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AbstractDespite the unprecedented attention paid to the sharing economy and despite the growing interest in household food production, the non‐market and non‐monetised sharing of home‐grown food – a social practice at the intersection of these two concerns – has so far largely escaped scholars' attention. The goal of the article is twofold. First, drawing on a large‐scale survey (2058 respondents) and four focus groups conducted in the Czech Republic in 2015, the article shows that in the Global North the sharing of home‐grown food is a surprisingly widespread and economically and environmentally significant practice. Second, the article to some extent aims to break with the research tradition that deems studies conducted in the periphery of the Global North lacking in potential to produce more generally valid insights. It therefore seeks to counter the scripting of Eastern Europe on the margins of the geographies of knowledge production. The article contests the causal link between economic hardship and informal food practices, views these practices as sustainability by outcome rather than intention, and suggests they are compatible with the tenets of alternative food networks. While not perceived as sites of outright resistance to capitalism, these spaces are viewed by practitioners as constituting valuable domains of socially and culturally motivated human interactions, driven by the desire for fresh and healthy food, fulfilling personal hobbies, and the development of enjoyable social ties.

Considerable scholarly attention has been given to Charter '77 as a site of dissent in the former Czechoslovakia. Yet there was a socially embedded site of resistance that was active long before the dissidents. We call this site the Czech woodcraft culture. With its mass popularity and its potent references to Native American anti-colonialism, the woodcraft culture has still barely registered among researchers. In this paper, we offer the first scholarly account of the origins of Czech woodcraft culture, starting in the early twentieth century. We argue that subsequent transformations of the woodcraft culture in the Czech landscape should be understood as popular, complex, and often ambiguous practices of resistance, from the internationalist inversions of a national bourgeois order in the inter-war period, to nostalgic and paradoxically nationalist subterfuges of the Soviet-imposed regime after 1968. We trace how, as a response to the state socialist regime's cultural and political pressures, the activities of Czech woodcraft culture were "layered with memories and experiences rooted in the pre-communist period" (Bren, 2002: 124). The Czech woodcraft culture as a whole provided its adherents with an autonomous space that enabled new forms of sociality, immersions in the natural world, and a host of long-standing voluntary associative activities that preceded the emergence of localized environmental movements and other sites of dissent around the Czech lands.

Using the case of Movement Brontosaurus, a Czech organization founded in state socialist times, this article investigates how civic associations and nongovernmental organizations seeking to promote alternatives to the status quo respond to institutional pressures in different political and social contexts. The case shows that under state socialism, Brontosaurus appeared to conform to state mandates and societal expectations. However, its formal structure was decoupled from many activities to obscure its oppositional intent. After the transition to democracy, the organization was only able to maintain its place in society after it aligned its structure and practices with each other and openly expressed its alternative agenda. The findings demonstrate how social change and alternative lifestyle organizations vary their responses to institutional pressure in ways that enable them to realize their values and pursue their missions while accounting for the political and social contexts in which they are embedded.