This chapter explores food-related community building activities by young environmental and social activists who seek to change food consumption patterns and thus change the transnational food system. It seeks to understand the role of food and drink (hereafter ‘food’) not only as the object of their concern but also as a discursive and sensory socio-material entity that is itself involved in the building of more sustainable local and alternative food communities – and that can certainly be strategically employed for other community-building purposes as well.

Food is often present in practices of community development and community building. Traditionally, food has been addressed as an aspect of the experience of poverty, for instance in relation to food banks (Warshawsky, 2020), community kitchens (Hennchen and Pregernig, 2020), credit unions and microfinance for small-scale agricultural production (Salami et al, 2020). Food has also been a frequent topic in community development programmes of community education concerned with poverty alleviation, for example through budgeting for healthy nutrition and with health prevention such as in the case of obesity and other forms of malnutrition – likewise often among poor populations (Wetherill et al, 2019). Food is also frequently used as the basis for community cohesion work in multicultural contexts (Gatenby et al, 2011). All these discussions show that these interventions stumble in relation to the complex issues of power (both personal and political) that food practices embody.

In this chapter a different perspective unfolds, one in which food itself is the central concern: the chapter is concerned with the role of food in community-building activities that aim at systemic changes in the food system. To that purpose, it focuses on discursive, material and sensory aspects of corresponding social practices that involve food and at the same time foster community. Particularly, it concerns the work of a group of young environmental activists from Zurich, Switzerland, who engage in the promotion of a more sustainable food system as one of the central fields where action is needed towards a more ecologically sustainable and more just society.