The Food Policy Council (FPC) movement has emerged as a highly modular form of local/regional response to multiple problems facing North American agricultural production and food consumption. Though FPCs or their equivalents trace origins to the early 1980s, the last decade has seen a dramatic increase and diffusion of this organizational response to a range of problems associated with food and agriculture, such as social justice, hunger, nutrition, obesity, 'local' agriculture, environmental concerns, and the absence of coherent, integrated federal agriculture and food policy. Each locale brings a particular constellation of organizations that reflect regional interests, organizational capacities and power differentials. This paper attempts to adapt Fligstein and McAdam's recent theory of strategic action fields to analyze FPCs as an embedded field that may facilitate governance of local manifestations of national and global level contradictions of agriculture and food systems.
