Michael S Carolan

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Verified

Michael verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD Sociology
• Professor and Director at Colorado State University

This paper examines some of the more-than-representational knowledge that underpins food systems. As argued, it is not enough to know what sustainability is. We have to, literally, be able to feel (care for, taste, practice…) it. The author begins by drawing upon interviews with food scientists, food advertisers and marketers, and executives from t...

Environmental scholars and practitioners are calling for the democratization of science and expertise. Two of the earliest and most influential arguments toward this end come to us from Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz, with their now famous discussion of “postnormal science,” and Alvin Weinberg, with his well-known distinction between “research”...

Drawing upon original research examining urban agriculture projects in Denver, Colorado, this article explores the “growing” metaphor used in community development circles, especially those involving food-growing schemes. The authors propose the following analytic distinction: above ground/below ground. The former refers to those capitals we count...

This article has multiple aims: (1) to understand, with the help of descriptive statistics, how eaters engaged within various alternative foodscapes compare to more conventional eaters when asked questions about things like their interest in local politics, whether they volunteer, and their reasons for buying local foods; (2) to map, with the help...

A little over a century ago, Thorstein Veblen introduced us to the now commonplace term "conspicuous consumption": the idea that we consume, at least in part, in order to display to others our social power. While the conceptual utility of this term is just as valid today as it was the day Veblen penned it, further elaboration is now required to acc...

In this paper, we provide an overview of the research and literature on wild foods (i.e., edible plants that grow without human cultivation and/or animals harvested from their natural habit, i.e., food sourced from “hunting and gathering”) and their ability to assist food systems in becoming more sustainable and equitable. We begin with a discussio...

Farmer field school (FFS)/integrated pest management (IPM) functions as a facilitative mesosystem in Agricultural Innovation Ecosystems, spanning across problems and sectors. It addresses the interface between farmers and the environment, opening new trajectories for sustainable transition and promoting healthy agroecosystems. This paper applies th...

Development research and practice often use a capitals framework to study and encourage community improvement (Flora et al. 2015; Pender et al., 2014; Scoones 2009). This includes capitals such as human, social, natural, infrastructural, political, economic, and cultural. Despite robust scholarship on a variety of capital types, the conceptualizati...

Although there has been a recent surge in research on drivers of poor farmer wellbeing and mental health, there is still a limited understanding of the state of wellbeing in farming communities around the world and how it can be best supported. This special issue seeks to extend our knowledge of how a combination of different stressors can challeng...

Potatoes are the most consumed vegetable worldwide and play an important role in the U.S. economy. Growers make critical decisions each year in choosing which cultivar to grow, based on factors such as yield, resilience to the growing environment, and utility in the food industry. Current research supports the finding that less-common specialty cul...

This paper investigates what investments in shorter supply chains, especially post-outbreak (COVID), mean in relation to broader agrifood corporatization trends. The paper draws from 25 interviews with individuals connected to large-scale vertical farming operations in the US and Canada, from investors and executives of vertical agriculture firms t...

This paper offers a first-in-kind systemic visual content analysis of food systems images.A Google Images search for “food systems” was conducted and the top one hundred were captured. After images were filtered, a total of 82 figures were coded based on their text, pictures, geometric symbols (circles, arrows, etc.), and proportionality. The analy...

This editorial introduces a special issue (SI) concerning quests for responsible digital agri‐food innovation. We present our interpretations of the concepts of responsible innovation and digital agri‐food innovation and show why they can and have been productively interrelated with social science theories and methods. First, each of the articles i...

Organic nutrient sources (ONS) are managed as a key resource by smallholder farmers to maintain the productivity of soils. Recycling of ONS by applying them to soils is a globally dominant strategy of ecological nutrient management. Understanding how ONS produced on-farm are allocated and what drives farmer decision making around their use is criti...

Thoroughly revised and updated, the third edition of The Sociology of Food and Agriculture provides a cutting-edge, comprehensive introduction to the study of food and society. The book begins by examining the food economy, with chapters focusing on foodscapes, the financialization of food, and a new chapter dedicated to food and nutrition (in)secu...

This paper challenges conventional understandings of how we think about consumer food waste by investigating the food purchasing/wasting views and practices of 102 Colorado (USA) residents (67 households). The methods used in this study included the triangulation of surveys, self-reported pictures of food waste and related daily reports over a two-...

