Alternative Food Networks

Knowledge, Practice, and Politics

David Goodman, E. Melanie DuPuis, Michael K. Goodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136641220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Farmers' markets, veggie boxes, local foods, organic products and Fair Trade goods – how have these once novel, "alternative" foods, and the people and networks supporting them, become increasingly familiar features of everyday consumption? Are the visions of "alternative worlds" built on ethics of sustainability, social justice, animal welfare and the aesthetic values of local food cultures and traditional crafts still credible now that these foods crowd supermarket shelves and other "mainstream" shopping outlets?

This timely book provides a critical review of the growth of alternative food networks and their struggle to defend their ethical and aesthetic values against the standardizing pressures of the corporate mainstream with its "placeless and nameless" global supply networks. It explores how these alternative movements are "making a difference" and their possible role as fears of global climate change and food insecurity intensify. It assesses the different experiences of these networks in three major arenas of food activism and politics: Britain and Western Europe, the United States, and the global Fair Trade economy. This comparative perspective runs throughout the book to fully explore the progressive erosion of the interface between alternative and mainstream food provisioning. As the era of "cheap food" draws to a close, analysis of the limitations of market-based social change and the future of alternative food economies and localist food politics place this book at the cutting-edge of the field.

The book is thoroughly informed by contemporary social theory and interdisciplinary social scientific scholarship, formulates an integrative social practice framework to understand alternative food production-consumption, and offers a unique geographical reach in its case studies.

Part I

Alternative food networks

Reflexivity and shared knowledge practice

1 Introducing alternative food
networks, fair trade circuits, and
the politics of food

The end of the twentieth century marked the close of a chapter in the history of social change. In the 1960s, political mobilizations, inspired by revolutionary socialism, reformist social democracy, and identity politics seemed to call into being a brave new world. By the 1980s, these hopes and visions that the world could be transformed by protest-and-projects activity had become distant dreams. Yet social activism is remarkably resilient as revealed by the efflorescence of democracy movements in eastern Europe and the Arab Spring in the Middle East, environmentalist groups, fair trade, the anti-globalization/global justice movement, La Via Campesina, and myriad other expressions of social protest. This “new wave” of social activism includes the burgeoning alternative food movement in its many and diverse forms, from local farmers’ markets to fair trade producer cooperatives. Manifestos of this movement, bracketed, for example, by Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet (1971) and Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food (2008), offer a vision that people, by eating differently, can change the worlds of food as well.

Academic analyses of attempts to transform these worlds of food fall into two broad camps. Some scholars are critical of the failings of activist projects, pointing variously to the powerful mainstreaming forces exerted by a globalizing food industry and the ideological influence of neoliberalism on movement ambition. More recently, academic critique has drawn attention to the exclusionary, often raced and elitist nature of efforts to re-localize food provisioning. Other scholars recognize these failings but also give weight to the promise of the new “pre-figurative” politics created by the alternative food movement as a framework in which these limitations can be addressed and resolved.

The new politics of food provisioning and global fair trade builds on imaginaries and material practices infused with different values and rationalities that challenge instrumental capitalist logics and mainstream worldviews. These alternative projects are seen as templates for the reconfiguration of capitalist society along more ecologically sustainable and socially progressive lines. The discursive and material development of such “spaces of possibility” over the past 30 to 40 years demonstrates that alternative forms of social organization with their own operational rationalities can coexist, and even coevolve, with contemporary capitalist society (cf. Jessop 1997; Leyshon et al. 2003; Gibson-Graham 2006; DuPuis and Block 2008).

Our own work has attempted to walk a line between conventionalization arguments that record the rising totalization of food provisioning as alternative political projects, from local food to fair trade, are drawn into the mainstream corporate economy, and celebratory accounts of food movement prefigurations and visions. In steering a course between these positions, we have taken a reflexive view, one that allows a certain critical distance. This stance recognizes that food activists’ struggles have failed to meet their own visions but also pays attention to the ways in which, in some cases and in some places, alternative economies have carved out relatively independent positions in the food system.

