'Milk actually comes from a cow': Ontario dairy farmers' reactions and interventions with consumers' milk rifts as third‐party alienation. (17th January 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Gray, Allison
• Is Part Of: Journal of agrarian change. Volume 21:Number 3(2021)
• Page Start: 504
• Page End: 521
• Publication Date: 2021-01-17
• Subjects: alienation -- dairy farmers -- food movements -- metabolic rift; Agriculture -- Economic aspects -- Periodicals; Agriculture -- Social aspects -- Periodicals; Agriculture -- Periodicals -- History; Land tenure -- Periodicals; Land reform -- Periodicals; 338.1
• DOI: 10.1111/joac.12406
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1471-0358

Abstract

Abstract: A significant effect of industrial capitalism on the modern Western world is the generation and perpetuation of a physical and discursive distancing between people and food – a result of what Marx termed the metabolic rift. Studies of alienated relationships often homogenize the rift experience. This paper explores how rural Ontario dairy farmers experience what John Bellamy Foster calls 'metabolism' and their perceptions of the alienated states of non‐farmers. Results from on‐farm semi‐structured interviews suggest these farmers are aware of a distancing between non‐farmers and food (milk) that is a different experience than that of farmers. Such perception of milk alienation involving an external group – or what I term third‐party alienation – is accompanied by farmer‐initiated interventions, such as on‐farm educational visits and educational programmes, attempting to mend non‐farmers rift experience. Third‐party alienation exemplifies the ways in which metabolism can be diversely embodied – and possibly mended – within current human–food, and human–nature, relationships.