Food Practices in Transition

Changing Food Consumption, Retail and Production in the Age of Reflexive Modernity

Gert Spaargaren, Peter Oosterveer, Anne Loeber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136485435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

This edited volume presents and reflects upon empirical evidence of 'sustainability'-induced and -related transition in food practices. The material collected in the various chapters contributes to our understanding of the ways in which ideas and preferences, sociotechnological developments and changes in the governance of food interact and become visible in practices of consumption, retail and production.

1 Sustainability Transitions in
Food Consumption, Retail and
Production

Gert Spaargaren, Peter Oosterveer
and Anne Loeber

INTRODUCTION

At present, food may come ready-to-eat (through microwave or steam oven) and organic, can be bought in processed and packed form in the supermarket or obtained unprocessed and raw from the farm or the farmers’ market. Farmers today may manage high-technological computerized and specialized enterprises or combine food production with running a campsite and keeping hobby horses. Food factories may transform locally produced potatoes into countless varieties of crisps and add their carbon footprint on the package when shipping them to foreign destinations, whereas organic retail chains distinguish themselves by purchasing as much as possible from local farmers.

This present state of affairs in food did not drop from the air. The multiple choices, dynamics and dilemmas which offer themselves to the modern food consumer are the result of a series of delineated transition processes acquiring shape after WWII in most OECD countries. In the post-war period, the production, processing and consumption of food was at first singularly oriented towards increased efficiency and further rationalization. Innovations such as labor-saving techniques (both in agriculture and in domestic food processing), feed conversion and conservation technologies offered mostly undisputed guidance to actors in food production and in agricultural policy- making. Next to regulatory authorities, farmer organizations, powerful processing industries and in particular food retail and catering companies were decisive actors for shaping food practices from farm to fork.

This coherent and integrated framework of values, policies and practices in food production and consumption became increasingly disputed over the years, especially in the period from the 1970s to the 1990s. Currently, the food sector within OECD countries displays some fundamentally different characteristics compared with the situation immediately after WWII:

• The notion of food-shortage has disappeared, at least in OECD countries, to be replaced by an ‘obesity-regime’ based on the omnipresence of cheap food
• More or less elaborate and reliable regulatory regimes for food safety have been established to deal with both old and new food risks, whereas at the same time food risks serve as key examples of the ambiguous and inherently risky character of (reflexive) modernity
• Variety and choice in food have exploded as a result of the annihilation of time and space in food production and distribution; food has become a multicultural affair
• The food catering and retail sector is assuming unprecedented powers in organizing and orchestrating major parts of important value chains and networks in the food sector, while at the same time being unsecure about the directions of change to be taken
• A significant loss of power from the side of farmers producing food has occurred under a simultaneous gain of power from the side of the citizen-consumers buying and using food; forms of consumer empowerment are only recently becoming used for promoting and safeguarding also non-economic values in food
• Sensitivity among the public has heightened with respect to animal well-being and with respect to the huge impacts of food production and consumption on nature, climate and environment; this general awareness about sustainability and food has not yet resulted, however, in major changes in food practices
• Food supply chains have become stretched over huge distances of time-space, resulting in new power relations to emerge between ‘the local’ and ‘the global’ in food provision, retail and consumption; we are, however, far from having reached a new balance in between the local and the global whereas the local, socio-ecological ‘rootedness’ of food has developed into a central controversy among food scientists and policy makers
• The cultural dimension of food has become a central issue in the ‘Erlebnisgesellschaft’, with different lifestyle groups using different food practices to articulate their socio-cultural status and (good) taste in different ways

Today, the orthodox consensus on (technological) rationalization and intensification of food production and consumption within a predominantly national and regional economic and regulatory framework seems to have lost considerable ground and is being challenged and partly replaced by a variety of new approaches and value-orientations. Economic efficiency and rationalization remain important, but they are accompanied by concerns about food quality and safety, environmental protection and nature conservation and animal welfare as equally important ‘organizing principles’ around which product innovation and new consumption practices evolve. Local, national and regional (EU) circumstances, identities and relations in (the regulation of) food production and consumption are being supplemented, transformed and partly replaced by global circumstances, identities and relationships. Where the first part of this story—the disappearance of the post-war orthodox consensus in food consumption and production in OECD countries—can be rather easily documented and assessed, the follow-up question about what will take its place is much more difficult to deal with. The present foodscape is a contested landscape-in-the-making, with many actors, dynamics and uncertainties resulting in a complex configuration of food practices.

