Tag Archives: degrowth

Susan Paulson: Gender-aware care in pandemic and postgrowth worlds

Coronavirus has provoked some of us to think about our worlds in new ways and to consider different horizons of change. Yet in many pandemic-related discourses and policies, I have been frustrated to see hegemonic ideals about care, kinship, and residence distract attention from empirical realities and adequate solutions. Examples range from the ubiquitous representation of care as embodied by women health workers and mothers to the shocking silence about disproportionate burdens of coronavirus illness and death born by men, and the wildly incorrect assumption that most humans live in and are cared for by nuclear family households.

Covid masculinities

Much attention has been drawn to vulnerabilities of women nurses, health aids, and caretakers. More gender awareness is needed for millions of men performing essential jobs as sanitation workers, truck and bus drivers, agricultural workers, miners, fishers, and loggers. These occupations are absolutely vital for public health, yet were already among the most dangerous and deadly before adding exposure to coronavirus. Around the world, they are performed overwhelmingly by men, in patterns of workplace violence so highly gendered that, in countries like USA, men suffer 92% of occupational deaths. The workplace, then, is a realm that calls urgently for improved care.

Data from countries around the world show that coronavirus infections tend to be much more severe among men than women, with death tolls as high as two times greater for men (Bhopal and Bhopal 2020). In the US, the death rate from coronavirus for men is 1.6 times that of women. This intersects with disproportionate burden of coronavirus infections and underlying conditions among racial and ethnic minorities, and among those who are less wealthy and less educated. In many contexts, then, it is poorer less-white men who are most vulnerable to suffer critical illness and death from coronavirus (Rushovich et. al 2021). Care for these groups needs to be much more visible in news and policy responses.

While analyses of structural inequalities in occupation, residence, and healthcare rarely address masculinities, some airtime has been dedicated to men’s behavior. Studies in various contexts found men to be much more likely than women to go without masks and to break quarantine. How can criticism of the behavior of individual men shift to societal commitments to supporting self-care among all humans, including variously positioned men?     

Is it useful to blame men for getting sick? Feminists have struggled to motivate compassion for women whose conditions constrain the development of skills and confidence needed to establish dignified lives for themselves. Transitions to care-full worlds will also require compassion for boys and men whose gender expectations push them to demonstrate their manliness by performing dangerous labor in hazardous conditions, by exercising and enduring violence, and by taking risks with their health and their lives. Perhaps the devastating gendered impacts of the virus can spark mobilization against gender-linked violence that harms men and women in different ways.

While some people find safety and comfort at home, others face conflict and crowding, or lack homes altogether. Reports from diverse countries indicate that domestic violence has intensified during lock-downs, impacting women disproportionately. People who don’t even live in homes face different kinds of vulnerabilities. In most countries, women outnumber men among residents in long-term care centers, while men make up majorities as high as 90% in prisons, jails, migrant labor camps, homeless shelters, immigrant detention centers, and military barracks, all of which became hotspots for the virus. In these residential patterns too, the forms of violence and discrimination borne by men intersect with ethno-racial and class inequalities. Demands of care for those not living in households call for moral and institutional shifts away from private family responsibility toward community and commons.

Normative households

Kinship and sexuality are also fundamental in the organization of care. Many public health messages, exemplified by those pictured below, reinforce the widespread—and incorrect—assumption that contemporary populations live mostly in heteronormative nuclear households. In the US, however, only 20% of households consists of nuclear families, as measured by the US Census Bureau. Can we do better at supporting the other 80% to respond to this pandemic and conditions of life beyond?

A public health announcement banner shows a photograph of a man and woman seated on either side of two small kids. Text reads: Covid-19. Es en serio! #QuédateEnCasa. AUS: Asociación de Usuarios Sanitas
Image 1: One of many COVID prevention posters depicting nuclear family households that dominate public health messages in the world

The false portrayal of residential life as reflecting a normative kinship model limits support for the actual residential and kin arrangements through which care and provisioning are organized in today’s societies. Inaccurate assumptions that all people live like the Flintstones, the Simpsons, or the Jetsons seriously limit public health efforts by obscuring empirical realities, which are plural. Those public messages also operate to demean and delegitimize other ways of living, and to stifle creative responses to coronavirus and other challenges.