Taking this reflexive approach, this book focuses on two social spaces where “vanguard” projects of alternative economy have gained more general prominence and are now widely known: alternative food networks (AFNs) and fair trade circuits with the global South. We debate whether or not these developments are precursors of a broader project of social empowerment and progressive change throughout the following chapters.

In this Introduction, we outline some of the underlying problematics of these forms of alternative economy. We suggest that their critiques of conventional or mainstream systems have created a new politics of food as activists struggle to gain greater social control of food provisioning and to reframe notions of what is equitable and fair in trade relations. We then discuss the arenas where these innovative social projects are tested and contested and the principal cross-cutting themes that give the book its analytical and thematic unity: reflexivity, knowledge practices, and alterity.

In their general problematics, alternative food networks and the fair trade movement have emerged in response to the glaring and multifaceted contradictions of the unsustainable industrial food system and the exploitative trading relations embedded in the global supply chains that support its growth and (expanded) reproduction. These contradictions are revealed by the food in security and malnutrition of over one billion people, interrelated ecological and livelihood crises, compelling evidence of global resource constraints on intensive, fossil-fuel dependent conventional agriculture, and the crisis-proportions of disease associated with Western lifestyles and diets rich in animal fats and industrially processed foods. Although the magnitude of these global challenges can seem overwhelming, activists are mapping different ways forward by creating new economic and cultural spaces for the trading, production, and consumption of food – organic, fair trade, local, quality, “slow” – whose ethical and esthetic alternative “qualifications” distinguish them from the products conventionally supplied by international trade, mainstream food manufacturers, and supermarket chains.

Unlike the politics of universalism and mass mobilizations to extend and defend public entitlements institutionalized by the state, the collective action of these social movements is directed primarily toward the market. With the “econ-omization” of the political and the accompanying market-embeddedness of morality (Shamir 2008; see also Fourcade and Healy 2007), consumers have become significant agents of change in the social and ecological relations of production, and the pace of this transformation depends on entrenching alternative values ever more deeply in everyday practices of food provisioning and global trade circuits. Inspired in part by feminist theory, activists place the consumer in a relational network with other actors, at times provocatively as the “vanguard” of change (Miller 1995c), and including relationships of “trust” with producers, as Whatmore and Thorne (1997) argue in the case of fair trade coffee.

In turn, these commoditized ethical and esthetic values or “qualities” are open to mainstream capture that threatens to neutralize the social projects and critical ambition of the alternative food and fair trade movements. Large-scale retailers, such as Wal-Mart, Carrefour, and Tesco, now provide shelf-space for “alternative” products, often produced and sourced under their own-label brands. These encounters reveal that the interface between “alternative” and “conventional” is becoming highly permeable and confusing as actors compete to control these new income streams. Can the politics, forms, and spaces created by alternative food and fair trade movements resist assimilation and dilution in the miasma of the corporate mainstream and, if not, what kind of social change can “conventionalized” social movements achieve?

These questions immediately “flag” two interrelated and contentious issues that are at the center of debates on market-based social movements: commodity fetishism and political consumerism. In Marx's classic analysis of the commodity form, the exploitation of labor by capital in commodity production is concealed or veiled by the fetishization of the products of that social labor as exchange values. Unless this veil is removed, it is argued, consumers will remain in ignorance of the “real” nature of capitalism as a social relation and accordingly can play no part in bringing about progressive social change. This revelatory strategy underlies much activist discourse and media exposés of industrial food provisioning: once consumers are made aware of this “false consciousness” about food products, they will struggle to create just, humane, and environmentally sustain able food systems.

Other contributors doubt that false consciousness can be so easily and completely dispelled and warn against capital's capacity to re-work the fetish (cf. Bryant and Goodman 2004). David Clarke (2010) is even more forthright and rejects the binary drawn between the false consciousness of the commodity fetishism thesis and the fully conscious subjectivity assumed in some recent analyses of shopping practices and ethical consumption (cf. Miller 1998b). While navigating these dangers, this book understands consumers (and producers) as “imperfect” social actors situated somewhere between these polarized positions and focuses on the politics of consumer–producer relationships that are the bedrock of alternative food and fair trade networks.

