The swindler's story and the epistemic conquest of alternative food

There is nothing so coherent as a swindler's story. So wrote ^{Geertz in 1973} (p. 18), and there seems no better way to situate this argument now. Geertz was writing about the anthropologist's tricky task of sifting grains of reality from the sands of all too convincing narratives of evident reason and unmistakable logic. Even after decades of critique and deconstruction, the pillars of particular reason and particular progress that germinated from the violent ethics of modernity's institution still ground this epoch's regnant world order -and they continue to swindle its invested devotees.

Over the last several decades, Latin American decolonial thinkers (e.g., ^{Dussel, 1994},1998; ^{Mignolo, 2000},2009,2011; ^{Grosfoguel, 2008}, 2009,2013) have articulated the epistemic particularism and civilizational pathology that handicap the present in terms of a modernity/coloniality joinder, emphasizing three domains of constitutive coloniality that make possible modernity's fact and dispense its configuration: coloniality of power (^{Quijano, 1992}; Quijano and Wallerstein), of knowledge (^{Lander, 2000}), and of being (^{Maldonado-Torres, 2007}). All three announce their presence in the foodworld, and all three intertwine in the web of cognitions and materialities that I refer to as man/food's¹ wholesale economization in the extremist neoliberal rationality that circumscribes modernity's contemporary logic.

In tandem with the last century's environmental movement and its globalized discursive commitment to development - and the critical response to it² - many people and groups have activated efforts to change a global food situation that they identify as unjust, anti-democratic, anti-ecological, and pathological in many ways more³. Still, in the past decade, the alternative food movement (AFM) has assumed novel forms and reanimated thrust and, importantly, also new cohorts of sympathizers and adherents. Some of these new actors have been institutional ones, particularly as global and national questions of economy, ecology, equity, energy, and demography have fused into ones of food security and food sustainability in ways touching even the richest countries. Britain called the contemporary global food scenario a "grand challenge" (^{Marsden, 2012}, p. 139). Europe entered it as a strategic research priority, and the issue of "who will feed the world" became ready media candy (^{Brunori, Malandrin, and Rossi, 2013}). Alternative food movements assimilated these cues into their own discourses, already more or less resonant, and the food movement became more or less recognizable in its present form - a form, of course, with an important span of colorations⁴.

Even a superficial reflection on the sorts of questions that underpin the AFM, however, already begins to reveal the limited, limiting discursive space at stake. That any "who" might "feed the world", for example, seems at this juncture a posture of extraordinary arrogance, an enunciation from the same locus of responsible superiority and benevolent tutelage that have shaped several centuries with colonial and developmental civilizational essays to such extraordinary and -I reveal my ethics- violating effect. This matter is only the beginning, and it alone is as complicated as anyone might make it: Who constitutes the world's who, and who or what constitutes the world? Why are we worried about feeding them or it, and is it an it or a them that this we are referring to? Why is whoever it is who will feed the worldfeeding anything or anyone? Do people -if indeed it is persons who comprise the world in question- not eat in agential, volitional acts of our own protagonism? I insist that to feed and to eat are two expressly different acts: the just so articulated construal of this great epochal challenge, one replicated eagerly by the AFM, evokes contents of disconcerting similarity to so many benevolent violences past. This is my point of departure, then: even a superficial critique and a gaze at the most preliminary postures of the AFM discourse reveal the movement's (at least) suspect philosophical bases.

Digging only a little more deeply into the AFM discourse writ broadly supports this suspicion with more clues of the AFM'S epistemic particularity and manacled fastening to modern truth. Its reductive understanding of man/food, for example, filters the entire spectrum of the foodworld's relational possibilities into that single one cognitively functional in the regnant cosmovision. Man-subject manipulates food-object in a wholly or preponderantly instrumental - indeed, as I will argue, wholly economized -way. That man/food might be configured in some way radically other - that the relation might be possible to imagine in its reverse, with food-subject and man-object (see ^{Mol, 2008}, for an interesting thought experiment in this direction); that man and food might co-relate as companions in a reciprocating existence of being; that food might transcend its materiality to visit transcendence upon man, to be spiritually communicant, or to become itself mystical or magical becomes an unthinkable impossibility. The expansive richesse of man/food shrinks into a single notion of economic man and utilitarian food, an idea as concordant with neoliberal modern rationality as we can find.