The present diversity in orientations and circumstances as it has come to exist in the food sectors incites many questions with respect to the overall process of social change of food consumption, retail and production. Is it still possible to speak of ‘mainstream’ versus ‘alternative’ approaches in food provision and consumption? What exactly are the concepts of ‘alternative’ food products, production processes and lifestyles referring to? When looking at the future of food consumption and production, can we expect a movement from the current situation of diversity into a future situation of more coherence and uniformity again, or should we expect the processes of individualization, diversification and individualization to continue into a constellation of post-modern ways of handling food?

It is against this backdrop that we explore and analyze in some detail present trajectories of change which together make up transitions in food consumption, retail and production in OECD countries since WWII. Among the multiple factors involved in food transition processes, we argue that two factors stand out and make a specific and important contribution to the present day foodscape: sustainable development and globalization.

The need to make both food production and consumption more ‘sustainable’ has been recognized and accepted by most major actors and stakeholders in the food sector, from Unilever to McDonalds, from the European Commission to the local school board, from vegetarians to meat lovers. Whether in the form of safer food without pesticide residues and GMOs or in the form of natural food enhancing ecosystem qualities, whether sold as fair trade food contributing to social justice or carbon-neutral food contributing to mitigating climate change, environmental arguments are brought into play in the discourse about food production and consumption in a very prominent way. In fact, it could be argued that the need for a sustainability transition in the food sector has been one of the major factors putting an end to the post-WWII consensus on rationalization and intensification.

Where foodstuff up until today has been regarded by many as representing a group of special commodities because of their direct, intricate and inherent connections with the soil, the land, landscapes and local communities, they gradually seem to be losing this status of being a special kind of product under the influence of globalization. The globalization of food production and consumption is challenging exactly the local, natural, land-based (traditional) meanings and attributes of food because of the ‘lifting out’ of social relations of production and consumption from their local embeddedness (Giddens 1990). As a result, new relationships between the global and the local are being established. These new relationships are manifest in the specific forms of local food circuits and short supply chains presently under (re)construction as much as they are represented by the global food chains and networks and by the emergence of the global food consumer. Globalization affects both slow-food and fast-food production circuits and lifestyles, although in a different way and to a different extent.

A Transition Perspective for Analyzing Changes in Food

Whichever spectrum of food systems and lifestyles might emerge in the next future, sustainability and globalization will be among their key organizing principles as we aim to show with the help of both the theoretical and empirical arguments gathered in this volume. This book seeks to contribute to a systemic reflection on transitions in food consumption and production as they evolved in OECD countries in the period after WWII. Its major objects of analysis comprise the dynamics of change involved in these transitions. In particular we will look into new images of food adhered to, sustainable technologies experimented with, and new modes of governance involved in the transition process.

When trying to make sense of the historical and future trajectories of changes in food, the authors in this book make use of the theory of transitions and transition management as developed over the past decennia in the Netherlands and some other European countries (Grin et al. 2010). The objects of study for transition theory are delineated processes of change happening in a specific time and space, carried by specific actors who try to block or enhance the transition depending on the interests at stake. Transitions are medium- to long-term (from about 10 up to 50 years or so) processes of change which go to the heart of the matter because they affect the regimes, e.g. the specific rules of the game of food production, retail and consumption. Transitions refer to structural changes resulting in the emergence of new modes of production and consumption. In and through a transition, one can witness a change in the routine behaviors and opinions of all major actors involved: the regulating authorities, the farmers, the managers and workers in the food industry, the retailers, the marketing specialists and the consumers. They change their views, positions and tactics on food within a delineated period of time while addressing a set of issues they all deem relevant for the future of food. As a result of transitions, new power relations are being established among actors in the food chain, who in the new situation use a different set of arguments and technologies to organize and legitimate the food practices they are involved in. These food practices in turn become (re)embedded in different consumer concerns and cultural frames when compared with the situation preceding the transition. The new modalities of food consumption, retail and production as implied in the transition process become institutionalized over time: a new, fundamentally different set of rules and resources for governing food practices has been established. The pre-transition regime has been replaced by a post-transition regime.

Outline of the Argument

The main aim and object of this volume and the reason behind its composition is to provide an organized reflection on the dissolution of the orthodox consensus in food and its replacement by a new set of food regimes. By using a historical perspective to social change, we are better able to discriminate between the lasting, essential, and the short-term, superficial changes. Transition theory has been developed to make this kind of analysis possible. In the next section we discuss some of the key concepts of transition theory while indicating their specific ways of being interpreted and used throughout this volume. Building upon the general framework offered by transition theory we develop a conceptual model that will be used to discuss and organize the main arguments of the book (third section). Our conceptual model emphasizes in particular some of the (landscape) changes that came about in the second half of the 1980s in OECD countries under the combined influence of globalization and sustainable development. The impacts of these landscape changes are shown to have effects on concrete, situated practices of food consumption and production in OECD countries. These effects are investigated with respect to three dimensions of practices and institutions: the cultural (human-nature) dimension, the socio-techno- logical dimension and the governance dimension. We conclude this chapter by presenting the outline of the book and a short characterization of its authors and chapters (fourth section).

