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To the extent that social science scholarship engages real-world developments it remains grounded and better able to resist elite agendas. With this in mind this article argues for the critical encounter with what I argue is the most significant struggle around food and agriculture today--the amorphous and broad-based movement that strives to resist the further degradation of food environments and ensure healthy eating in society. This struggle is inevitably engaged with contemporary neoliberal agendas that have transformed and degraded food environments as they have privileged profit making over healthy diets. The article considers different sites where the struggle over healthy eating is taking place, both at the level of the state and more extensively in civil society. It considers the debate over bovine growth hormone in Canada and the wider efforts to turn around school food environments as examples of state-centered and civil-society struggles, respectively, that illustrate different dimensions of the healthy-eating movement today. In each case the agendas of transnational food corporations are seen to be directly contradicting efforts to ensure healthy diets. The article considers some notable successes among advocates of healthy eating, in the United States and Canada and most notably in Britain, and examines some of the factors that may account for this success. Overall, I argue that this struggle has the potential to challenge the hegemony of neoliberal discourse in fundamental ways. The article concludes with a call for academics, and rural sociologists in particular, to give a much greater priority to healthy-eating struggles, and considers a number of areas where academic practitioners can aid activists' efforts to resist the further degradation of diets and establish healthier food environments.

This paper examines qualitative data on class consciousness derived from a study of corporate restructuring and the impacts of layoffs in rural Ontario communities. In particular, the study examines how the rural environment might impinge on the development of class consciousness among the workers there in the context of severe economic stress brought on by plant shutdowns. It is argued that an ideology specific to a farm and small town environment plays a significant role in shaping their response to crisis. The more standard predictors of class consciousness such as age, gender, past union membership, and employment status are also considered. The paper aims to deepen our understanding of the seemingly contradictory belief structures of working class people.

This paper examines the contention that capitalist agriculture is coming to predominate in the industrialized West. An empirical study of central Canadian farms integrated into agribusiness operations indicates the structural complexity of agriculture and the importance of commodity features in defining the social organization of farms. Particularly notable findings concern the long duration and relatively high volumes of seasonal wage labour, some of it migratory offshore labour, used on certain categories of farms, and the importance of this labour usage in defining these farms in structural terms. These findings challenge the sweeping generalizations found in the rural sociological literature concerning farm structure, and in particular previous analyses of the impact of agribusiness on petty-commodity production., The major sociological writers on agrarian change who continue to influence rural sociology were concerned with specifying the essential features of the agricultural enterprise as a guide to predicting the [...]

Kordick rightly confronts the myth of Costa Rica as a country historically characterised by a class of smallholder coffee farmers unencumbered by an exploitive oligarchy so characteristic of other Latin American countries, a myth that has been also perpetuated by foreign, largely US, scholars. Perhaps the most significant contribution of this study is the insight it provides into the more recent role that out-migration and remittances migrants send back home play in changing social relationships in Costa Rican society. Another subject she introduces, and one that is a significant contribution, I would argue, is the more recent reality of population out-migration to the United States, particularly from rural areas, and the significant socio-economic impacts this is having on Costa Rican society, at least in certain regions. [Extracted from the article]

A case study of laid-off workers in a rural Ontario county is placed within the polarized debate over the implications for workers and for society more broadly of trade liberalization and economic restructuring. Examining experiences of layoff, including length of time unemployed, comparisons between old and new jobs, and the degree of income loss, we present empirical data on the transformation taking place in a rural community context. We argue that, for such communities at least, the long-term effects of restructuring are negative for workers and their communities overall, and are particularly disadvantageous for women and older workers., THE FORCES OF CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM are radically altering the structure of business enterprise, the organization of labour, the quality of life on and off the job and the role of [...]

This paper is concerned with the restructuring of petty commodity producers in agriculture and, more specifically, the role of food processing firms in this process. Two mechanisms by which processors secure their agricultural supplies--corporate farming and contract farming--are examined in central Canada. Although fairly widespread, corporate farming by processors is slowly declining and is unlikely to have a major impact on petty producers. By comparison, this study indicates that, in the context of corporate consolidation, the behavior of food processors in granting production contracts to formally independent farm operators is furthering the social differentiation of the latter.