Abstract

Over the last 15 years, social scientists have paid a growing attention to food activism in Italy; nonetheless, much research has been devoted to activism in the domain of consumption, while rather less attention has been paid to food workers' activism. This article describes a number of workers' movements and organizations - of both peasants and farm labourers - whose activism is linked to the issues of agricultural labour and the conditions of food production. In recent years, such movements have developed new practices and have proposed radically alternative views and discourses concerning the food system, in opposition to the corporations of agro-industry and food retail. In this review, I use the categories of "mutualism" and "resistance", as elaborated by the sociologist and historian Pino Ferraris in his analysis of the early Italian and European workers' movements.