Consider too the particular configuration that thinkers give to man/ food when they invoke this relation in more common, and more rational still, terms. Scholarly publications refer more frequently to "alternative food systems" than to "alternative food movements", and removing the adjectival modifier exponentializes the preponderance. We read and hear much of food's "producers" and "consumers" but remarkably little of its eaters. And the vast literature on foodworld-reinventing and humanity-saving reincarnations of Green Revolution innovations readily invite ^{Ellul's (1962},1965) critiques of modern rationality in its materialization as la technique.

Thus the AFM begins to reveal its entwinement with so many similarly sired discourses - and not least of all with that of the global-industrial food system it protests. The constricting reins of neoliberal modernity show their effect, an epistemic threshing that sends all that designated cognitive chaff into the wastelands of incomprehensibility. We might call it a particular form of epistemicidal violence, one that compels compliance with the dominator's ethic. ^{Dussel's reframing of the American descubrimiento as instead an encubrimiento (1994)}, not a discovery of the American other but instead his covering-up and covering-over, is a good image to invoke here: for the alternative food movement, man/food's imagination is limited to that single model of rationality that is protected under the guardianship of the modern-colonial-capitalist world-system (as per, e.g., ^{Grosfoguel and Cervantes-Rodriguez, 2002}; Dussel and Fornazzari, 2002). It is the only model cognitively available: all others lie outside the boundary of thought, encubiertos. The AFM, of course, protests the profligacy, asymmetry, injustice, and very much else about the dominant global-industrial food system. What it fails to challenge, however, is its philosophical understructure. It is that logic, I claim, that is the problem, and the food system's appraisable afflictions and ailments, only the picturesque excesses of the hypermodern logics that situate them⁵.

In this paper I suggest that the alternative food movement, or at least that portion of it epistemically bound to the centers of the world-system, is a sterile offshoot of the same philosophical root as the dominant global-industrial food system it opposes. Moreover, its cognitive compliance with the reductive reason and epistemic exclusivity that make possible and operative the global-industrial food system pervert the movement into a steward of that system. More seriously still, the movement does not apprehend its philosophical bases - its compliance - and operates from within an epistemology of blindness (^{Santos, 2009},2014); it fails to recognize the suppositions it assumes as prior truths, the same ones that determine the dominant system, and closes itself to the radically different -better- possibilities that might be discovered in thinking from radically different foundations.

Understanding something: Alternative food from the epistemic centers

To this point my argument is so big as to be indefensible, all the more so in a neoliberalized intellectual world obliged by what Castro-Gomez points to as the reductive "hegemony of the paper" (2017). So I will carve off a very small piece of my critical claim to pursue here and prepare a smaller still empirical palette from which to paint.

First, as I try to show how the AFM is fettered, like its adversary, to the philosophical patrimony of a particular modernity, I will focus on a single of its telltale characteristics: the wholesale economization of human existence that defines neoliberal rationality. Second, as I have already hinted, I do not extend my critique to the totality of the AFM but only to that part of it epistemically bound to the centers of the regnant (modern-colonial-capitalist) world-system -that is, to the universalist truths that situate the modern cosmovision and the world order that this makes possible-. This is a carve of necessity-exhaustiveness is impossible, in any case, and the delimited essay I make here is no more than a gesture- and yet one that still, I think, comprehends a large partition of the AFM. All but the most radical fringes of the movement act from a similar epistemic stance, wherever these originate in senses geographic, political, or social, and whatever their priorities and foci. Exceptions to this characterization of epistemic complicity and inertness do exist at scales both collective (e.g., sumac kawsay and Via Campesina, both more movements of cosmovision than of food per se) and individual and personal (irrespective of geographic and social positions⁶); and I exclude these from my analysis here. Such exceptions, precisely for their epistemic exceptionality, are more correctly captured as radical than as alternative, and -I will arrive here- should be the locus of any hope we might dare to retain.

The empirical palette

My empirical palette draws from research I carried out between 2011 and 2016 as part of the Purefood research network and on the basis of which I prepared my Ph.D. dissertation. Riding a wave of social and scholarly enthusiasm at the food/cities juncture, I became interested in the food policy discourses levied by and in big cities; here I consider the movements of alternative food policy, practice, and activism in New York City (NYC), one of the metropoles lauded widely among activists and academics (e.g., Freudenberg, McDonough and Tsui, 20ll) as icons of virtuous food policy reform and municipally led change-making promise (^{Ashe, 2016}).

