UA certain form of sobriety has long been practiced in food production and distribution. This takes shape within the systems that link market gardeners and urban consumers, such as associations for the maintenance of peasant agriculture (AMAP) in France, consumer and producer cooperatives in Greece or Catalonia, purchasing groups solidarity (GAS) in Italy, cooperative supermarkets and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in the United States. These diverse experiences can be seen both as examples of food activism, in which adherents oppose through their production and consumption practices the economic and food system of agribusiness, and as concrete projects to small scale to rethink the way of producing, sourcing and eating.
Let’s take the case of AMAP-type vegetable basket subscription systems which, in the city of Marseilles, come together in the Marseille Baskets network. The contracts linking market gardeners and “consum’actors” (the term is used to designate consumers who are members of the system) allow the latter to secure a year’s supply of seasonal, organic fruit and vegetables, produced nearby and at affordable prices. more interesting than those of large retailers. Market gardeners are guaranteed the sale of the year’s production, and therefore secure income, supposed to allow them to live from their activity, but also to free themselves from the competition operated by large retailers and commercial intermediaries.
But this system also has other effects, first of all on the way of producing. Organic farming practiced on a family scale, with a few employees, requires paying attention to the soil and diversifying crops. The pace of deliveries requires rethinking production times in order to be able to provide diversified baskets each week, as provided for in the contract. The proximity between the places of production and the places of distribution allows market gardeners to produce more fragile varieties of vegetables, which require short lead times between harvest and distribution, but which are also tastier by maintaining or reintroducing biodiversity in the fields.
The members, for their part, become aware of the vagaries and difficulties of production, of which they share some of the risks. They also change their attitude towards food: they do not choose it, neither in quantity nor in variety, but must learn to make do with seasonal vegetables, the quantity of which varies over the weeks.
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