In this study, a cross-cultural analysis was undertaken to compare the knowledge of organic producers and agricultural experts in Iran concerning the concepts of good farming, good farmer, and organic farming in the field of sustainable agriculture. We put concepts of good farming, good farmer, and organic farming in conversation with Bourdieu's co...

In addition to upending nearly every segment of the economy, COVID-19 has uprooted social life as we know it and the innumerable discourses and practices therein contained. While a terrible event, it can also be approached as offering a once-in-a-lifetime (hopefully) natural experiment. This is certainly true as far as the global pandemic applies t...

This paper adopts a relational, also known as a topological, approach to food accessibility—the idea that food spaces are best understood as relational becomings rather than as voids filled exclusively with mass (immutable materiality) and address (geospatial coordinates). It is animated by an experimental spirit, in terms of the methods employed,...

This article is based on research conducted in Colorado in late-2019 and again post-COVID outbreak, from April through May of 2020. In addition to (virtual) face-to-face interviews, the study used a GPS tracking app to map respondents’ macromobilities – trips from one GPS coordinate to another. The data presented are informed by practice theory. Th...

How do we make agricultural practice more sustainable? One way to examine the drivers and barriers to change within agriculture is through the sustainability transitions framework. However, this approach has been criticised for not adequately engaging with the lessons of food justice. To correct this deficiency, we suggest the concept, “just transi...

This paper contributes to our understanding of farm data value chains with assistance from 54 semi-structured interviews and field notes from participant observations. Methodologically, it includes individuals, such as farmers, who hold well-known positionalities within digital agriculture spaces—platforms that include precision farming techniques,...

The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology is a go-to resource for cutting-edge research in the field. This two-volume work covers the rich theoretic foundations of the sub-discipline, as well as novel approaches and emerging areas of research that add vitality and momentum to the discipline. Over the course of sixty chapters, the authors fe...

The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology is a go-to resource for cutting-edge research in the field. This two-volume work covers the rich theoretic foundations of the sub-discipline, as well as novel approaches and emerging areas of research that add vitality and momentum to the discipline. Over the course of sixty chapters, the authors fe...

This paper offers an alternative approach for engaging sociologically, ontologically, and politically with digital farming platforms. A challenge faced by any approach looking to upend intellectual conventions, especially ontological ones, lies in the question of representation, namely, how do we talk about digitization in novel theoretical ways us...

The growing interest in incentivizing sustainable agricultural practices is supported by a large network of voluntary production standards, which aim to offer farmers and ranchers increased value for their product in support of reduced environmental impact. To be effective with producers and consumers alike, these standards must be both credible an...

While easy to empirically document the explicit bias underlying authoritarian populism, most of the individuals animating the movement are driven by sentiments harder to detect, such as implicit bias and what is known as the colorblind ideology. Drawing from semi-structured interviews of Colorado (USA) residents (n = 71), the paper makes the follow...

Though a small fraction of the US citizenry, agricultural producers are directly responsible for the stewardship of almost half of the country’s land. This group is therefore an especially important one to understand from the standpoint of how they process and respond to science as it relates to agroecological phenomena. Data from a sample (n = 111...

This article engages with two rich but largely disparate research traditions: one looks at ethical consumption, that is, constructions and contestations around good food, while the other interrogates the equally contested space of what it means to be a good farmer. The argument is informed by qualitative data collected from, on the one hand, those...

Problem, research strategy, and findings: How do traditional forms of urban agriculture and the newer digital urban agriculture converge and diverge from one another in terms of land use and gentrification? I interrogate the subject of digital urban agriculture with data from 82 semistructured interviews and notes taken during public forms and tour...

This article, originally a Keynote Address at the XXVIII European Society for Rural Sociology Congress (Trondheim, Norway, June 25‐28, 2019), reflects on my positionality as a citizen‐academic at a time when democracies around the world are threatened by runaway incivility, anxiety, and hate. Such reflexivity ought to be encouraged in the field and...

Once reliant on year‐long periods of unvegetated fallow, dryland farmers are reaping environmental and economic benefits by replacing fallow with a crop, a practice called cropping system intensification. However, in the U.S. High Plains, transitions to intensified cropping systems have been slow relative to other regions, and cropping systems have...

Within the market-making literature lies nuanced discussions dealing with the plurality and construction of subjectivities and value. These topics have been of particular interest to those interested in platforms hoping to engender so called caring capitalism, which speaks to financial ecologies that are both more-or-less market and more-or-less so...