An illustration of a Black person, wearing comfortable clothes, seated and reading a book with a houseplant in the background. Text reads: Stay Home, Yew Yorkers. Do your part to help stop the spread of coronavirus.
Image 2: New Yorkers Stay Home poster

Across wealthy countries, the most common household category is a single person living alone (27% US and Canadian households, 40% of Swedish households). This New Yorkers Stay Home poster taps into possibilities of nourishing companionship in uni-person households through literature and interspecies relations (human & plant). Another creative response to needs for care and conviviality is found in queer dance parties organized online with scopes ranging from local communities to celebrity-filled global gatherings. This is not a trivial example; opportunities to dance, laugh, move together not only provide care and acknowledgement needed in quarantine (and other isolating conditions), they can also build values and pleasures outside the realm of economic competition, consumption, and profit. Alliances with LGBTQ and related social movements help to honor the diverse household and kin arrangements that people are already living, and to support innovations provoked by the pandemic, as well as those motivated by desires for positive transformation.

Where did this ill-fitting model come from?

Generations of anthropologists and archaeologists have documented a rich variety of arrangements for care, protection, provisioning, and regeneration of human communities. These are often lumped together under the term “extended family,” reinforcing the false assumption that all kinship is based on the nuclear family, from which other relations may “extend.”

Today, much public discourse, together with a surprising amount of academic work, ignores the diverse realities of kinship across cultures and through history, and instead features an ideological model of (re)production that was established and disseminated with the rise of colonial capitalism, through the following historical processes:

  • conceptual and institutional divorce of market-oriented activities identified as “productive labor” from other activities identified as “reproductive care“   
  • designation of the first as “masculine” and the second as “feminine” allocation of disproportionate monetary value, resources, and power to masculine-associated production 
  • 20th century push toward nuclear family households as economic and residential unit
  • media, political, and educational messages convey expectations that human organization be based in heteronormative nuclear family households where men are excluded from care work
Images of three families from classic cartoons: The Simpsons, The Flintstones, and the Jetsons. All three family images include a father, a mother, one or more children, and at least one pet.
Image 3: Images from cartoon series suggesting that humans have always and will always live in single-family homes among heteronormative nuclear families with man bread-winner and woman care-provider. Audiences worldwide have watched the Flintstones since 1960, the Jetsons since 1962, and the Simpsons since 1989.

What drives ongoing pushes to keep imposing this model on populations that it so poorly represents? Why continue allocating responsibility of care to putative nuclear families in strategies that overburden some and fall short of needed care for many?

One key motive is the role this model has played as an instrument of industrial capitalist growth, adapted to engineer and to justify forms of appropriation that support profit and accumulation. The model has also been instrumental to the militarization of domestic and international conflicts related to this push. For me, then, challenging normative assumptions about this gender-kinship model is a vital move to curb and to heal eco-social damages provoked by the drive for growth.

What policies, practices, messages can support and motivate people of all identities to organize care with healthier arrangements of care?

A silver lining can be found in the potential of historical crises (like COVID-19 and climate break-down) to destabilize established orders, opening possibilities for new alliances toward healthier and more equitable worlds.

While respect for planetary boundaries demands degrowth of the total quantities of resources and energy transformed each day by the global economy, some features need to be nurtured and developed, namely infrastructures and institutions of care that enhance the well-being of more people in more places. Care-full paths forward are being explored by Degrowth and Feminism(s) Alliance (FaDA), in contexts including the coronavirus pandemic (Paulson 2020).

Amid the pandemic, we have been happily surprised to see governments experimenting with policies proposed in our book The Case for Degrowth (Kallis et al. 2020): companies and governments have reduced working hours, implemented work-sharing, and subsidized workers during quarantine and business closings. Enhanced public services have supported household and community economies, and mechanisms such as the US Defense Production Act have been mobilized to secure vital supplies and services.

Can we think about these moves as anticipatory strategies that may secure ongoing care for populations, and slow down the rush toward future disasters? For example, can provisional cash payments to sustain residents through the crisis lead the way to basic care incomes? Can defense budgets shift emphasis from updating military armaments toward protecting and regenerating human resources?