Since I was interested in understanding the change-making prospects for cities as institutions, I began studying the food system reform discourses activated by and within the city s formal, authorized organs of government. These proved to be bound and ever interlocuting with many alternative food discourses (led by informal activist networks, communities of scholarship, formal government agencies at different levels of government and in different places, and so on); hence I widened my analytical gaze to comprehend (some) of those discourses, as well.

Of course, the very idea of what I refer to as institutional alterity -those discourses of formally authorized and juridically installed institutions that deviate in important ways from the regnant world-system norm- might seem an unintelligible delimitation, the very idea of institutional alterity, incongruous. The incoherency is not obvious, however, or in any case not widely appreciated, and many AFM activists and their credentialed academic endorsers (and their cohorts of even more importantly credentialed financiers) argue just the contrary. Indeed, many proponents argue that it is precisely institutions' institutionalism that endows them with impressive motive potential and change-making force (e.g., ^{Blay-Palmer, 2009}; ^{Reynolds, 2009}; ^{Rocha and Lessa, 2009}). Institutional alterity is at least, then, recognized as part of the alternative food movement, and some argue that it is an important one; whatever its gravity, it seems a part of the AFM worthy of some reflection, and of a reflection that attends carefully to the interlocutions between institutional and informal alterities⁷.

There is something especially worthwhile, too, in relecting upon the AFM'S activation in New York, this paragon of Western wealth, power, and civilizational advance. An "anthropology of modernity" (^{Escobar, 1995}), one that probes the particularism of modern Western institutions in light of their cultural-historical specificity, seems never more appropriate and nowhere better realized.

Postdevelopment and decolonial thinkers have issued ample critique to the alternative development movements deployed unto poor countries in the midst and in the wake of a half-century's "pauperizing" (^{Rahnema, 1991}) missiological work in promotion of globalized modernization. Such alternative projects were (and are), as ^{Escobar (1995}, 2005) writes, more alternatives of development and modernity than alternatives to them; and of its voguest exemplar, ^{Esteva (2010}, p. 13) writes that sustainable development is nothing more than "a strategy for sustaining 'development'". It is in exactly this sense that I issue my critique of the AFM: its actions, grounded in blindly compliant and conventionally modern philosophical foundation, do little more than recolor the superficial articulations of the global-industrial food system - and, worse, in their compliance, only act to consolidate that foundation and the dominant system that builds its empire upon it.

A dominated discourse: The economization of human existence

Recall Foucault's "big" understanding of discourse: it is the set of "practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak" (Foucault, 1972, p. 49). To form objects, in the case of interest here, is to form the spaces of possibility in which food and people and the world exist, relate, and interact, and what those existences and relations can look like. Discourse makes cognitively available - or not - the spaces of our intellection: it "producefs] permissible modes of being and thinking while disqualifying and even making others impossible" (^{Escobar, 1995}, p. 5); it imposes the "unconscious structures that set boundaries on the thinking of our epoch" (^{Sachs, 2010}, p. XIX); it circumscribes the possibilities for "what [can] be said, thought, [...] practiced, even imagined" (^{Peet and Hartwick, 2009}, p. 224).

Here, then, I hold a critical lens upon New York City's AFM discourse to make visible those antecedent inputs that have crystallized in its particular articulations of alterity. The manacles of the modern cosmovision appear: a collection of dualist ontologies that produce the thinkable spaces and permissible modes of knowing and being to which Escobar refers. With the naturalized separations of self from other, of humankind from nature, and of people from things, ^{Illich's I who derives from we (1980)}, ayni, and the sacredness of coca all turn cognitively unintelligible. But this modern metaphysics arrived hand in hand with a coeval companion that continues to shape the contemporary foodworld just as profoundly: an economic system, capitalism. In modernity, man/food reduces its scope of possibility from the cosmic to the corporal, from the mystical to the mundane, from communion, communicant, and communicator to calorie. In the hands of the economy, food becomes first a thing, and subsequently a necessity, a unit of trade, a product, and finally a commodity.

Though it is capitalism specifically that emerged and has grown hand in hand with modernity, it is not capitalism per se against which I issue this critique; rather it is the concomitant economization of human existence that emerged with it and has blossomed now in a monstrous neoliberal baroque.

Wendy ^{Brown (2015)} captures the totalizing effect of the phenomenon: As a normative order of reason developed over three decades into a widely and deeply disseminated governing rationality, neoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic. All conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized. In neoliberal reason and in domains governed by it, we are only and everywhere homo economicus (p. 10). (Italics added.)

