Scaling Food Sovereignty: Biopolitics and the Struggle for Local Control of Farm Food in Rural Maine

Recent scholarship highlights the play of biopower in and through policies and practices shaping food systems, but says little about the practices of resistance to such power. Alternative food movements mobilize critique of and resistance to an industrialized food system from many perspectives. This article examines food sovereignty activism in Maine as an illuminating instance of contemporary biopolitics. This article investigates a “food sovereignty ordinance” passed in eleven towns in Maine since 2011 as an important moment in the biopolitical struggle over the nature of food systems. The ordinance exempts direct transactions of farm food from licensure and inspection in an effort to maintain the viability of small, diversified farms in a struggling rural economy. The ordinance effectively carves out a space of food sovereignty in each town that enacts it, thereby protecting conditions of life and livelihood within local food networks. The analysis focuses on the spatiality of the practices that comprise biopolitics, with attention to the scalar politics in play as well; that is, the ways in which modalities of power shape and are shaped by social, economic, and political scales of organization. This exploration of the scaling of biopolitics in relation to the concept of food sovereignty suggests insights into the contours of other moments of struggle over food regulations.