Policies like these may work in very different ways, depending on the degree to which they are institutionalized to stimulate economic growth or to promote equitable wellbeing; to prolong productivism or to support reproduction; to provide charity for vulnerable people or to replace hierarchical and exploitative social systems that produce those vulnerabilities.

Beware that these crises also nourish divisive and reactionary alliances. Amid the ongoing pandemic, powerful actors continue pushing to reconstitute the status quo, and to shift costs to others. There is danger that abilities to ally for change will be undermined by politics of fear, xenophobia, and blame; intensified surveillance and control; and isolation that constrains political organizing and all kinds of common efforts. Campaigns to discredit vaccinations and masks synergize with attacks against climate action, gender equity, and racial justice. All are rallied in the name of political economic stability and defense of geopolitical interests. On personal levels, this allied resistance to change is fueled by understandable fear of losing identities and relations that have been construed and experienced as natural, meaningful, and morally correct (even as I understand them as historically adapted to support growth). In the face of polarizing narratives and blame, what strategies can support shifts away from divisive competition toward mutual collaboration?

Conclusion

I would like to see economies slow down by design, not disaster, in ways that support societies to become more caring and equitable. However, it looks like transitions may be unplanned and messy, like those we are living through now. Finding ourselves amid global pandemic and climate change, we must seize opportunities to build healthier priorities, policies, and sociocultural systems. Such transitions depend on alliances among differently positioned actors. And they must involve attention to gender and kinship systems that honor diverse contributions, and that assure care and minimize vulnerabilities for all.


Susan Paulson is Professor at the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies. She studied and taught about human-environment relations during 15 years in Latin America, and taught sustainability studies during 5 years in Europe. Paulson contributes to theory and practice in political ecology; degrowth; and gender, masculinities and environment.


References

Bhopa, Sunsil and  Raj Bhopal. 2020. ‘Sex differential in COVID-19 mortality varies markedly by age.’ Lancet 396 (10250): 532-533.

Kallis, Giorgos, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria 2020. The Case for Degrowth. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Paulson, Susan 202. ‘Degrowth and feminisms ally to forge care-full paths beyond pandemic.’ Interface: A journal for and about social movements. Volume 12 (1): 232 – 246. https://www.interfacejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Interface-12-1-Paulson.pdf

Rushovich, Tamara, Marion Boulicault, Jarvis T. Chen, Ann Caroline Danielsen, Amelia Tarrant, Sarah S. Richardson, and Heather Shattuck-Heidorn 2021. ‘Sex Disparities in COVID-19 Mortality Vary Across US Racial Groups.’ Journal of General Internal Medicine 36: 1696-1701. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-021-06699-4.


Cite as: Paulson, Susan. 2022. “Gender-aware care in pandemic and postgrowth worlds.“ FocaalBlog, 26 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/26/susan-paulson-gender-aware-care-in-pandemic-and-postgrowth-worlds/

Andrew Flachs, Ankita Raturi, Juliet Norton, Valerie Miller, and Haley Thomas: Building back bigger or degrowing local food? US alternative food networks and post-corona agrarian economies

There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. – John Steinbeck

Midway through The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck turns away from the dispossessed Joad family to consider the injustice of a farm system that values profit over a flourishing rural economy. The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted local food economies and supply chains, and these disruptions have been centuries in the making: beginning with the privatization of commons, settler colonialism, redistribution of labor, and efforts to intensify the capitalization and technification of agricultural work. Like any agrarian crisis, the pandemic reveals cracks and opportunities amid hegemonic order (Flachs 2021). Although all stakeholders want to shift labor and production, their post-pandemic visions for the future differ: some advocate for an agrarian degrowth, yet others see the pandemic as a chance to better position themselves in a post-COVID hierarchy.

Food Regime (Friedmann and McMichael 1989) and Capitalocene (Moore 2015) analysts roughly agree in seeing agrarian capitalist crises emerging from industrializing Europe (Araghi 2000; Kautsky 1988) as a combination of colonialism and enclosure. As land in the colonial periphery was made cheap and exploitable, common land and labor relationships were severed back in the metropole through a slow process of privatization. In much of the world since the mid-20th century, farms became increasingly consolidated and production increasingly specialized as technology and capital appropriated discrete elements of farm production (Goodman, Sorj, and Wilkinson 1987).

