Current discussions of alternative food movements tend to focus on their growth and significance in advanced capitalist societies. In this groundbreaking contribution to critical food studies, editors Yuson Jung, Jakob A. Klein, and Melissa L. Caldwell explore what constitutes "ethical food" and "ethical eating" in socialist and formerly socialist societies. Containing essays by anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers, this politically nuanced volume offers insight into alternative food movements and their place in today's global economy. 

Collectively, the essays cover discourses on food and morality; the material and social practices surrounding production, trade, and consumption; and the political and economic power of social movements in Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Lithuania, Russia, and Vietnam. Scholars and students will gain important historical and anthropological perspectives on how the dynamics of state-market-citizen relations continue to shape the ethical and moral frameworks guiding food practices around the world.

Content - Acknowledgments, Introduction: Ethical Eating and (Post) socialist Alternatives, 1. Homogenizing Europe: Raw Milk, Risk Politics, and Moral Economies in Europeanizing Lithuania, 2. The Moral Significance of Food in Reform-Era Rural China, 3. Placing Alternative Food Networks: Farmers' Markets in Post-Soviet Vilnius, Lithuania, 4. Ambivalent Consumers and the Limits of Certification: Organic Foods in  Postsocialist Bulgaria, 5. Connecting with the Countryside? "Alternative" Food Movements with Chinese Characteristics, 6. Vegetarian Ethics and Politics in Late-Socialist Vietnam, 7.  Agroecology and the Cuban Nation, 8. Gardening for the State: Cultivating Bionational Citizens in Postsocialist Russia, Afterword: Ethical Food Systems: Between Suspicion and Hope,  Contributors, Index