Contradictions on the path towards just and sustainable food worlds: alternative food initiatives and food (in)justice in the Netherlands

Alternative food initiatives (AFIs) see themselves confronted with many contradictions which mark their vulnerability to logics of the capitalist food system and raise questions about their position in moving towards more just and sustainable food worlds. Food (in)justice represents such a contradiction – one that is relevant in the Netherlands where a pressing food injustice remains largely unacknowledged. Following the question “How can alternative food initiatives in the face of contradictions such as replicated food injustice contribute to eroding the globally dominant capitalist food system and to constructing more just and sustainable food worlds?”, this paper explores the reproduction of injustice, the challenges to practice justice, and the heterogeneity amongst AFIs through a lens of plural justice. Centrally arguing that even in the face of contradictions, AFIs are integral to moving towards more just and sustainable food worlds, this paper looks through the lens of an accumulation of strategies and movements in which individually different and perhaps contradictory components can be collectively effective. Alliances become a key consideration in this argument. Fieldwork comprising interviews, participant observation, and informal conversations with AFIs and their organizers in Utrecht (the Netherlands) and interviews with organizers in AFI and agrarian networks and movements in the Netherlands form the empirical grounds of this paper.