Food System Intermediaries: Bonding and Bridging in China, Latin America, and Australia

by Adrian Hearn

Overview

A cutting-edge analysis of food systems sustainability, including COVID’s impact on current food systems, in up-to-date case studies of community farms in Australia, Brazil, Cuba, and China.

What does expanding agribusiness—and community resistance to it—reveal about the influence of global trends on local livelihoods, and conversely, the influence of food traditions on international networks? In Food System Intermediaries, anthropologist Adrian Hearn examines how small farmers and their allies are defending their lands and livelihoods from expanding commodity plantations. At the heart of these encounters are food system intermediaries: people who carefully articulate food traditions to forge consensus among otherwise disconnected community producers, local governments, and urban customers. Their efforts to bring these groups together must contend with alternative portrayals of food circulated by more powerful corporate and government actors.

The book offers case studies of urban farms in Melbourne, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Beijing, and Havana to demonstrate how intermediaries are building alliances to cultivate more sustainable food systems, particularly as China’s impact on global agriculture deepens.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262553513
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	10/21/2025
Series:	Food, Health, and the Environment
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Adrian H. Hearn teaches at the University of Melbourne. His books include Diaspora and Trust, Cuba, The Changing Currents of Transpacific Integration, and China Engages Latin America. His organization, Suns of Mercury, works with communities around the world to create music, films, and urban farms.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Adrian Hearn always brings revelations and insights to his readers that delight and enlighten—in Food System Intermediaries, more so than ever. Echoing Hearn’s perceptive words, history matters, for the subject being studied as well as the one doing the study.”
—Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Professor of History, American Studies, and Ethnic Studies, Brown University

"Adrian Hearn again puts to use his considerable gift as an ethnographer to give us a series of lucid studies about the role of strategic intermediaries in making possible a viable system of food production, distribution, and consumption organized around small farmers and bypassing large agribusiness. Food System Intermediaries is an interesting study and a valuable addition to the literatures on social capital, popular participation, and urban development."
—Alejandro Portes, Professor of Sociology (emeritus), Princeton University and Professor of Law and Distinguished Scholar of Arts and Sciences, University of Miami

Editorial Reviews

Adrian Hearn always brings revelations and insights to his readers that delight and enlighten—in Food System Intermediaries, more so than ever. Echoing Hearn’s perceptive words, history matters, for the subject being studied as well as the one doing the study.”
—Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Professor of History, American Studies, and Ethnic Studies, Brown University

"Adrian Hearn again puts to use his considerable gift as an ethnographer to give us a series of lucid studies about the role of strategic intermediaries in making possible a viable system of food production, distribution, and consumption organized around small farmers and bypassing large agribusiness. Food System Intermediaries is an interesting study and a valuable addition to the literatures on social capital, popular participation, and urban development."
—Alejandro Portes, Professor of Sociology (emeritus), Princeton University, and Professor of Law and Distinguished Scholar of Arts and Sciences, University of Miami

From the Publisher