BOOK REVIEW

Sally Miller: Edible action: food activism and alternativeeconomics

Fernwood Publishing, Halifax, Canada, 2008, 191 pp., ISBN 978-1-5526-6280-9

Martin Danyluk

Accepted: 10 December 2010 / Published online: 24 December 2010

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Poor households grapple with hunger and malnutrition,

farmer incomes are declining, food-related illness is on the

rise. As the cracks in the mainstream food system—a

system increasingly organized according to the totalizing

logic of profit—widen into full-blown crisis, activists are

conceiving new ways of producing and exchanging food.

Initiatives like farmers’ markets and worker co-operatives

are helping to forge more sustainable and just food sys-

tems. They are thereby also creating working alternatives

to capitalism and subverting this powerful economic dis-

course that pervades modern society. Food, embodying

many meanings, can help rehumanize our economic rela-

tions: it is ‘‘a catalyst for social change’’ (p. 10).

This is the central argument of Edible Action: Food

Activism and Alternative Economics. To illustrate her

point, author Sally Miller takes an approach rooted in

storytelling. She considers various kinds of resistance to

the conventional food economy, examining the inner

workings of co-ops, community food security agencies,

natural food stores, fair-trade organizations, and commu-

nity gardens to show how these constitute alternative

economic models in which groups prioritize values other

than profitability. The book explores cultural mythologies,

shared ways of making sense of the world, in order to

illuminate the linkages between social movements and

rhetorical acts—the ways ‘‘stories about food can be used

to shape social change’’ (p. 27). The stories told here, thrust

into dialogue with the seemingly monolithic narrative of

capitalism, are meant to inspire and motivate action.

The first story recounted is that of the Canadian People’s

Food Commission of 1978–80, where thousands of citi-

zens, activists, politicians, and industry representatives

gathered to voice their concerns about the industrial agri-

food system. This important moment of storytelling, Miller

suggests, gave momentum to many subsequent food ini-

tiatives. The book proceeds to examine consumer move-

ments against genetically modified foods, highlighting the

limitations of ethical purchasing as a strategy for broader

change. Miller notes how conventional accounts of social

transformation (often involving a heroic individual taking a

principled stand) gloss over the important roles of grass-

roots organizing, collective learning, and government

action in effecting change. In Chaps. 4 and 7, she charts the

shifting political tides of the organic and fair-trade move-

ments, which have been forced to confront and negotiate

the tension between moral and economic value. Chapter 5

examines the ways food co-ops in Atlantic Canada defy

traditional business practices: by fostering shared interests

between producers and consumers and by allowing mem-

bers to decide the fate of surpluses, Miller argues, these

enterprises stand as working alternatives to capitalism.

Recognizing that economic systems both shape and are

shaped by the ideas we use to apprehend them, Miller

focuses on language and representation as loci for change.

Following Gibson-Graham (2006), she works to dislodge

the ‘‘capitalocentric’’ discourse that depicts the economy as

uniformly capitalist by showing how food movements are

cultivating other economic understandings. One by one,

Edible Action unsettles the simplistic and flawed premises

of orthodox economic theory: the rational, self-interested

consumer (who doesn’t care about the health of ecosys-

tems); the neat curves of supply and demand (in which

producers and consumers can never have common inter-

ests); free choice in the marketplace (between products

M. Danyluk (&)

Department of Geography and Program in Planning, University

of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 3G3, Canada

e-mail: martin.danyluk@utoronto.ca

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Agric Hum Values (2011) 28:143–144

DOI 10.1007/s10460-010-9303-9

made by any of three manufacturers); and a price system

governed by willingness to pay (in which those who cannot

afford food go hungry). The message is that these powerful

mythologies have come to shape our identities, practices,

and institutions, and that most of us are worse off for it.

Miller weaves a productive theoretical discussion into

nearly every chapter, striking a conversational tone that is

at once accessible to activists and engaging to scholars.

Although Canadian cases dominate, the lessons are perti-

nent wherever the right to food has been subordinated to

the efficient functioning of markets. Two particularly

compelling examples are the Big Carrot, a worker-owned

food co-op in Toronto where all decisions are made by

consensus, and the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, whose

municipal council declared food a human right in 1993,

with an array of programs to deliver on this promise. Miller

is enthusiastic about the food initiatives she examines, but

undergirds her optimism with critical reflection on the

political tensions lurking beneath the surface. This sensi-

tivity to conflict and contradiction is the book’s greatest

strength. The examination of ‘‘food democracy’’ in the final

chapter, for example, acknowledges the messy and always-

unfinished work of negotiation, contestation, and mutual

learning that constitutes the democratic process. Also

welcome is Miller’s treatment of unequal access to food as

a structural problem, one embedded in manifold institu-

tions, practices, and ideologies. Rather than blame any

particular individual or group, she invites the reader to

consider that the profit-seeking behaviours of corporations

‘‘are determined in a systemic framework of capitalism that

prevents them from acting in any other way’’ (p. 38), and

uses this analysis to guide her call for collective action.

If there is a shortcoming in the book, it is her handling of

scale. Miller risks leading the reader into the ‘‘local

trap’’—the assumption that local food systems are inher-

ently preferable to other scales (Born and Purcell 2006).

Chapter 8, ‘‘Living by Our Food,’’ celebrates a variety of

initiatives to relocalize food systems, pointing to the eco-

nomic and social benefits of localization. But it fails to

address seriously the limits and problems of such strate-

gies, particularly for the many producers in the global

South who depend on exports to Northern markets. As a

philosophy, relocalization can be productive in helping us

envision a radically different food economy, but in practice

it denotes a historically contingent process that departs

from, and is accountable to, the interdependencies of the

globalized present. How can localization efforts acknowl-

edge and respond to these vulnerabilities? A more nuanced

discussion of localization movements and a recognition of

the need for action at multiple scales would be compatible

with, and augment, Miller’s endorsement of a diversity of

strategies by a range of actors.

Still, Edible Action is a lively, theoretically rich, and

cogent book that will be valuable to academics and activists

interested in food issues, the social economy, and the pro-

duction of economic knowledge and subjects. It is broadly

successful in showing how existing food movements pro-

vide a language for imagining, and serve as models for

building, new economic arrangements. Through concrete

examples, Miller demonstrates that ‘‘capitalism is, beneath

its towering and hegemonic status in our society, riven with

alternatives, and already fragmented by alternative patterns

of economic exchange’’ (p. 180). Indeed, the task of

building a just food system, let alone a just economic sys-

tem, will be impossible without a plurality of approaches, a

focus on dialogue and reflexivity, and more attention to the

alternative narratives presented in this book.

References

Born, B., and M. Purcell. 2006. Avoiding the local trap: Scale and

food systems in planning research. Journal of Planning Educa-tion and Research 26(2): 195–207.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2006. A postcapitalist politics. Minneapolis,

MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Author Biography

Martin Danyluk is a Ph. D. student in Geography at the University of

Toronto. His research interests include urban political economy,

social justice, and food economics.

144 M. Danyluk

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