Current pandemic-induced agri-food anxieties in the US stem from a century of agrarian change that has embraced productivism: the ideology that production yields and profit growth are and should be the key drivers of agriculture (Buttel 1993). In the decades following the Great Depression, US farm sizes have steadily increased while the number of individual farms has plummeted (Magdoff, Foster, and Buttel 2000), destabilizing land tenure, work, and rural institutions (Goldschmidt 1978).

A phone screenshot of a spreadsheet tab labeled "2021 Onions" with columns of data including "Market", price, quantities, and percentage calculations.
Image 1: This screenshot illustrates the digital record-keeping and spreadsheet logics that guide farmer decision-making, as well as the invisible infrastructures of pricing, efficiency, and abstraction predetermined by spreadsheets that may lead farmers to pursue growth and simplicity. Image shared by Midwest farmer participant, summer 2021.

Alternative food networks are common responses to acute economic crisis: Americans flocked to vegetable gardening during the first and second world wars (Lawson 2005), civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer organized America’s largest farm cooperative in response to the eviction of Black tenant farmers across the American South in the 1960s (White 2018), and Americans returned to urban gardens in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis (Flachs 2010; Poulsen et al. 2014). Shaken by shortages and price hikes at grocery stores, Americans rushed to buy vegetable seeds and garden supplies during the first waves of the pandemic, but they also supported an explosion of interest in local food through farmer’s markets, farm shares, and food deliveries.

To understand how local farmers responded to this sudden uptick in interest, we recruited farmers and farm managers as part of a larger, long-term project led by Dr. Ankita Raturi on data management and resilience in the local food system. Thanks to support from the Social Science Research Council’s Just Tech Covid-19 Rapid-Response program, we interviewed 12 local food coordinators and 29 Midwest farmers across rural, periurban, and urban environments to map the flows of information and food before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Growing Local Food

Farmers across the Midwest experienced the pandemic as a time of growth and expansion. “People were going to stores and they were out of meat, so it became this scramble: where can I get meat,” explained a rural Indiana beef farmer. “[It] opened their options a little bit more…We hear from some of our new customers that, ‘wow this is great!’ We didn’t know you were here this whole time and now we buy from you every other week.” Similarly, an urban herb and vegetable farmer laughed when we asked how his business coped with COVID-19. “Everything was booming through the roof…I don’t want to sound harsh, but the pandemic was good for farmers.” Growth is a desired goal here, outpacing the low-scale, high diversity local farms from before the pandemic. “This is the year of simplicity,” explained an urban farmer. “We don’t have 1,001 products; we specialize in 10-20.”  Local farmers turned to their data collection as demand grew and began asking where they could save time. “I really focus on how to reduce labor costs,” explained a periurban orchard manager. “Are there ways that I can automate in those areas or at least use tools or make a mechanical means to reduce labor and time spent?” Guthman (2004) called this creep toward agrocapitalist logic conventionalization, to note how alternative organic agriculture came to resemble industrial farming. Here, we observe that this is also as a growth trap and a data organization issue: conventionalization manifests as a combination of labor shortage, intensified demand, opportunism, and digital nudges implicit in data monitoring.

After initial hesitation over social distancing and public health, farmer’s markets and local food distributors across the country sprang back with new safety protocols and tools to arrange local food pickups.  Market managers also saw upticks in consumer interest in local food and especially in local meat. One such program became especially popular in Indiana and later across the Midwest as a tool to aggregate local food in regional cities and then deliver directly to consumers. The founder, himself a participating farmer, recalled:

[The stay-at-home order] hit and that Saturday we did as much volume that day as we would usually do in an entire week… Monday, we were freaking out. We did 400% volume that week and we thought: alright, let’s figure out how to just survive this week, we don’t have the shelf space or anything, but the vendors were there… We bought every black insulated tote east of the Mississippi that we could find.

Nine months into the pandemic, the program expanded from six to 32 cities, a sign of the enduring demand for local food deliveries that circumvent grocery store supply chains.  Critical scholars of science and technology have shown how the forms people use to organize information also dictate future planning (Ballestero 2019; Benjamin 2019). Produce demand grew alongside data management including spreadsheets, social media communications, and shifting inventory ledgers. Seeing these spreadsheets, many Midwest local farmers struggled to grow their production, ultimately paring back the diversity of food and services they offered.