This paper makes the case that justice scholarship cannot adequately account for the rural grievances that helped launch Trump to the presidency. This relative blind spot in the literature offers an opportunity for rural sociologists and rural studies scholars more generally to elevate their relevance in the academy and beyond. From late‐2012 to la...

This paper draws from interviews with (1) US farmers who have adopted automated systems; (2) individuals employed by North American firms that engineer, manufacture, and/or repair these technologies; and (3) US farm laborers (immigrant and domestic) and representatives from farm labor organizations. The argument draws from the literature interrogat...

Cities are increasingly turning to food policy plans to support goals related to food access, food security, the environment, and economic development. This paper investigates ways that rural farmers, communities, and economies can both support and be supported by metropolitan food-focused initiatives. Specifically, our research question asked what...

We are living in an era of the audit. Sustainability indicators are used to ensure that industries are behaving responsibly. The audits are well elaborated in their environmental requirements, but they are often less directly engaged with issues of social sustainability. Should they be? After describing a number of challenges with measuring social...

Some are predicting that as much as 70% of the nation’s farmland will exchange hands between 2011 and 2031 (Dean, 2011). Given these changes looming on the food horizon, there is a need to better understand the processes, barriers, and opportunities related to intergenerational farm transfer, especially at the rural-urban interface. I draw upon dat...

Investments in urban agriculture (UA) initiatives have been increasing in the United States, but the costs and benefits to society are poorly understood. Urban agriculture can link socioeconomic and health systems, support education and societal engagement, and contribute to a range of conservation goals, including nutrient recycling and biodiversi...

The Community Capitals Framework has been used by scholars and practitioners to both evaluate community projects and help leverage community resources. However, less work has examined the role of symbolic values in these processes. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this research examines the relationship between value and identity frames and resource...

Cooperative organizing around food and agriculture is nothing new (Knupfer, 2013). However, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in the cooperative legal form. This research has followed this rebirth in a region in the western United States where rural producers and urban consumers, gentrifying communities of color, and environmentally mi...

The paper takes a critical look at how food retail firms use big data, looking specifically at how these techniques and technologies govern our ability to imagine food worlds. It does this by drawing on two sets of data: (1) interviews with twenty-one individuals who oversaw the use of big data applications in a retail setting and (2) five consumer...

The article examines two seemingly disparate case studies, one involving conventional corn producers and agriculture professionals located in North Dakota, the other focusing on participants in a diverse urban agriculture cooperative in an anonymized U.S. city. Drawing on qualitative interviews and data-presenting devices known as “word clouds,” th...

This thought-provoking but accessible book critically examines the dominant food regime on its own terms, by seriously asking whether we can afford cheap food and by exploring what exactly cheap food affords us. Detailing the numerous ways that our understanding of food has narrowed, such as its price per ounce, combination of nutrients, yield per...

Runaway inequality is placing tremendous pressure on the world’s democracies and on our international capacity for peace. The widespread loss of security among the world’s middle and working classes has produced a Janus-faced response: one listening to our better angels and seeking equity, the other preying on our fears, looking to blame anyone wit...

At one point during her widely viewed Ted Talk, Rachel Botsman, author of What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, asked the audience for a show of hands from those who owned a power drill. Nearly everyone lifted a palm.¹ “It’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it?” she said, with a mix of disbelief and sadness, “because what you need i...

A little known irony about Thomas Jefferson and his agrarian ideal: successful farm ownership during his presidency was entirely dependent on seed sharing.

Noelle is a labor attorney. Two decades of helping corporations skirt labor laws—lawfully skirt, she assured me—had taken its toll. “Got to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore,” she confided. “I wasn’t making the world any better; I certainly wasn’t helping my fellow man. My job was to enrich companies, even if that meant pulling the rug out...

Marvin is a contract hog farmer in Iowa. He owns his land, his barn, his tractor, and his animal crates. He has seen profits drop steadily for the last twenty years and feels trapped. Josh is a dairy farmer on a cooperative in Massachusetts. He doesn’t own his cows, his land, his seed, or even all of his equipment. Josh has a healthy income and fee...

Land succession: here is a topic that you will be reading and hearing more about in the years ahead.

You know it’s hot when you can see it. Standing alongside a field just off Route 2 in Massachusetts, I was mesmerized by the heat rising off the road, blurring the horizon far in the distance. The bright midday sun beat down on the top of my head. The thermometer in my rental, a mid-size whose air-conditioning made more noise than cold air, read 10...

