Abstracts.

The article present abstracts of several research papers and articles that appeared in the October 2002 issue of the journal Sociologia Ruralis. An article authored by Stewart Lockie related to food production-consumption networks, states that the distanciation of production-consumption relationships in space and time, and the historically productivist bias of social theory, have contributed to the development of sociology of food production and consumption as largely unrelated academic discourses. Production-based agro-food studies have tended to treat consumption as either a domain of social practice distinct from, but determined by, production, or as a source of demands that producers must compete among themselves to meet. Both perspectives fail to deal either with the complexity of food consumption practices or their relationships with practices of food provision. Another article by Julie Gutham states that agro-food researchers have yet to systematically theorize how the social life of food intersects with a political economy of food production. Yet without such understanding, activists are unlikely to affect the politics of production in intended ways. It is crucial to understand how the meanings that animate the politics of consumption are translated and distributed as surplus value and rent, and, for that matter, how surplus value and rent value are translated into meanings.