A related theme involves the perils of visions of “good food” and ideas of perfecting society – from Michael Pollan's tale of hunting wild pig in northern California to Alice Waters’ epiphany when eating a bowl of potage in Paris. Such visions “celebritize” particular ways of life and are easy prey for mainstream branding. Once food politics is caught in the maze of competing definitions of the “real,” the “authentic,” or the “local” the game is already lost. This book therefore attempts to understand more clearly, and to de scribe more accurately, the politics of alternative food system-making as process.

At the center of our approach is a rethinking of our social world, what it is and how we know it. In particular, we move away from bifurcated Manichean perspectives and a politics of “conversion” that seeks to change the world by embracing a perfect vision of an alternative world based on a fixed, static set of values, whether of the “good life” or “good food.” Instead, we rearticulate food politics toward an understanding of the world as relational and process-based rather than perfectionist. This relational worldview admits that its vision is never perfect but always can be improved by working in relationship with others, especially when informed by an open, reflexive, and contested view of “improvement” as an idea and a process. The following chapters explore the ways in which the politics of food can be strengthened by relational, process-based approaches.

A reflexive perspective not only changes our ideas of what the world is, but also how we see it. In previous work we have argued that alternative food systems, in fact all alternative ways of life, require different ways of knowing as well. In this book, we examine the politics of knowledge-making more closely and explore how alternative knowledges can work effectively to build a more resilient and vital alternative food system, one that is less vulnerable to mainstream pressures and more capable of dynamism, strength, and growth.

A new food politics: contesting quality

This threat from the mainstream brings us to a recurrent and unifying theme: the politics of quality, or the struggle by activists to confront and transform the values, operational rationalities, and singular pursuit of profitability characteristic of conventional food provisioning and international trade with the global South. The stakes here are greater social control of food and global trade circuits in order to extend civic governance over processes of economic production, valorization, and accumulation. What are the material relations and discursive meanings of quality in food and globally traded products – how, where, and by whom are these commodities produced? Whose values and knowledges determine how these products are commoditized and marketed? That is, which actors and social institutions define the conventions of product quality accept able to markets? Can the conventions of standardized, industrial products be supplanted by those affirming alternative values of ecological sustainability and social justice?

Such questions immediately reveal the political economic nature of different social constructions of quality since these demarcate the boundaries between markets and establish the conventions or “rules of the game” within these competitive spaces. In the economy of quality, segmented in accordance with different market conventions, only designated production practices and the values they perform will qualify products and their producers to participate in specific “defined” markets. Control of the material and symbolic construction of these “qualifications” thus confers competitive advantage by opening up new opportunities for accumulation. As we shall see, especially in Chapters 10 to 12 on fair trade networks, the struggle between mainstream corporate actors and social movements to control the framing of “quality” markets incorporating the new ethical and esthetic conventions of production is at the center of contemporary food politics.

These politics are fought out in many arenas and at different spatial scales. We therefore give thematic prominence to relational conceptualizations of place, space, and scalar processes that draw out the asymmetries of power between different actor spaces. These processes articulate the local and the global and we explore their unfoldings at various points along these axes, and particularly in the infrastructural spaces of everyday social practice and reproduction.

Crosscutting analytical themes

We conceptualize alternative food and fair trade networks in relational terms as the organizational expression of recursive material and symbolic inter actions between producers and consumers. This theoretical position leads us into “conversations” with a broad range of contemporary social theory as we search for conceptual “bridges” to understand how producers and consumers interact in these emergent “alternative worlds” and what it is that holds them together. By looking at these networks of producers and consumers as relational and mutually constituted in material and discursive practice, we can explore their innovative organizational forms and potential to reconfigure the values, time–space relations, and structures of governance of everyday food provisioning and the global trading system.

