Supermarkets and Their Alternatives: The Politics and Practices of Sustainable Food: Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment

The global rise and expansion of supermarkets is often criticised but provides evident benefits to consumers. This volume critically examines the relationship between the large-scale globalised conventional food system, as epitomised by supermarkets, and its small-scale localised alternatives. In particular, it interrogates the ways in which the large and the small-scale are mutually entangled and symbiotically co-exist. As such, it challenges and extends current debates about sustainable food systems, which commonly position globalised supermarkets and their localised alternatives as diametrically opposed.

The authors present a series of in-depth chapters and shorter commentaries that explore the ways in which producers and consumers, in a range of geographical contexts, engage and experience supermarkets in their everyday lives. It draws attention to the benefits gained and challenges faced when local producers deal with supermarkets both as a route to market and as competition and the ways that consumers find alternatives in supermarket spaces. The contributions further elucidate how notions of alternative and local foods are ideologically constructed in opposition to seemingly placeless supermarkets, while also demonstrating how these ideals are often at odds with the reality of consumers and producers practices, which imbue supermarkets with place and locality.

Uniquely, the book thus draws together producers and consumers perspectives, and encourages the reader to see interconnections between these two groups, as well as critically reflecting on how the global is made local, and vice-versa. These dynamics, and the background framing of sustainability are made explicit in the final section of the book, which examines the shifting environments of supermarkets and the ways, in turn, that supermarkets change the environments in which they are situated. "