In this article, I consider how organisations within 'Alternative' Food Networks (AFNs) might help us to enact a more-than-human ethic of care in the Anthropocene. Drawing on the diverse economies framework of J.K. Gibson-Graham (2006a; 2006b) as well as readings in the feminist ethics of care literature, I explore an ethnographic study of three Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) schemes in the North West of England. Whilst there has been surprisingly little scholarly work linking food and the Anthropocene, much more has been made of the relationship between the food system and Anthropogenic processes of climate change. The orthodox responses to the problems that climate change may bring about are undergirded by Hobbesian visions and the perceived viability of instrumental, technocratic 'fixes' that are, for many reasons, worthy of critique. Broadening our viewpoint, and recognising that the Anthropocene and climate change require different responses, I argue that AFNs can provide a more hopeful perspective in how we might understand our existence within a more-than-human world. Rather than reading AFNs through analytical binaries as either reformist or radical entities merely confronting the ills of the food system, I develop an account that instead understands them as open-ended and tantalisingly different forms of organisation (Stock et al., 2015b) that can play a central role in fostering a more-than-human ethics of care for the Anthropocene.

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The adverse consequences of contemporary agri-food relations, particularly in terms of public health and environmental sustainability, have led to growing calls-across interdisciplinary research and policy perspectives-for fundamental systemic change. Focusing on the interconnections and 'workings' of agri-food systems, these accounts have coalesced around the vernacular of transformation to think through the possible ways in which these relations might be configured differently. Against this backdrop, the relationship between food 'production' and food 'consumption' emerges as a key problem. This article revisits debates developed within Sociologia Ruralis approximately two decades ago concerning the terms on which consumption and consumers are brought into agri-food scholarship, arguing that these are given renewed impetus in the context of contemporary calls for agri-food transformation. We build on and advance these previous integrative efforts both by taking stock of recent advances in consumption studies and by responding to the shifting contours of food politics. The analysis focuses on the case of alternative proteins and outlines three substantiveThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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