Reflexivity

The first of these conceptual bridges is a theoretical and political reading of consumers as critical, self-aware, reflexive actors who articulate and perform ethical, esthetic, and political values in the everyday routines of shopping, food provisioning, and social reproduction. We can then conceptualize alternative networks as reflexive “communities of practice” of consumers and producers whose repertoires create new material and symbolic spaces in food provisioning and international trade. This approach extends to social movements whose critiques of conventional food systems draw on universal ethical values of social justice and ecological sustainability, such as fair trade networks and organic movements, and those adopting a more particularistic esthetic critique based on the conservation of regional food cultures, localism, and traditional farmed landscapes, exemplified by the “gastronomic esthetic” advocated in its formative years by the Slow Food Movement.

In Chapter 2, we develop a reflexive approach to alternative food economies and re-localization movements that is deeply sceptical of utopian imaginaries and their dogmatic politics of “perfection.” Supporting an open, process-based and pragmatic food politics, we reject normative portrayals of the local as places with conflict-free, communitarian values of reciprocity and fairness that unproblematically “incubate” alternative economic forms and promote social justice and environmental sustainability. Against such normative certainties, we introduce the notion of “reflexive localism” to redress the erasure of politics, difference, inequality, and social injustice.

We argue that a reflexive localism is the foundation of a democratic local food politics that is processual, open-ended, and altogether messier – less dogma and romanticism, greater experimentation, more negotiation, more openness to alternative worldviews. A reflexive approach recognizes this messiness as the stuff of politics and calls for pragmatic compromise and participatory civic governance. In keeping with this perspective, the local is not idealized as a space insulated from power relations and anomic global capitalism but is acknowledged as a publicly contested site of political-economic struggle, exploitation and accumulation. The local thus is formed relationally as local and external actors constantly maneuver for advantage in the changing spatial division of labor. We discuss these processes of place-making empirically by examining the parallels and differences in the construction of the local in the USA, Europe, and fair trade networks.

Shared knowledge practices

Practices of knowledge production – how we grow food and how we know what we are eating – provide a second conceptual bridge between production and consumption by revealing the formative linkages between materiality and meaning. Shared knowledges between producers and consumers are the foundation of alternative communities of practice and of the collective learning processes behind their growth and consolidation.

This perspective of relational knowledge production was first developed in a 2002 paper, Knowing Food and Growing Food, that focused on shared food knowledges as a way of opening up the sociology of agriculture to consumer agency and thus to a significant dimension of contemporary politics (Goodman and DuPuis 2002). On this approach, innovations in the time–space equations of food provisioning reflect cognitive differences from the corporate mainstream in the ways that actors in alternative movements “know and grow” food. The politics of alternative and mainstream provisioning systems can then be located on a terrain of contested knowledge claims, which define material practices and advance competing constructions of quality, modes of governance, and political imaginaries.

We extend these earlier ideas on the “knowledge economy of quality” by drawing out connections with several related literatures, including the recent revival of a theories of practice approach to the sociology of consumption that emphasizes the institutionalized, infrastructural foundations of “ordinary” spending habits, learned routines, and social norms of consumption. Adopting a relational conception of innovation, this research draws attention to the role of alternative food and fair trade movements in testing and disseminating new social practices of consumption. In Chapter 4, we explore several case studies that see innovation through this relational “consumer lens” as change in the daily routines and infrastructures of social reproduction.

This interest in making wider theoretical connections also is central to our analysis of fair trade. The rich literature in this field draws on the “moral turn” in human geography and the vigorous scholarship on ethical consumption but this work has been largely ignored in the sociology of agriculture and food. In our conversations with contributors to these debates, we build a third “brid...

Table of contents

• Front cover
• Alternative Food Networks
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• PART I Alternative food networks: reflexivity and shared knowledge practice
• PART II Alternative food provisioning in the UK and Western Europe: introduction and antecedents
• PART III Alternative food movements in the USA: formative years, mainstreaming, civic governance, and knowing sustainability
• PART IV Globalizing alternative food movements: the cultural material politics of fair trade
• Notes
• References
• Index