Moving beyond direct marketing, food systems work is increasingly connecting sustainably grown food with supermarkets, dining services, and other mainstream outlets. It is here that growers come face-to-face with the rigid conditions of a globalized food system. In this paper we document the emergence of mission-driven intermediaries as bridging institutions in the middle spaces of American agriculture that are using value addition and strategic scaling up to connect alternative food systems to local and regional markets at profitable prices. Through in-depth interviews with Working Landscapes of Warrenton, North Carolina, we describe one path to becoming a Mission-Driven Intermediary, in which intermediaries with roots in the nonprofit sector evolve into organizations of hybrid form that include revenue-generating activities. This institutional heterodoxy allows lateral alliances with diverse entities that help recombine existing resources in new ways, enabling the organization to demonstrate long-term commitment to the local food project while successfully improvising to survive in a highly competitive and corporatized industry. [Working Landscapes, local food systems, mission-driven intermediaries, supply chains]
In communities across North America, organizations have launched local food system initiatives as a response to the depredations of the globalized agri-food economy; however, they increasingly find that they cannot achieve their desired impacts or sustain their ventures by operating solely within their home communities. Consequently, they embark on regional food system development initiatives. Drawing upon the experiences of 41 organizations-including Working Landscapes, a
Advocates for structural change in the food system see opportunity in alternative food systems (AFS) to bolster sustainability and equity. Indeed, any alternative to industrial labor practices is assumed to be better. However, little is known about what types of jobs are building AFS or job quality. Failing to understand job quality in AFS risks building a sustainable but exploitative industry. Using a unique and large data set on job openings in AFS, this paper narrows this gap by providing an assessment of labor demand and job quality for AFS in the United States between 2010 and 2019. Job advertisements are matched to 2018 Standard Occupation Codes to characterize work. Wages are compared to living wage standards and median incomes by occupation and local labor market. Considering living wage tests and local labor market competitiveness together, the potential for high job quality in AFS is mixed. Optimistically, higher prices in occupation that are close to consumers and experiencing significant labor demand, like food service and sales, saw more competitive wages. However, these roles frequently failed to offer living wages. Farm work occupations underperformed compared to local labor markets. In addition, uncompetitive senior-level jobs may indicate low-quality career pathways for leadership roles charting paths forward in AFS. These results suggest more institutional action are necessary to enhance labor quality within these spaces and more broadly across the food system. These results also raise questions about who is able to participate in AFS development and whether barriers to participate may replicate equity blind spots.
The development of wholesale markets fundamentally changed food provisioning in the United States. Because of this system, food today may travel around the world before it is eaten, requiring handling by untold numbers of workers and companies as well as technologies to safely store and transport it. Cities are tied up in the story of global food supply chains, as they are the endpoint for the majority of consumption.The transition to food provisioning via wholesale markets was a dramatic shift that is important for understanding food systems today, yet, with few exceptions, 1 the new and growing subfield of food systems planning has not much examined its history. 2 Movable Markets: Food Wholesaling in the Twentieth-Century City, by Helen Tangires, shrinks this gap by documenting the forms and spatial layouts of evolving wholesale markets across the United States over the course of the twentieth century.Tangires' first book 3 documented a proliferation of food retail stores in nineteenth-century cities as a result of deregulation. This sequel explores the rise of food wholesalers to supply these retail outlets. More specifically, the book investigates how, after food provisioning evolved into an activity that took up ample (and valuable) real estate, cities extricated wholesale markets from their downtowns and reconstructed them as invisible and peripheral to the city's infrastructure. Tangires argues that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) "was the 'visible hand' that guaranteed the movable feast" (p. 14) by setting the conditions and orchestrating resources in order to shift the wholesaling food system into developments designed from scratch for the modern era.To tell this story, Tangires focuses on the role that the USDA played in the fight over the future of the urban wholesale market. The depth of research is extensive and often includes fascinating images and illustrations of USDA's work. Tangires characterizes the development of food wholesale provisioning in terms of three eras, which also make up the three parts of the book. Each chapter provides examples from various cities, with the arcs of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Baltimore wholesale markets described in bits and pieces throughout. A wide range of terms are used to refer to actors in the wholesale sector, reflecting the diversity of people involved in the industry and the dramatic shifts it underwent. The terms are primarily undefined, in part, because they were inconsistently used historically and because they evolved over time. Nonetheless, it can add confusion. The story primarily features white men, and Tangires notes their xenophobic
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