Pinnacling as homo economicus, then, all of man's other possibilities for identity as a self -perhaps in capacity faber, poetica, amans, viator, socialis- and as a being-with shrink into the margins of cognition. In the handful of empirical examples from New York City's alternative food discourse that follow, I pursue only this last point to show how the baroque economization of existence, like and in tandem with other metaphysical and epistemic posits of modernity, draws tight boundaries around the thoughtspace of and for foodworld (re)imagination.

City of dreams and dollars: Economized man in New York City

New York City's much lauded institutional alterity turns out to be, in this sense, unexceptional in every way. Even with its real progressive policy achievements and symbolic city-leader celebrity, the city's alternative food discourse is so replete with man's economization that the degree of neoliberalism's cognitive traction approaches caricatured exaggeration. Food is an object, a utilitarian tool, a something to be produced and consumed; people are its producers and consumers; it must be known and managed rationally and scientifically; and it must be consumed so as to generate functionally (and productively) optimal corporal specimens. In all cases of food's consideration, related dollars must be calculated and related actions must sponsor economic growth.

This economizing denominator materializes perspicuously in two logics that actuate throughout the city's food discourse -a discourse that, it bears repeating, earns regular recognition as efficaciously divergent from the dominant global-industrial template-. First, the city's policy professes a supreme faith in market mechanisms as (the) solution to food system problems and, in a corresponding sense, an understanding of the food system itself as an economic generator; the requisite binder between these two means also that good outcomes in either domain are expected to symbiotically invoke (also) benefit in the other. Second, where policy articulation and program deployment regard intuitively extra-economic domains -social life or ecological vitality, for example- these carry at least implication and more commonly explication of a posterior economic finality. Policy does not altogether neglect people or their (extra-economic) problems -that would be both inaccurate and politically untenable- but such appraisals generally carry little empathic charge and act to reinscribe the situations in more rationally modulated terms. People and their problems are framed and understood as quantifiable, mensurable, manageable objects of study and intervention: in a word, they are economized.

The city's two most important food policy-related documents, Food-Works (Brannen, 2010)⁸ and PlaNYC: A Greener, Greater New York (City of New York, 20ll)⁹ offer good examples, both pronouncing salable y palatable narratives of care and responsibility as they conscript ostensibly extra-economic matters into a discursive frame of economic primacy. PlaNYC -and it is pertinent and not incidental here to observe that we can read in its five-word subtide the consummation of Esteva's appraisal of sustainable development- addresses planning challenges that affect many different dimensions of residents' lives (such as transportation, housing, health, etc.). But it is clear throughout that one dimension runs transversally across all the others and is, in a sense, their finality. If that point remains confused to the reader, the report's closure makes matters clear: "Of course, everything we do should contribute to our residents' financial well-being" (City of New York, 2011, p. 160). Economic progress is the primary and ultimate interest here, and if any action has no economic benefit, it interests neither the administration nor the city residents it serves.

In Food Works, hunger -whose suffering is no less real for its sorry mediatic exploitation- does manage to win the standard post-productivist concession that rich countries have been obliged to make in an era of nationally aggregated market superabundance, and it receives recognition in New York as something more complicated than a dearth of aggregate food supply. But it (still) does not and cannot transcend economy: it is recast now as "the inability of people to purchase enough food". My point of course is not that hunger's cause is not this, the possibility a person has to purchase food; it is that it is reduced to this, only and only possibly this. Purchasing food: it is one imaginary where, in the economized world, we discover the boundaries of our possibilities for thought.

The city's hunger interventions operate in response to this formulation of the problem, and they act largely via the powers of the market itself. Its Health Bucks program, for example, incentivizes poor people to purchase so-designated healthy foods by providing an additional $2 in spending power for each $5 of (federally funded) snap¹⁰ allocations they use - to purchase food - at farmers markets. I want to first emphasize how such policies entail the wholesale replacement of the person by the more tamable formulation of the consumer. Indeed Food Works rarely refers to people in cases outside the recitation of statistics or as a placeholder noun, and the word person appears only four times total in the ninety-page document (once in a stock phrase, once as a statistical unit, and twice in bibliographic entries). As subjects and agents, people are consumers. They consume or intake food more frequently than they eat it, and they are never eaters¹¹. In these reformations and re-formulations of the person and of his encounters with the foodworld, that enormous spectrum of possibilities that I have sketchily collected as man/food, we can at least begin to see the economizing ethos, man's visible lexical containment tracing his preceding ideational one. This is economic man.

