienced in their youth but feel lost in the present. Paradoxically, they recognize the developments of the following decades emancipated their generation from the vexatious living conditions of their parents. But at the same time, they feel in this process the supportive, reciprocal, and authentic sociability that (necessarily) characterized that time of labor and deprivations have been lost.

Food therefore contributes to nourish social intimacy among these people, that participate in sharing an ethical (not strictly political) idea of living, and feel that the structural conditions for its realization have been canceled by “disenchanting” market economies and mass-consumption.