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While many characteristics of food consumption have been examined, little attention has been given to the health potential of consuming from local food communities. Local food communities, including community supported agriculture (CSA) are food initiatives, which try to respond to the healthy food, environmental or socioeconomic challenges of the food system. As a step toward understanding local food communities, this study sets out to examine the health-related adaptivity and self-management practices of CSA participation.

The qualitative research approach, which included semi-structured interviews (n = 35), was designed to discover the potential for being healthy: the ability to adapt and to self-manage among CSA participants. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis.

The results suggest that local food communities can influence health-related adaptivity and self-management in the following themes: awareness of product origins; enhanced food-management capability; expanding applicability and usability of the food environment; and strengthening one's food-related self-image.

Increasing the presence of local food communities might be part of developing strategies to evaluate the health effects of the local food environment and to encourage consumers to take responsibility for their own health.

This study extends the food consumption literature to include new knowledge about how local food communities facilitate individual efforts to enhance their own potential for health as well as improving understanding of the mechanisms that underpin a healthy diet.

This paper aims to explore multiple problematisation processes through a former needle exchange programme run by Kék Pont (a non-governmental organisation) in the 8th district of Budapest. By presenting a collage of ethnographic stories, this paper attempts to preserve tacit knowledge associated with the programme and thereby keep its office alive as a “drug place”, the operation of which was made impossible in 2014.

Drawing on the insights of Foucauldian governmentality studies and actor-network theory, this paper focusses on drug use as a problem in its spatial-material settings. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the contribution traces multiple problematisation processes and related infrastructures.

From the needle exchange programme’s perspective, drug use is not a singular problem but the effect of multiple problematisation processes. Although those processes are often in conflict with each other, the question is not which one is right, but how social workers manage to hold them together. It is a fragile achievement that requires years of training and ongoing negotiation with local actors. By eliminating Kék Pont’s 8th district office, the Hungarian Government did not only hinder harm reduction in the area but it had also rendered tacit knowledge associated with the needle exchange programme as a “drug place” inaccessible.

The paper is a melancholy intervention – an attempt to preserve tacit knowledge that had accumulated at the needle exchange programme. The retelling of ethnographic stories about this “drug place” is one way of ensuring that other drug policies remain imaginable.

Hungarian libraries have been organized into networks since the 1950s, and more recently there have been efforts to co‐ordinate acquisitions. The high cost of foreign publications is a problem. Legal deposit laws provide libraries with a generous number of copies of Hungarian publications, and this compensates to some extent for inadequacies in union catalogues. The National Széchényi Library is at present the main focus for interloan requests, but it normally acts only as a switching centre because it does not lend material. New regulations will promote the use of a larger number of supplying libraries. 23% of all requests are satisfied by libraries abroad. Interlending demand is at a relatively low level in Hungary, but shows a steady growth. Improvement requires government backing on policy and finance. Two new bodies that will bring some improvement are the Central Storage Library, a repository centre, and the Central Register of Libraries, which collects data on library holdings.