Food System Intermediaries: Bonding and Bridging in China, Latin America, and Australia (Food, Health, and the Environment) - Softcover

Hearn, Adrian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262553511 ISBN 13: 9780262553513

Publisher: MIT Press, 2025

Synopsis

What does expanding agribusiness—and community resistance to it—reveal about the influence of global trends on local livelihoods, and conversely, the influence of food traditions on international networks?  In Food System Intermediaries, anthropologist Adrian Hearn examines how small farmers and their allies are defending their lands and livelihoods from expanding commodity plantations. At the heart of these encounters are food system intermediaries: people who carefully articulate food traditions to forge consensus among otherwise disconnected community producers, local governments, and urban customers. Their efforts to bring these groups together must contend with alternative portrayals of food circulated by more powerful corporate and government actors.

The book offers case studies of urban farms in Melbourne, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Beijing, and Havana to demonstrate how intermediaries are building alliances to cultivate more sustainable food systems, particularly as China’s impact on global agriculture deepens.

About this title

About the Author

Adrian H. Hearn teaches at the University of Melbourne. His books include Diaspora and Trust, Cuba, The Changing Currents of Transpacific Integration, and China Engages Latin America. His organization, Suns of Mercury, works with communities around the world to create music, films, and urban farms.

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262553511
• ISBN 13: 9780262553513
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 252