TRANSITION THEORY AS A TOOL FOR ANALYZING SOCIAL CHANGE

Transitions refer to more or less organized processes of change with a recognizable pattern through time and space. Because the theories of transition and transition management were originally developed to deal with complex and persistent problems as they became manifest in the 1990s in Dutch national (environmental) policy, the idea of goal setting and goal attainment has been prominent from its inception. Transitions are considered to be necessary in order to enforce a breakthrough in a deadlocked situation. In order to be effective and successful, transitions have to be organized and managed with the help of good scientific knowledge about the dynamics of change in modern societies. Examples of persistent problems that have become key objects for transitions studies are the car-based mobility system with its problems of CO2 emissions and congestion (Geels et al. 2011), the fossil-fuel-based energy system which runs up against its limits in terms of resource depletion and climate change impacts (Verbong & Loorbach 2011) and the systems of industrialized food consumption and production which do not seem able to deal with the emerging environmental and health risks and the new (animal well-being) concerns among food consumers (this volume).

When looking at some of the key concepts and ideas that figure rather prominently in transition (management) theory, it is important to bear in mind its origin. We will not provide an exhaustive debate of transition theory (see Grin et al. 2010) but point out four topics which deserve analytic attention in the context of this volume on transitions in food consumption and production: i) transitions as the organized change-over into a new set of socio-technical regimes, ii) the role of technology and agency in transitions, iii) the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) as a methodology for studying transition dynamics at different levels of scale and iv) the role of sustain- ability and globalization as key factors co-shaping the emerging foodscapes in reflexive modernity.

i) Transitions As a Change of Socio-Technical Regime-Sets

Transitions relate to the emergence of new ideas, frames and discourses as well as to new products, objects, technologies and infrastructures. They are cultural and ideational next to material and infrastructural. Because of their roots in Science and Technology Studies (STS), the first formulations of transition theory (Rip & Kemp 1998; Schot et al. 1994; Schot, 1998; Rip 1992; Geels 2002, 2005; Elzen et al., 2004) tended to emphasize the key role of socio-technical innovations and material infrastructures. Without a close look at the technologies involved, the car system, the energy system or the food system cannot be analyzed properly, so it was argued. Although transition theorists try to avoid technological determinism by referring to socio-technical regimes and by emphasizing the key role of human actors and their values for bringing about the transition, the technological dimension of social systems are regarded to be of central importance and as a fruitful starting point for the analysis of social change. And for good reasons, so it seems. Whoever wants to change the car-based mobility system or the energy system has to confront the (constraining) impacts of technologies and infrastructures on the future development paths these systems will follow.

After more than a century of R&D, of huge investments by both private and public actors and with user routines now deeply embedded in culture, it is impossible to make the transition towards a radically different mobility or energy system overnight. The ‘sunk costs’ that went into these systems (the roads, the network of fuel stations, the piped and wired systems for the transport of energy), the vested interests of key stakeholders (car manufacturers and oil companies are high on the list of the most powerful TNCs worldwide) and—last but not least—the addictive routines of endusers of cars, air-conditioners and central heating installations all function as ‘lock-in’ mechanisms. They represent the ‘constraining’ aspects of socio- technical systems because they exclude or leave out of sight alternatives which radically depart from the existing situation, its infrastructures and user routines.

Lock-in effects prevent the switch-over to a new system, or socio-technical regime, even when some of the negative side effects of the present constellation have become manifest and many actors and stakeholders in society have become aware of these (unintended) negative consequences. In order to realize social change in these contexts, the dominant, existing socio-technical regimes have to be gradually challenged by new ideas, technological innovations and ways of doing. Old, mainstream or established socio-technical regimes have to be substituted by a new set of socio-technical regimes. The innovations prefiguring and enabling the establishment of such new socio-technical regimes tend to develop best in the context of ‘strategic niches’. With the help of strategic ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Routledge Studies in Sustainability Transitions
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 Sustainability Transitions in Food Consumption, Retail and Production
• Part I Transitions In Consumer Practices
• Part II Transitions In Retail
• Part III Transitions In Production Practices
• Contributors
• Index