Lacey Gaechter’s research while affiliated with University of Wyoming and other places

Until the advent and spread of supermarkets, the markets that we now call farmers, public, open-air, or traditional markets needed no adjectives. They were simply markets. Currently, the bodies of research about traditional markets common in the Global South and about farmers markets resurging in the Global North tend to be separate. However, viewed through the lens of food regime frame­works, together these markets come more clearly into focus as globally local alternatives to a corpo­rate regime of supermarkets. As microcases within this macrosociological framework, this paper examines two urban markets—one traditional daily market in Suva, Fiji, and one seasonal Saturday farmers market in East New York, Brooklyn, in the United States. We analyze interviews and surveys with vendors and market-related documents. As we illustrate with brief case descriptions, other than both being urban, the individual markets and their contexts could hardly be more different. One market was formalized early in the colonial food regime, and the other was founded more recently as an alternative to the current neoliberal corporate regime. However, vendors in both reported that selling at the market generates income, autonomy, respect, and social connectedness for them. These commonalities suggest that examining lessons from such markets across communities globally, South or North, traditional or farmers, may offer new insights into how to sustain and expand such mar­kets even in the face of supermarket domination. In addition, doing so with a food regime lens may make that work more useful for informing how to support traditional and farmers market develop­ment in ways that help keep aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute, and consume food at the heart of their work, as real alternatives to neoliberal frameworks.

Social movement theory suggests that effectively framing the cause of a problem (diagnostic fram­ing), its solutions (prognostic framing), and reasons to support its solutions (motivational framing) is likely to be essential for reaching movement goals. In this paper, we apply social movement framing theory to empirically identify prognostic, diag­nostic, and motivational frames in the growing food justice movement in the U.S. We use the case of the Food Dignity project, a five-year, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)–funded, action and research collaboration between academics and leaders at five community-based food justice organizations. We coded multiple data sources, both public and internal to the project, to identify the strongest and most common diagnostic, prog­nostic, and motivational frames used by 25 indivi­dual collaborators in the Food Dignity project. Results suggest that the majority of diagnostic frames used by Food Dignity partners did not relate directly to food, but included instead insufficient resources, loss of place, degraded community, and constrained choice and response-ability (Minkler, 1999) as causes of problems—though a broken food system also emerged as a causal frame. Similarly, solution framing included one overarching food-related strategy, which we labelled “great food.” The other prognostic frames were reclaiming power, growing the local economy, strengthening community, fostering sustainable organizations, and networking. We did not find any motivational frames in the first round of semi-open coding. However, when we returned to reexamine the data with a hypothesis informed by our project experience beyond the textual data, we identified the motivational frame that we call recompense. Recompense suggests that those who have bene­fited from our current food systems should now work toward justice for those who sacrificed, usually unwillingly, to create them. This frame was mostly used indirectly and by community-based (rather than academic) partners in the project. Identifying these food justice diagnostic, prognos­tic, and motivational frames may help movement leaders to more explicitly examine and employ them and is an essential step for future research in assessing their effectiveness for creating a just, sustainable and healthy food system.