Different Forms of Embeddedness at Istanbul’s Bazaar and Farmers Market

Abstract

This paper assesses what social, ecological, and spatial embeddedness of food entails in different food exchange sites in Istanbul. The paper argues that discussions around embeddedness have focused primarily on cases from the Global North and have ignored sites from the Global South where different food actors (wholesalers, vendors, farmers, farmer-vendors) and production practices (local vs. alternative (certified organic vs. PGS vs. not-certified organic or 'natural') vs. conventional) can and do coexist in the same food exchange site. Then, using participant observation and interview data from Istanbul's bazaars (periodic markets) and farmers markets associated with the locavore movement (FMs), the paper shows that food is re-socialized and re-spatialized in both sites; however, what that socialization and spatialization entails (in each site) is constitutively different: The FMs aim to generate a community of eco-conscious food citizens even as there may be significant socio-economic differences between consumers and producers who participate at the FMs; whereas bazaars emphasize the maintenance of neighborhood communities. Yet, who constitutes those communities is neighborhood-and bazaar-specific. At the city's outskirts, such communities may include vendors, farmer-vendors, and consumers; whereas at bazaars more centrally located, the neighborhood community generated and maintained outside the bazaars tends to be reproduced at the bazaars, thus usually excluding the vendors. In short, not only are there differences between these two different types of sites in terms of the social, spatial, and ecological embeddedness of food, but there may also be differences within the types depending on where each site is located. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these differences for the food movement in Turkey in general, and for the locavore movement in particular.