We’ve talked about agricultural technologies and land—but ladders? The following is taken from a 1919 article titled “The Agricultural Ladder”

I had been driving country roads for close to an hour. The dull purr of pavement eventually gave way to the steady rumble of gravel, like a hail-storm hitting the vehicle’s underside. I saw the white tops of the iconic blue Harvestore silos peeking up over the dancing corn tassels well before the other buildings and farmhouse came into view. As I p...

I could smell my final destination before seeing it. Cookies? Cake? Nope, bread—freshly baked!

Identifying and understanding the heterogeneity of the motivations and problems of farmers is critical for designing better strategies as societies strive to convert towards agricultural approaches such as organic farming and sustainable intensification. The objective of this research is to explore the motivations and problems for conversion to org...

This paper draws from data collected through interviews with the following groups: big data and/or precision farm equipment firm employees from numerous countries; commodity farmers in the U.S. who use big data; individuals from the U.S.-based Right to Repair movement; and farmers associated with Farm Hack from the U.S. and the U.K. With this as th...

The author cautions against theories of value that look to define what ‘it’ is, noting how such an approach closes off imaginaries based on alterity and difference thus unintentionally reproducing the very status quo being criticizing. A call is made for experimentation, disciplinary transgressions, and cosmopolitical critiques. Can we think about...

Agricultural production contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and global climate change. If the agricultural sector is to mitigate its contributions, farmers must actively adopt conservation practices. Recent studies have shown farmers’ beliefs about climate change to be influential in their support for adopting these practices. This study explor...

In today’s fast-paced, fast food world, everyone seems to be eating alone, all the time—whether it’s at their desks or in the car. Even those who find time for a family meal are cut off from the people who grew, harvested, distributed, marketed, and sold the foods on their table. Few ever break bread with anyone outside their own socioeconomic grou...

This chapter provides an overview of our food preferences, which drive our daily food choices. Flavor and tastes are important factors for food enjoyment, although cost is a major decision driver in consumer choice. Genetics, culture, and the environment affect our tastes, including liking or aversion to certain foods. Meat and dairy are staples of...

Walking up their driveway, I passed a 1990 Volkswagen. Nothing out of the ordinary about it, except for the two bumper stickers displayed on its rear window: one read, “Slow Food”; the other, “If I’m Speeding It’s Because I Have to Poop.” Chuckling, I reconciled the mixed messages, thinking the car was a hand-me-down, from parent to child. I knew t...

“The little guys have their purpose,” Jérémie told me. “But still, the reality is you gotta pay to play. There are efficiencies; if you want to feed the world, there are efficiencies that can only be had with scaling up, with capital investment.”

In our fast-paced, fast-food culture, everyone seems to be eating alone—all the time. Americans report that they eat nearly 50 percent of their meals alone, while more than 60 percent of office workers typically have lunch at their desks—a phenomenon so prevalent it has earned a catchy moniker: desktop dining. So why do I claim that No One Eats Alo...

This chapter takes aim at a sacred cow in alternative food movements: “local.” If practices shape what we care about, then the potential of alternative food movements is not being fully realized by focusing narrowly on local food. After all, foodscapes can be “local,” “close,” and “compact” and still separate people.

People around the world are hungry. They need food. And just as importantly, they need nutritious food: affordable fruits and vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, and fast food. Wait, what was that last one?

“You are what you eat.” We have all heard this saying, and no doubt each of us has used it on a few occasions. Yet food is not only a what, but also a when, a why, a how, and a with whom. In other words, we cannot understand food without understanding the social practices that go along with eating and producing it, as well as all those activities t...

“Legislation is one thing; behavioral change is something else entirely.” This obsevation came from Nicole, a nutritionist employed by the USDA within its Food and Nutrition Service agency. We were discussing the challenge of getting school-age kids to eat differently. A few years back, the federal government introduced a new rule requiring schools...

It’s easy to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem. That’s particularly true of food, which involves problems that can be maddeningly complex. Complex, however, does not mean impossible. No panaceas, of course. Education; external incentives; food bans; Green Revolutions: one-size-fits-all approaches ignore the truth that...

Food writers generally avoid tramping into the thorny terrain of ethics. Remarkable, when you think about it. After all, a good bit of what we’re fighting over when it comes to food concerns ethical claims. Eat this. Avoid that. Why? Because that is what you should do. For the environment! Because animals feel pain, too! Support local businesses! F...

