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ETHICAL CONSUMPTION IN A FAIR TRADE TOWN: GLOBAL CONNECTIONS IN LOCAL PLACES
... During the 1970s, despite the overall trajectory in Nova Scotia toward farm consolidation, the province became a destination for counter-cultural 'back-to-the-landers' who pursued alternative, small-scale agriculture, including organic (Hetherington 2005). Today, the province is home to the country's first fair trade town in Wolfville, the highest number of farmers' markets per capita in Canada, and a robust set of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs (Spice 2012; Halifax Food Policy Alliance 2014). Direct agricultural markets, such as farm gate stands and farmers' markets, long pre-date the rise of grocery stores and supermarkets as the main venue for purchasing food. ...
This article explores the labour behind local food in the Canadian Atlantic province of Nova Scotia. Based on surveys and interviews with farmers, migrant farmworkers, and farmers’ market consumers in the province, we suggest that the celebration of local food by government and industry is a form of “local washing.” Local washing hides key aspects of the social relations of production: in this case, it hides insufficient financial and policy supports for Nova Scotian farms and the increased reliance on migrant farmworkers via the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Our research found that a growing reliance on migrant farmworkers was not just the case for larger, industrial farms, but also for smaller farms participating in local and alternative food initiatives, like farmers’ markets and fresh produce subscription boxes. Additionally, our surveys show that while farmers’ market shoppers expressed an interest in supporting local foods, they reported knowing little about farm workers or working conditions. Our paper contributes to the literature on local and alternative food initiatives by connecting the relations of production to consumption. Rather than focusing solely on the nature of the relationships between farmers and consumers and the values embodied in direct agricultural markets, this research explores the central role of permanently temporary migrant workers in local agriculture.
Slow Food in a Fat Society
Using historian Hillel Schwartz's utopian conception of a "fat society" as inspiration, this essay considers the potential contribution of the Slow Food movement to American notions of dietary ethics. In the United States, eating has been morally evaluated largely in terms of self-control, in relation to personal health and body image. In contrast, the dietary ethos of Slow Food is notable for its disregard of bodily aesthetics and secondary attention to nutrition. Slow Food might offer a path for redirecting moral consideration of food and eating away from the narcissistic, singular body, and toward a culinary ethic emphasizing our responsibilities to human and animal others, to cultural heritage, and to the environment.
This article explores emerging discursive formations concerning the relationship of business and morality. It suggests that contemporary tendencies to economize public domains and methods of government also dialectically produce tendencies to moralize markets in general and business enterprises in particular. The article invokes the concept of 'responsibilization' as means of accounting for the epistemological and practical consequences of such processes. Looking at the underlying 'market rationality' of governance, and critically examining the notion of 'corporate social responsibility', it concludes that the moralization of markets further sustains, rather than undermining, neo-liberal governmentalities and neo-liberal visions of civil society, citizenship and responsible social action.
“Coming home to eat” [Nabhan, 2002. Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods. Norton, New York] has become a clarion call among alternative food movement activists. Most food activist discourse makes a strong connection between the localization of food systems and the promotion of environmental sustainability and social justice. Much of the US academic literature on food systems echoes food activist rhetoric about alternative food systems as built on alternative social norms. New ways of thinking, the ethic of care, desire, realization, and vision become the explanatory factors in the creation of alternative food systems. In these norm-based explanations, the “Local” becomes the context in which this type of action works. In the European food system literature about local “value chains” and alternative food networks, localism becomes a way to maintain rural livelihoods. In both the US and European literatures on localism, the global becomes the universal logic of capitalism and the local the point of resistance to this global logic, a place where “embeddedness” can and does happen. Nevertheless, as other literatures outside of food studies show, the local is often a site of inequality and hegemonic domination. However, rather than declaim the “radical particularism” of localism, it is more productive to question an “unreflexive localism” and to forge localist alliances that pay attention to equality and social justice. The paper explores what that kind of localist politics might look like.
Local food systems' movements, practices, and writings pose increasingly visible structures of resistance and counter-pressure to conventional globalizing food systems. The place of food seems to be the quiet centre of the discourses emerging with these movements. The purpose of this paper is to identify issues of 'place', which are variously described as the 'local' and 'community' in the local food systems literature, and to do so in conjunction with the geographic discussion focused on questions and meanings around these spatial concepts. I see raising the profile of questions, complexity and potential of these concepts as an important role and challenge for the scholar-advocate in the realm of local food systems, and for geographers sorting through them. Both literatures benefit from such a foray. The paper concludes, following a 'cautiously normative' tone, that there is strong argument for emplacing our food systems, while simultaneously calling for careful circumspection and greater clarity regarding how we delineate and understand the 'local'. Being conscious of the constructed nature of the 'local', 'community' and 'place' means seeing the importance of local social, cultural and ecological particularity in our everyday worlds, while also recognizing that we are reflexively and dialectially tied to many and diverse locals around the world.
