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Food System Intermediaries

Bonding and Bridging in China, Latin America, and Australia

Part of Food, Health, and the Environment

Author Adrian Hearn
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$65.00 US
The MIT Press
26 per carton
On sale Oct 21, 2025 | 9780262553513
Sales rights: World
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A cutting-edge analysis of food systems sustainability, including COVID’s impact on current food systems, in up-to-date case studies of community farms in Australia, Brazil, Cuba, and China.

What does expanding agribusiness—and community resistance to it—reveal about the influence of global trends on local livelihoods, and conversely, the influence of food traditions on international networks?  In Food System Intermediaries, anthropologist Adrian Hearn examines how small farmers and their allies are defending their lands and livelihoods from expanding commodity plantations. At the heart of these encounters are food system intermediaries: people who carefully articulate food traditions to forge consensus among otherwise disconnected community producers, local governments, and urban customers. Their efforts to bring these groups together must contend with alternative portrayals of food circulated by more powerful corporate and government actors.

The book offers case studies of urban farms in Melbourne, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Beijing, and Havana to demonstrate how intermediaries are building alliances to cultivate more sustainable food systems, particularly as China’s impact on global agriculture deepens.
Series Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Traversing Food Systems
1 Mediating the Urban Fringe
2 Using and Abusing Food Traditions in Melbourne and São Paulo
3 Sowing Seeds of Trust in Beijing and Rio de Janeiro
4 Reimagining Food Sovereignty in Cuba
5 Bridging the Belt and Road
Conclusion: Cultivating Middle Ground
References
Index
additional book photo
additional book photo
“Adrian Hearn always brings revelations and insights to his readers that delight and enlighten—in Food System Intermediaries, more so than ever. Echoing Hearn’s perceptive words, history matters, for the subject being studied as well as the one doing the study.”
—Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Professor of History, American Studies, and Ethnic Studies, Brown University

"Adrian Hearn again puts to use his considerable gift as an ethnographer to give us a series of lucid studies about the role of strategic intermediaries in making possible a viable system of food production, distribution, and consumption organized around small farmers and bypassing large agribusiness. Food System Intermediaries is an interesting study and a valuable addition to the literatures on social capital, popular participation, and urban development."
—Alejandro Portes, Professor of Sociology (emeritus), Princeton University, and Professor of Law and Distinguished Scholar of Arts and Sciences, University of Miami

About

A cutting-edge analysis of food systems sustainability, including COVID’s impact on current food systems, in up-to-date case studies of community farms in Australia, Brazil, Cuba, and China.

What does expanding agribusiness—and community resistance to it—reveal about the influence of global trends on local livelihoods, and conversely, the influence of food traditions on international networks?  In Food System Intermediaries, anthropologist Adrian Hearn examines how small farmers and their allies are defending their lands and livelihoods from expanding commodity plantations. At the heart of these encounters are food system intermediaries: people who carefully articulate food traditions to forge consensus among otherwise disconnected community producers, local governments, and urban customers. Their efforts to bring these groups together must contend with alternative portrayals of food circulated by more powerful corporate and government actors.

The book offers case studies of urban farms in Melbourne, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Beijing, and Havana to demonstrate how intermediaries are building alliances to cultivate more sustainable food systems, particularly as China’s impact on global agriculture deepens.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Traversing Food Systems
1 Mediating the Urban Fringe
2 Using and Abusing Food Traditions in Melbourne and São Paulo
3 Sowing Seeds of Trust in Beijing and Rio de Janeiro
4 Reimagining Food Sovereignty in Cuba
5 Bridging the Belt and Road
Conclusion: Cultivating Middle Ground
References
Index

Photos

additional book photo
additional book photo

Praise

“Adrian Hearn always brings revelations and insights to his readers that delight and enlighten—in Food System Intermediaries, more so than ever. Echoing Hearn’s perceptive words, history matters, for the subject being studied as well as the one doing the study.”
—Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Professor of History, American Studies, and Ethnic Studies, Brown University

"Adrian Hearn again puts to use his considerable gift as an ethnographer to give us a series of lucid studies about the role of strategic intermediaries in making possible a viable system of food production, distribution, and consumption organized around small farmers and bypassing large agribusiness. Food System Intermediaries is an interesting study and a valuable addition to the literatures on social capital, popular participation, and urban development."
—Alejandro Portes, Professor of Sociology (emeritus), Princeton University, and Professor of Law and Distinguished Scholar of Arts and Sciences, University of Miami

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