Food Works gives notable attention to other problems that might be intuitively understood primarily as ones of human suffering - most centrally, to food-related health grievances. As it does with hunger, however, it generally communicates that these are problems not primarily because of the sufferings they invoke but rather because they create an avoidable economic burden for the city and its taxpayers. Its scientized, rationalized, and finally and ultimately economized recognition of people's poor health comes with lots of numbers and only a little sympathy:

As paradoxical as it seems to the problem of food insecurity, three of the five leading causes of mortality in New York City can be linked to diet and are mostly preventable: heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. Each of these is strongly rooted in the problem of obesity. Over the past 20 years, obesity among children and adults has doubled and is now considered epidemic. The economic costs of these health problems are also considerable. Obesity-related medical expenditures in New York State are over $6 billion, 81 per cent of which are paid by Medicare and Medicaid. Currently, Medicaid comprises 30 percent of all state revenues. New York City alone spends an estimated $2.65 billion on health care each year, at a cost of roughly $315 per resident. (^{Brannen, 2010}, p. 7)

Moving beyond the city's institutional alterity and into the interweaving discourses that emerge from other cohorts of the city's flourishing AFM, economized man remains an imposing presence. The cohort at the New York City Food Policy Center at Hunter College comprises scholar-activists who -the center's mission statement already reveals its neoliberal situation- "develop intersectorial, innovative and evidence-based solutions to preventing diet-related diseases and promoting food security in New York and other cities". The Center's major Good Food Jobs report (NYCFPC, 2013) bills itself, at least in part, as an advocacy for new good food jobs in the face of a food industry norm characterized by unlivably low wages and dangerous, precarious, and generally poor working conditions. The bulk of the report, however, attends to the task and promise of economic generation by way of such jobs, and it launches its argument with a demonstration of the magnitude and growth of the food sector. In other words, it implies, the reader should attend to the report's argument not necessarily because the circumstances inherent to the food sector's bad jobs do not make possible anything construable as a dignified human existence, but rather -first -because the related economic sector is large and growing.

More impressive still is the transformation Good Food Jobs applies in its descriptions of people's experiences and sufferings. Its section on food-related health is a good example, arguing that creating good food jobs would help people to be healthier. A superficial reader might surmise that that would be a good end because people enjoy good health; but the report makes it clear from beginning to end that there is a different priority at stake. It is not that good health makes people feel well, but rather that "making healthier food more available and affordable can help to reduce the growing health and economic burden that diet-related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and some forms of cancer impose on New York City" (p. 19). The report's depersonalizing effectivity is appraisable, too: the burdens described affect "New York City", the abstract, faceless geopolitical entity rather than the warm-bodied, unfungible persons who comprise it. Even its reinscription of "good health" as "good health outcomes" is telling.

One of the report's summary tables lists a collection of veritably bad human health "outcomes", presenting these not in terms of personal sufferings but in terms of economic burden to the abstracted city. One entry counts the number of people suffering from diabetes "who required dialysis" and "diabetes-related amputations requiring hospitalization" before making explicit its central message: "In NYC, Medicaid spends more than $3 billion dollars a year to treat diet-related illness" (NYCFPC, 2013). Another entry describes the "health and economic costs" related to the city's "high rates of hunger and food insecurity", again reporting human sufferings primarily as economic and productivist burdens: "poorly nourished children", for example, "have lower school test scores and require more costly health care", and "hunger reduces the productivity of workers, which reduces their earnings, which, in turn, reduces their ability to purchase nutritious food for their children" (p. 20). That the most remarkable concern related to hungry children is their "more costly health care" and that hungry workers realize, first and foremost, "reduced productivity" testify - here too - to the presence of economized man.

New York City's food activist groups still more informally placed retain this central figure of economized man in their versions of the alternative food discourse. Prior to the 2012 congressional vote on the U.S. "Farm Bill", a major piece of legislation that regulated (among much else) the nation's food assistance program for low-income people ("food stamps") and specifying how much money the government would allocate and who would be eligible to receive the benefit, alternative food movement supporters across the country rallied their support. Activists in New York led a public information session at one of the city's farmer's markets; as a discussion of man's desert developed, I intervened to clarify the group's emerging position on merit and entitlement to food:

[Participant 1] Food stamp money is taxpayer money. Social Security is taxpayer money. And when we retire, whatever age we retire, we're the first in line to get our Social Security because we feel like we've earned it. Our taxpayer money has gone to it. Why do we have this sort of different double-sided approach for people getting food stamps? It's still taxpayer money and they've still earned it.

