By comparing insights from three different fields sites located in the UK, Italy, and China, the authors explore how AFNs, in different ways that are context dependent, are providing a variety of alternatives to the mainstream food system. We argue that “alterna- tives” have both emerged and been constructed through a variety of social, political and economic responses which are dependent on the local conditions AFNs are derived from, and employing the lenses of locality, scale and food materialities, they suggest that alterity across spatial contexts points to a (hyper) generalised typology that may have interesting implications for future research.