The ongoing complex crises have thrown into stark relief the vulnerability and unsustainability of the current food systems. At the same time, they have brought popular and academic attention to food as an arena for experimenting with and contesting novel ways of food provisioning. An important but often neglected opportunity for enhanced resilience of the food systems rests in the combination of the dominant capitalist food system with is diverse alternatives. While research on alternative food networks, food self-provisioning, sharing, foraging and other non-market or community-based alternatives mushroomed in recent decades, it developed in almost complete isolation from research on the conventional system. In contrast to this epistemic separation, many households combine food from conventional and alternative sources in their daily routines.

This Session aims to explore links and interdependencies between the food systems, the hybrid spaces “in between”, and the ways the systems mutually interact and influence each other. Our objective is to look at these links, spaces and interactions from the perspective of resilience while stressing the practicalities of household’s everyday practices. Welcomed are contributions about food self-provisioning, alternative food networks and other alternatives which take into account the place of the dominant food system in shaping practices, motivations and values attached to produced, shared or consumed food. We also invite critical research on the conventional food system’s sensitivities to actual or potential influences of food alternatives. Both conceptual and empirical contributions are welcome, as are papers using various theoretical lenses and located in diverse social and geographical contexts.

The contributions may aim at the following themes, but are not limited to them: