Transforming the capitalist food regime: A historical materialist perspective on community-supported agriculture

Historical materialists explain that our capitalist ‘food regime’ is defined by global inequality, labour exploitation, food insecurity, and environmental degradation, contributing to a ‘metabolic rift’ between people and our environment. Yet, this regime is challenged by transformative alternatives, notably the practice of community-supported agriculture (CSA). CSA involves economic collaboration between producers and consumers, often including co-ownership and work, thus potentially subverting the capitalist logic of the food regime. However, CSA’s non-capitalist nature and impact are often called into question. This article therefore analyses CSA’s transformative potential through a historical materialist lens of food regime theory and the metabolic rift. It finds CSA potentially capable of decommodifying and democratising food production, de-alienating labour and socio-ecological relations, enhancing environmental sustainability, addressing social inequalities, and scaling effectively. However, all these potential achievements face significant limitations and mutual trade-offs, which likely cannot be resolved by individual CSAs but require collaboration at scale.