| Agrifood Initiatives, such as edible gardens, farmers' markets, and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), represent a response to the dominant commodity food system. Focusing on small-scale food system participants in general and gardeners in particular this thesis seeks to understand the performance of AFIs as it is connected to the operation of the commodity food system. To this end, interviews with local gardeners were carried out. These interviews are used to assess the potential of gardens to help change the food system. This thesis employs Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural and counter-hegemony and the concept of scale to analyse the commodity food system, Agrifood Initiatives in general, and edible gardens in particular. Combined with the literature, the interview-results are used to explore whether edible gardens have counter-hegemonic potential and hence are able to further food system change and how their performance could be improved. This thesis demonstrates that the interviewee's understanding of the terms `functional' and `alternative' confirms the literature-based definition of these terms, as well as that edible gardens as AFIs possess certain counter-hegemonic potential. In addition this thesis suggests how their counter-hegemonic performance could be improved. The integration of the concept of scales into the theoretical framework to understand and resolve the question of how the efficiency of hegemony is linked to scale, the extension of Johnston's (2007) list of counter-hegemonic criteria, as well as the application and extension of the Gramscian approach into the field of food studies represent the contribution to the literature this thesis makes. |
