Sustainability and the “urban peasant”: rethinking the cultural politics of food self-provisioning in the Czech Republic

From the introduction: The third article, written by environmentalists Petr Jehlička and Joe Smith, overturns accounts of food self-provisioning in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe that are rooted in myths of the “urban peasant”. After reviewing and rejecting those accounts the authors introduce very different explanations for high rates of growing and sharing food outside the market system based in social anthropological research in the region. The authors have extended that work with their own qualitative and quantitative research over a period of six years in the Czech Republic, and here present findings that confirm the contribution that food self-provisioning is making to both the social and ecological sustainability