Degrowing Local Food

Others looked over their data to find that their work, and the sociocultural values underpinning it, needed reexamining after March 2020. Degrowth, a political-economic theory of reorganizing production to achieve socio-ecological sustainability over the long term (Gerber 2020; D’Alisa, Demaria, and Kallis 2015), provides a framework to evaluate the lasting impact of persistent local farming beyond the production or sale of agricultural commodities. By questioning externalized costs, capitalization, and yield growth in small farmer economies, degrowth asks how alternative rural development programs enable a range of possible futures on farms beyond continual expansion. Conversely, agriculture forces degrowth to face difficult questions around labor, productivity, and technological change – local food systems confront challenges in equitable labor and resource management in that they depend on difficult work and local ecological constraints. Scholars have looked to cases spanning Cuban agroecology (Boillat, Gerber, and Funes-Monzote 2012), Via Campesina (Roman-Alcalá 2017), and European allotment gardens (Vávra, Smutná, and Hruška 2021), questioning what an agricultural system might value apart from growth (Gerber 2020). Some Midwestern local food workers, having experienced the pressures of rapid growth, offer another perspective.

As employers cut hours for off-farm work, many farmers responded by intensifying their farm businesses – not merely to recoup lost wages but also to finally pursue more meaningful work. “As much as it was frustrating and difficult, and horrible, and terrifying, it has really given us time that we needed to put everything in perspective,” explained an automotive industry engineer whose plant closed during the initial COVID-19 shutdown. “We did definitely arrive at a place where people [realized] I have all of this extra time but I’m not feeling like I have something fulfilling to do,” agreed a rural Wisconsin farmer. “I think labor is often talked about in the ag circle as something to reduce down to nothing. And I think that we need to flip that completely on its head … I think that the sort of stuff we’re doing can be a healthful meaningful activity.” Similarly, a periurban orchard grower delved into his data not to specialize in top sellers but to understand how to turn buyers on to rare or unusual varieties.  “My wife is an educator, my father is an educator, my grandfather was. We just enjoy doing that sort of thing,” he explained. “We also need probably 7 or 8 varieties because a part of the educational aspect of this, which I dearly love, is helping people select the apple that they enjoy.”

Others explicitly saw their agricultural work as a path toward social justice. “I know that my price points are not all that low because I have a high input cost. But… it costs a lot of money to heal this planet,” a rural Minnesota farmer explained. She plans to continue this healing process by donating her farm to Indigenous or Black female farmers when she retires as a form of reparation for centuries of systemic racism in American agriculture.  “It’s really hard I think to figure out how to do reparation on a system level. But on a one-sie, two-sie level I can make that happen.” For an urban hydroponic farmer, growing vegetables in a shipping container was an explicit response to the generational marginalizing of Black farmers that stems from “not having access to land. I don’t have access to seven acres of land to try to grow lettuce. So, pivot and do something different…If you don’t have fertile land that plants like, and that you can grow plants in, and that has that nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium that plants need, you’re just wasting your time. And most people that look like me don’t have access to that kind of land that’s suitable for plant growth.” Amid questionable, data-driven indoor agriculture expansions over the last decade, this farmer highlighted the role that indoor agriculture can have in bringing equity to local food production.

Building and Degrowing in the Post-Corona Rural Economy

Anthropological insights should always tie to lived experiences of particular times and places, not universalist theories bent to match interesting case studies. No farmers discussed wanted to produce less. However, a degrowth perspective on agricultural sustainability is not inherently against all increases, but rather against a particular model of short term extraction (D’Alisa, Demaria, and Kallis 2015; Gerber 2020) that imagines rural economies as short term assets to be leveraged and then liquidated in the mode of financial capitalism. When the Midwestern local food economy experienced rapid growth, some took it as a sign to intensify production and compromise on biodiversity and employment – but many were cautious to pursue goals of diversification and meaningful work, eschewing growth that came at the expense of solidarity and ecological commons.

