Reworking state boundaries through care: ‘Peasant friends’, ‘greedy entrepreneurs’ and ‘corrupt officials’ in an ‘alternative’ food network in China

Agro-food studies has interpreted ‘alternative’ food movements in ‘the West’ as expressing a shift in governance from ‘state’ to ‘civil society’. This working paper shows how the state is entangled in an ‘alternative’ food network in China. While one might be tempted to judge this food initiative as ‘less alternative’ and as a sign of a ‘weak civil society’ in ‘the East’, this would merely reproduce the dominant ‘Western’ self-image. Instead, I focus on the role of the state, which has thus far largely been neglected. This not only allows new insights into how the ‘alternativeness’ of food networks is constituted, but shows us that this process transforms the state as well. Rather than presupposing ‘the state’ and ‘civil society’ to be distinct entities, I join anthropological approaches to state and care, proposing analyses of how actors in food networks rework state boundaries through performances and negotiations of care. With concern over food safety growing in China, some urban middle-class consumers seek to care for their families by sourcing ‘ecological’ food through networks with producers, struggling to construct a suitable realm of care separate from ‘the state’. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in a self-declared ‘ecological village’ in Sichuan Province, I spotlight figures that appear in narratives about food safety: the ‘peasant friend’, the ‘greedy entrepreneur’ and the ‘corrupt official’. I show how actors are identified with — or try to distance themselves from — these figures and how these enactments of state images shape the state as well as the food network.