A Google search for nineteenth-century cookbooks returns many pages of results, all now in the public domain. It’s a virtual time machine for anyone who wants a sense of how our ancestors experienced food. Among my favorites: The White House Cook Book, from 1887. The opening pages read: “To the wives of our Presidents, those noble women who have gr...

A popular question asked by consumers, the media, and politicians is whether the existing protein regimen can keep up with current rates of demand. But to answer this question assumes we know what those rates of demand are. As this chapter explains, this question is not settled terrain. It explores what it means to feed the world—does that assume,...

This paper seeks to answer the following questions. How are digital platforms encountered and felt by producers and consumers and how do these assemblages shape the foodscapes we imagine and enact? How do elements like digital locks, proprietary code, and “open” code inform how we think about the subject of agrifood governance? Finally, what are th...

Current wildlife management practices in western societies must increasingly deal with human-wildlife conflicts. In their attempt to spatially regulate humans and wild animals, the common focus is on containment , endeavouring to facilitate the removal and exclusion of wild animals. Recently, however, ideas of cohabitation have emerged in wildlife...

In this second edition of The Sociology of Food and Agriculture, students are provided with a substantially revised and updated introductory text to this emergent field. The book begins with the recent development of agriculture under capitalism and neo-liberal regimes, and the transformation of farming and peasant agriculture from a small-scale, f...

Recent agri-food studies, including commodity systems, the political economy of agriculture, regional development, and wider examinations of the rural dimension in economic geography and rural sociology have been confronted by three challenges. These can be summarized as: 'more than human' approaches to economic life; a 'post-structural political e...

This article draws upon data taken from the following: 18 interviews of Iowa farmers who utilise big data when making farm management decisions; 14 interviews of those engaged within big data industry, those involved in the sale and promotion of large-scale data acquisition, predictive analytic software, and/or precision agriculture technologies fo...

1) Agrifood scholars need to recognize (if not all-out embrace) just how public their scholarship is. 2) Public scholarship that enlivens ought to be encourage, avoiding practices that enact politics of subtraction. 3) Our scholarship enacts worlds, not just in terms of the methods we practice but also in terms of the imaginaries we contribute to....

This paper investigates how we can enact, collectively, affording food systems. Yet rather than asking simply what those assemblages might look like the author enquires as to how they might also feel. Building on existing literature that speaks to the radically relational, and deeply affective, nature of food the aims of this paper are multiple: to...

Food is a contentious and emotive issue, subject to critiques from multiple perspectives. Alternative food movements – including the different articulations of local, food miles, seasonality, food justice, food knowledge and food sovereignty – consistently invoke themes around autonomy, sufficiency, cooperation, mutual aid, freedom, and responsibil...

This article builds on Carolan's three natures scheme, where he distinguishes between the strata of ‘nature’, nature and Nature, by overlaying his previous framework with further analytic distinctions. Doing this, the authors argue, adds an important layer of analytical and conceptual robustness that his earlier scheme lacks. After building on this...

Does food sovereignty have a core? Can it and yet still be spoken of as wildly relational, as being a process which prioritizes means over ends? Those are the type of questions posed in this commentary. After applauding Lucy Jarosz's ability to synthesize an incredibly diverse literature, spanning decades, the author admits to his own struggles in...

This paper speaks to the generative capacities of research more generally and the biological economies process specifically. It highlights the importance of being disruptive and critical while avoiding the traps of structuralist paranoia that keep one from seeing and doing difference. It also seeks to move through, rather than beyond, conventional...

Noting that the field of agro-food studies has undergone numerous ‘turns’ over the years, this article first seeks to make sense of this evolving literature by examining aspects of the metaphysical foreground upon which this ‘turning’ takes place. Doing this highlights a coalescing of sorts within the field; a movement the author describes as being...

In this challenging work, the author argues that the goal of any food system should not simply be to provide the cheapest calories possible. A secure food system is one that affords people and nations – in both the present and future – the capabilities to prosper and lead long, happy, and healthy lives. For a variety of reasons, food security has c...

It is the wickedest of problems. If what we know is truly embedded in practice, in our routines, habits, and embodied performances (Carolan 2011), than we have to do food futures before we perceive them. How do you enact an alternative reality before thinking it? Without coming right out and saying it, this Special Issue collectively attempts to ma...