Alternative food movements have created space for woman entrepreneurship based on homemade local and traditional foods in rural areas. The term ‘alternative food movements’ is used to refer to initiatives that aim to create alternative agricultural practices opposite the standardizing effect from the industrial agricultural model (Renting, Marsden, & Banks 2003, p. 394), that aim to improve trading conditions and trade practices and thus increase farmers’ shares of the added value of the final product (Guthman, 2008, p. 1176), and that aim to link producers and consumers in shorter food supply chains in line with the new rural development paradigm (Murdoch, 2000, p. 407).

The increased industrialization in agricultural production; its detrimental effects on the public in terms of economics, culture, ecology, and health; and the reactions opposing these have led to the emergence of an alternative food movement in which quality is more important than quantity. A growing number of studies regard quality as socially constructed and embedded to a particular social context, showing that the notion of quality has been increasingly associated with the concepts of locale, region, tradition, and ruralism in recent years (Ilbery & Kneafsey, 2000; Guthman, 2002; Marsden, 1998). The growing demand for natural, farm, artisan, handmade, and other products with the certificates including organic and geographical indication can be considered evidentiary of the increasing importance being local has as a quality marker (Guthman, 2009).

Ilbery and Kneafsey (2000) argued that consumer willingness to pay more for local foods is not only for health and safety reasons but also to satisfy a nostalgia for real and wholesome food. According to Bessiere (1998), the social demand for local food and culinary traditions is an illustration of how people aspire toward a shortlived appropriation of a rural identity to rediscover lost rural roots. In other words, the demand for local products reflects the desire to rediscover the lost rural roots through eating practices. For some, local foods activate memories of childhood experiences, while for those who haven’t experienced rural roots, these foods help to reinvent local food production conditions through women’s daily life practices in rural life. According to Ashley (2005, p. 88, as cited in Anthopoulou, 2010), foods produced by rural women in accordance with long standing ancestral traditions and artisanal methods promise a “nostalgic trip back to the realms of the food.” This romantic way of thinking about localism reinforces stereotyped images of rural women as nurturers and guardians of culinary traditions. Anthopoulou (2010) argued that this reinvented image of “rural motherhood” functions as a quality marker that on one hand contributes to the marketability of local foods while encouraging reproducing traditional gender roles on the other.

In recent years, promoting local foods and cuisine has become an essential feature of rural development projects, which aim to empower rural women and have small-size farming units generate supplementary income from their agricultural production. This study aims to discuss the ideological, cultural, social, and economic barriers that shape the ways in which rural women conduct entrepreneurial activities based on homemade foods. By focusing on women’s daily practices in domestic and professional life and on how these shape and constrain their entrepreneurship, the study aims to debate the impacts commercializing local foods has on existing gender roles.

A case study has been conducted on the local food markets in Seferihisar, İzmir where rural women sell home-based food products such as dolmas, stuffed artichokes, pastries, sweet pastries, bread, and tomato sauce. The source data, drawn from 27 in-depth interviews and 131 survey interviews has been triangulated in order to develop the body of the findings. The aims are to investigate how these local markets affect women’s social and economic lives and to address the following two questions: How do these women perceive the benefits and problems related with the market, and what do women expect and demand from the local governments? The following four topics are covered in the interviews conducted with the woman entrepreneurs.

1. What are the demographic characteristics of the women in the local market (age, marital status, education, income level, and number of household members)? What type of products do they choose to sell in the market? Does product differentiation affect the competition among the women in the market? What factors determine the different levels of earnings among the women?

2. Do women see their entrepreneurial activities as a means of supplementing family income or as an opportunity for developing a professional personal career? How do women spend their earnings from the market? Does the household division of labor change after women become involved in homebased food production? To what extent do women receive help and support from their family members (husband, children, mother, or father)?

3. How do they experience their entrepreneurial activities; what kind of lifestyle changes have their activities brought? Do the local markets help women develop new social networks or build new social relations with those from distant areas? To what extent do they feel they have economic and social power? Do they have autonomy in the decision-making process at the household level?

4. Do women think they have effective collective actions among themselves? What do they expect from the cooperatives? How do they identify the factors that contribute to the popularity of local products? What type of social policies and support (credits, provisions, education, training, and marketing channels) do they require from the local governments? Are they pessimistic or optimistic about the future?

The main finding of this study is that the local food markets in Seferihisar, which were initiated by the local government and designed to empower women, have involved commercializing women’s home cooking practices, which are an indispensable part of their daily life practices. The nature of their entrepreneurship, homemade foods, has led to an increase in workload, requiring multi-tasking across their family and business lives. Despite this burden, which has resulted in them having less spare time and higher stress/anxiety levels as business owners, the majority of surveyed woman expressed contentment with their achievements, such as having greater emancipation and self-realization, being proud of their labor, and overall having greater happiness. The surveyed women perceive themselves as playing an important role in the process of revitalizing their rural area. Accordingly, they see their achievements as a collective action rather than individual effort.

Woman entrepreneurship is argued to be able to contribute to a fairer food system, but this depends on the political circumstances surrounding women’s participation in the decision-making process. Such factors in turn influence the processes of feminizing agriculture, of strengthening women as actors of rural change, and of the corresponding decline in the stereotypical images of rural motherhood that reinforce traditional gender roles. Within this context, the most important impact and consequence of the local markets in Seferihisar is not the visibility of local foods in the markets as a result of the women’s efforts, but rather the women’s increased visibility in the public sphere as a result of locally producing food.