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This paper explores food commoning through an ethnographic case study in Catalonia as our primary site while the Norwegian case is juxtaposed as a comparison, two agriculturally and economically different European countries. The ethnography analyses cooperation networks between organic food producers’ and consumers’ involving different nodes of community gardening initiatives, self-employed growers, local farmers and all of them under a unique cooperative integrating a community economy. The result it is a myriad of exchange practices ranging from reciprocity and barter to market exchange without intermediaries through on-line platforms. Along these exchanges different options of currency intervene giving rise to novel social and cooperative relations. Similar initiatives in Norway show less variation and are less experimental regarding forms of payment but share similarities in relation to material articulations, concerns and forms of alternative practice. Although these novel forms do not represent a complete break from the more standardized supply chains, and hence from the oppositions/contradictions of production and consumption, the participants see themselves as contributing to a more general process of de-commodification of food. We explore the extent to which the meaning and moral values are mutually constituted in relation to socioeconomic exchanges and environmental caring that each person experiences based on different forms of cooperation and reciprocity. Food, we suggest, is more than a commodity on the market that we may influence through our role as consumers. It is a significant focal point connecting our lives to those of others that articulates one’s relations to society in a political manner.

The emergence of cooperation in human societies has received ample academic attention from different disciplines, and is usually considered as an adaptive response to competition over scarce resources. In this article, the authors review the specific contribution that social anthropology has made to this field of research. They propose that social anthropology has contributed to this field through the description of systems that have regulated both cooperation and competition in traditional societies: (1) hunter-gatherer societies, where generalized reciprocity dominates; (2) prestige economies, which includes the exchange of valuables in specific spheres, primitive money, agonistic institutions in tribes; and last, (3) ‘moral economies’ in peasant communities, where cooperation and competition coexist but never at the cost of putting at risk the reproduction of the community itself or of some of its members. The three systems share the basic mechanism of reciprocity that allows for the maintenance of equality, as well as the very language for regulating competition in unequal prestige or moral economies. This pervasive presence of reciprocity as a moral norm would reveal its basic role in human evolution, and, likely, its co-evolution with ritual forms of social exchange.