UCLA

This dissertation traces the fresh fruit and vegetable supply chain that connects farmers with urban consumers in Bengaluru (Bangalore), India in order to illuminate broader transformations in the city and its agrarian periphery resulting from rapid urbanization. Food ecologies offer a site to describe, critique, and address the moral and material effects of urban development, from food safety scares to the insecurities of agricultural livelihoods. However, these critiques and the projects that they motivate are anchored in class-specific experiences. In this dissertation, I focus on the aspirations and insecurities of the middle and upper classes that guide many contemporary interventions into Bengaluru's food supply chain. I present results from eighteen months (June 2014 - January 2016) of ethnographic field research in Bengaluru and nearby farming communities in order to analyze two ongoing projects: one, the creation of new intermediary forms that establish “direct” supply chains, and two, city residents’ attempts to bypass food markets altogether by growing their own food. In Part I, I analyze the market logics and ethical ambiguities that guide contemporary interventions into the intermediary positions in the supply chain. These interventions, promoted and enacted by governmental and non-governmental actors alike, are rooted in an ideology of market efficacy and a belief in India's increased economic abundance. Despite language that positions newly established corporate forms—contract farming companies and farmer-producer companies—as “free market” enterprises that are uninhibited by the stifling effects of "middlemen," the relationships that characterize longstanding forms of agricultural production, distribution, and retail remain critical. In Part II, I consider producers’ and consumers’ understandings of the changing food supply chain, focusing on the aspirations, insecurities, and class inequalities embedded in shifting production and consumption practices. I show that the primary beneficiaries of the interventions described in Part I are members of the middle and upper classes. In Part III, I examine efforts among urban professionals to rework their relationship to the city’s food ecology by growing food themselves. For these individuals, gardening offers an ethical alternative to more common forms of work and leisure among the urban middle and upper classes.