Smallholder theory building from A.V. Chayanov (1966) and Robert Netting (1993) offers a general model wherein farmers often want to expand their sales, group memberships, savings, and production, because it helps them to escape difficult work, subsidize risks, and build a promising future in their own terms. Historically, crises of political economy have opened doors for temporary exercise of radical politics as seen during the resurgence of US urban gardens through war and financial crises and the organization of Black farmer cooperatives in response to civil rights activism and white agrarian closure in the US South. As they grew into internationally regulated brands, organic and Fair-Trade initiatives succumbed to conventionalization as they adopted productivist logics and ultimately aimed to increase yields, profits, and consumption. Clearly, some of the farmers above are taking this opportunity to expand into new markets. Yet others seek not an expansion of sales or production so much as an expansion in labor, skill, education, or equity. As a moment to challenge agri-food hegemony, the pandemic allows these farmers to pursue these goals above sheer growth. Such work is sorely needed to reorient food systems toward the kinds of collective solidarity and local investment necessary to provide a future in which US farmers and their farms can diversify away from extractive monoculture farming underwritten by the violence of cheapened labor. The efforts that farmers and farm supporters make now to manage renewed interest in local food economies is having serious repercussions for rural, urban, and peri-urban farm economies moving forward. Equal attention should be paid to how these changes ultimately reflect what kind of lives people want to live on the farm.


Andrew Flachs researches food and agriculture systems, exploring genetically modified crops, heirloom seeds, and our own microbiomes.  An associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University, his work among farmers in North America, the Balkans, and South India investigates ecological knowledge and technological change in agricultural systems spanning Cleveland urban gardens and Indian GM cotton fields. Andrew’s research has been supported by public and private institutions including the Department of Education, the National Geographic Society, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Volkswagen Foundation, while his writing on agricultural development has been featured in numerous peer-reviewed publications as well as public venues including Sapiens, Salon, and the National Geographic magazine. Andrew’s work has been recognized by numerous international awards, including most recently the Political Ecology Society’s Eric Wolf Prize and the International Convention of Asia Scholars’ Book Prize Committee.

Ankita Raturi is an assistant professor at Purdue University, where she runs the Agricultural Informatics Lab, focused on human computer interaction, information architecture, and software engineering, for increased resilience in food and agricultural systems. Ankita’s current work includes: the development of modular, open source, decision support tools (e.g., for cover cropping); information modeling for the development of agricultural ontologies and data services(e.g., for plant data); design methods for agricultural technologies (e.g., for soil health management technologies); and design for diversified farming systems (e.g., for community food resilience).

Juliet Norton is an Informatics Research Scholar in the Department of Agricultural & Biological Engineering at Purdue University working with Ag Informatics Lab. She is a co-project manager for the NECCC Cover Crop Species Selector Tool and Seeding Rate Calculator, MCCC Seeding Rate Calculator, SCCC Species Selector Tool, and Informatics for Community Food Resilience projects. She works remotely from her home in Martinez, CA. http://aginformaticslab.org/index.php/2020/04/15/juliet-norton/ 

Valerie Miller is a PhD candidate and graduate teaching assistant in the anthropology department at Purdue University. She holds an MA in applied experimental psychology. Now studying as abiocultural anthropologist, she researches alloparenting, postpartum experiences, maternal cognition, and mental health in the United States and the Commonwealth of Dominica. Valerie is trained in several ethnographic and psychological methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative, and integrates these approaches while researching human matrescence, cognition, and lifeways of Caribbean women. She is passionate about highlighting maternal perspectives within biocultural research projects as well as the centering of children’s voices and insights in ethnographic studies. Her writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals as well as public-facing online spaces including Teaching Anthropology and Ethnography.com.

Haley Thomas is an undergraduate at Purdue University pursuing a bachelor’s degree in agricultural engineering. She is working with Agricultural Informatics Lab to study farmers’ data management and software for local foods. Her other academic interests include ecological restoration and natural resource management. http://aginformaticslab.org/index.php/2021/07/15/haley-thomas/  


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Cite as: Flachs, Andrew, Ankita Raturi, Juliet Norton, Valerie Miller, and Haley Thomas. 2022. ”Building back bigger or degrowing local food? US alternative food networks and post-corona agrarian economies.” FocaalBlog, 23 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/23/andrew-flachs-ankita-raturi-juliet-norton-valerie-miller-and-haley-thomas-building-back-bigger-or-degrowing-local-food-us-alternative-food-networks-and-post-corona-agrarian-economies