How can smallholders sustain differentiated market access in China after external project support recedes? Drawing on the concept of nested markets, this article examines how a rural community in South China rebuilt ecological production, processing, and exchange after the withdrawal of an NGO that had previously organized key cooperative functions. Based on long-term ethnographic follow-up and process analysis (2018-2025), the study shows that nestedness was not sustained through ready-made alternative channels or spontaneous smallholder self-organization. Instead, it was gradually reassembled through the emergence of an endogenous intermediary and the process of endogenous intermediation linking fragmented producers to external markets. This village-based intermediary coordinated production, invested in processing and storage, stabilized quality conventions, managed parts of compliance work, and cultivated shared resources such as collective reputation, market channels, and practical know-how. The article argues that, in rural China, nested markets often depend not on the disappearance of intermediation but on locally rooted forms of intermediation capable of rebuilding commons under fragile institutional conditions. At the same time, the case highlights the precarity and limits of such arrangements under weak policy support and demanding regulatory environments.
The article presents critical analysis of clean eating's visual culture and classroom discussions, to explore the informal learning that arises from constructions of white femininity and food curation, promoted by clean eating influencers' social media channels, cookery books, and television appearances. Guided by bell hooks' Teaching Critical Thinking, the article discusses how the learning that takes place outside the formal structures of education can be brought into the classroom as material for "learning in action," and the methods used to encourage an understanding of thinking as an action. The visual messages of social worth that are communicated through the careful crafting of normatively desirable subjects, in conjunction with the curation of food, appear to be tools that educate audiences in the ways of social ideals and acceptance of standardized racial and classed identities. To explore these positions, Collins's intersectionality as social theory is applied to provide insights into how technologies of whiteness, aesthetics, color palettes, lighting design choices, and strategic compositions of food that appear across different influencers' platforms support the creation of stylized gendered subjectivities, as beneficiaries of intersecting privilege, in an apparently seamless practice of fresh, youthful, and knowledgeable whiteness.
This pedagogical reflection explores the use of taste as a teaching tool in short-term, interdisciplinary study abroad courses combining food studies and contemporary art. Drawing on two iterations of the course, All things are delicately interconnected: Global food and art, one in Venice, Italy, and another in S & atilde;o Paulo, Brazil, it examines how structured culinary experiences can connect students to complex histories of globalization, cultural exchange, and identity. Salt cod, present in multiple global cuisines, serves as a thread linking disparate geographies through centuries of trade, migration, and adaptation. Course design integrated theoretical frameworks from globalization studies with experiential assignments that required students to research, prepare, and share iconic dishes before travel. Student reflections revealed that these activities fostered curiosity, collaboration, and deeper engagement with the social and historical contexts of food, while also presenting various challenges. Post-trip evaluations highlighted how tasting and cooking transformed abstract concepts into tangible, memorable experiences. Experiences from the course suggest that incorporating intentional, taste-centered components into study abroad curricula can enhance intercultural understanding and make global processes more immediate and personally resonant for students.
This study contributes to practice theoretical research on the transition to more plant-based diets as one of the key elements in sustainability transformation. Recent research on sustainable eating has increasingly focused on plant-based oriented diets, such as flexitarianism, in which giving up or reducing the consumption of meat and/or other animal products are less evident compared to practices, such as veganism and vegetarianism. In this article, we examine dietary flexibility by analyzing 132 written accounts describing a single food day by Finns orientated to plant-based eating. The writings include descriptions of foods that were favored and avoided on one specific day in 2023, as well as reflections on food and eating in general. We analyze dietary flexibility, and more specifically exceptions, as expressions of varying and sometimes conflicting normativities related to plant-based eating. Our results show that the normative orientation of plant-based eating is often challenged by other normativities related to the availability of plant-based foods, commensality, avoidance of food waste, and self-compassion. Furthermore, we argue that dietary exceptions are a way to alleviate such conflicting normativities and thus, rather than being something to be avoided, they can serve as a source of joy.