[Participants] Most people think that they didn't earn it.

[LMA] When you say that they've earned it, essentially you're saying that, by virtue of being human, [they have earned it]?

[Participant l] [No!] By virtue of being a taxpaying citizen of the United States! (Two adult women, 2012)

Economized man deserves food because he has earned it - only because he has earned it, and only because he has (already) paid for it.

It is the same discourse that emerged from among food system reform supporters in the controversy that followed the announcement of New York's "soda ban". One of the city's mayor-led reforms invoked a maximum serving size limit for sugary beverages sold at takeaway stores and restaurants, a progressive move of minor separation from the global-industrial food system that became known by disapprovers as the "soda ban". A New York Times oped in support of the ban (^{Bittman, 2012,} December 25) received more than a thousand reader responses, very many expressing their support for the new legislation in terms underlining the salience of economized man in the surrounding discourse space. One commenter sustained his position thus:

At the end of the day, we pay for snap benefits [...] That entitles us to decide what people eat, especially since we pay again when they raise unhealthy children who are prone to chronic diseases, can't function in school and ultimately can't go to work and support others in need [...] If [as a taxpayer], I'm paying I get to call the shots.

Another wrote:

As a society we will pay for these people, either through "entitlement" programs or through prisons. But a better option would be to step in and be the parents of these kids...and I know there will be howls of disbelief and derision when I say this.... but this is a matter of national productivity, economic prosperity for the Middle- and Upper-classes as well, and of national security.

Again, all of these examples are only to suggest that the alternative food discourse space is as much subject to the dicta of modern truth as any other centric discourse. Man's economization here is as present as it is in the dominant global-industrial food system - and as it is in the neoliberal order that constitutes the modern-colonial-capitalist world-system in which all of these exist.

Is there any place for hope?

These snapshots of New York City's AFM discourse at least suggest the catastrophic limits of alterity writ more broadly. Even if so delimiting my argument confines its empirical content importantly, attending reflexively to these particularities might, even if it cannot hope to capture a larger reality, at least give us insight to it. New York's example tells us something, I insist, and it seems to me that this is something more than circumstantial. ^{Geertz (1973)} wrote that "it is not necessary to know everything in order to understand something" (p. 20) - and this is the gesturing spirit in which I offer this paper.

With an example so disheartening on the table, is there any room to hope for something better? If there is, it must lie, I think, outside the spaces of alterity altogether. ^{Dussel (1998)} writes that whatever real, virtuous change might come must arrive on the wings of a philosophy of liberation that takes as its project an "overcoming of the world-system itself": the problem at hand is the exhaustion of a "civilizing system that has come to its end" (p. 19) The problem with the alternative food movement, like that of all "alternative" formulations, is that it remains bound to that toxic civilizing system. Everyone thinking from within an "intra-modern perspective" (Dussel, 1998) - alternative food movers included - only extend and propagate that toxicity.

Hence the pluriversally oriented epistemic project of transmodernity (^{Escobar, 2007}; ^{Grosfoguel, 2009}, 2011; ^{Mignolo, 2009}) offers the only hopeful possibility I can see from here: "Could it be that it is possible to think about, and to think differently from, an 'exteriority' to the modern world-system [...] [to] envision alternatives to the totality imputed to modernity?" (Escobar, 2007, p. 183).

"Intra-modern" thinking, and an "intra-modern" alternative food movement along with it, are intoxicated. If there might be any hope for something better, it must come from the radical alterities that emerge outside the epistemopolitics of modernity. The sources of those epistemopolitics might come from anywhere, anywhere people "marginalized because they [do] not conform [...] to the imperialist [...] objectives prevailing after the convergence of capitalism" (^{Santos, 2009}, p. 106) celebrate and pursue their nonconformance.

How can the alternative food movement be, then, if it aspires to be something more than the Trojan horse that it is? Perhaps ^{Santos's (2014)} committed uncertainty can give some orientation:

The reasons to reject what exists ethically, politically, and epistemologically are far more convincing than those invoked to define alternatives. Fully to assume our time means to acknowledge this disproportion and act from there [...] to radicalize rejection and look for alternatives while recognizing their radical uncertainty, (p. 107)

That is where I land, too: radically rejecting what is and radically uncertain of what might be or how it might become.