Neoliberal political ideologies have been criticised for their blanket prescription of market reform as the solution to almost any social or environmental problem. This chapter thus examines the ability of market-based solutions to deal with the spatial and social diversity that characterises environmental problems in agriculture. In doing so, the chapter draws on case studies of the international fair trade movement and the regionalisation of natural resource management measures in Australia. Both these cases accept the neoliberal view that social and ecological degradation arises from the failure of markets to reflect the full cost of production, and seek, therefore, to achieve social and environmental objectives through the parallel pursuit of economic rationality. In Australia, voluntary planning and educational activities coordinated at a range of scales from the very local to the water catchment, encourage compliance with locally developed management plans and codes of practice that link the expression of private property rights with a ‘duty of care’ to the environment. In the process, landholders are re-defined as prudent and self-reliant businesspeople for whom sustainable resource management is an essential component of financial viability. Fair trade, by contrast, seeks to transfer social and environmental ‘duties of care’ through the entire fair-trade commodity chain. Auditing, certification and the payment of farm-gate price premiums enable Western consumers to become ‘partners’ in the economic and social development of small and marginalised farming communities; guaranteeing that the ‘fair price’ paid for commodities is reflected in the incomes and, importantly, expenditures of the people receiving them. Despite their differences, these cases are allied in their opposition to protectionist trade policies, their commitment to building the viability of farms as productive business units through exposure to ‘the market’, and their appeals to self-responsibility, empowerment and democratisation. And, ultimately, both fail, by themselves, to deal adequately with the spatial and social diversity that underlies agri-environmental processes and problems. Neither approach, it is suggested, should be abandoned. However, complementary processes of fair trade and bioregional planning are required if either are to achieve their maximum impact.
An examination of the relationship between space, place and consumption offers important insights into some of the most powerful forces constructing contemporary societies. Space and place are made and remade through consumption. Yet how do cultures of consumption discover space, and how do they construct place? This book addresses these questions by exploring the implications of conceptualizing consumption as a spatial, increasingly global, yet intensely localized activity. The work develops integrative approaches that articulate the processes involved in the production and consumption of space and place. The result is a varied, engaging, and innovative study of consumption and its role in structuring contemporary capitalist political economies. © Michael K. Goodman, David Goodman and Michael Redclift 2010. All Rights Reserved.
In this chapter, the authors take a close look at the current discourse of food system relocalization. From the perspective of theories of justice and theories of neoliberalism, food relocalization is wrapped up in a problematic, and largely unexamined, communitarian discourse on social justice. The example for California's localized governance of pesticide drift demonstrates that localization can effectively make social justice problems invisible. The authors also look at the EU context, where a different form of localization discourse emphasizes the local capture of rents in the value chain as a neoliberal strategy of territorial valorization. Examining Marsden et al.'s case study of one of these localization projects in the UK, the authors argue that this strategy does not necessarily lead to more equitable forms of rural development. In fact, US and EU discourses are basically two sides of the same coin. Specifically, in neoliberal biopolitical form, they both obscure politics, behind either the discourse of “value” in the EU or “values” in the US. Rather than rejecting localism, however, the authors conclude by arguing for a more “reflexive” localism that harnesses the power of this strategy while consciously struggling against inequality in local arenas.
Winner of the Society for Economic Anthropology Annual Book Prize 2008.
Belize, a tiny corner of the Caribbean wedged into Central America, has been a fast food nation since buccaneers and pirates first stole ashore. As early as the 1600s it was already caught in the great paradox of globalization: how can you stay local and relish your own home cooking, while tasting the delights of the global marketplace? Menus, recipes and bad colonial poetry combine with Wilk’s sharp anthropological insight to give an important new perspective on the perils and problems of globalization.
From mad cows to McDonaldization to genetically modified maize, European food scares and controversies at the turn of the millennium provoked anxieties about the perils hidden in an increasingly industrialized, internationalized food supply. These food fears have cast a shadow as long as Africa, where farmers struggle to meet European demand for the certifiably clean green bean. But the trade in fresh foods between Africa and Europe is hardly uniform. Britain and France still do business mostly with their former colonies, in ways that differ as dramatically as their national cuisines. The British buy their "baby veg" from industrial-scale farms, pre-packaged and pre-trimmed; the French, meanwhile, prefer their green beans naked, and produced by peasants. Managers and technologists coordinate the baby veg trade between Anglophone Africa and Britain, whereas an assortment of commercants and self-styled agro-entrepreneurs run the French bean trade. Globalization, then, has not erased cultural difference in the world of food and trade, but instead has stretched it to a transnational scale. French Beans and Food Scares explores the cultural economies of two "non-traditional" commodity trades between Africa and Europe--one anglophone, the other francophone--in order to show not only why they differ but also how both have felt the fall-out of the wealthy world's food scares. In a voyage that begins in the mid-19th century and ends in the early 21st, passing by way of Paris, London, Burkina Faso and Zambia, French Beans and Food Scares illuminates the daily work of exporters, importers and other invisible intermediaries in the global fresh food economy. These intermediaries' accounts provide a unique perspective on the practical and ethical challenges of globalized food trading in an anxious age. They also show how postcolonial ties shape not only different societies' geographies of food supply, but also their very ideas about what makes food good.
Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption presents an innovative reinterpretation of the forces that have shaped the remarkable growth of ethical consumption. Develops a theoretically informed new approach to shape our understanding of the pragmatic nature of ethical action in consumption processes. Provides empirical research on everyday consumers, social networks, and campaigns. Fills a gap in research on the topic with its distinctive focus on fair trade consumption. Locates ethical consumption within a range of social theoretical debates –on neoliberalism, governmentality, and globalisation. Challenges the moralism of much of the analysis of ethical consumption, which sees it as a retreat from proper citizenly politics and an expression of individualised consumerism.
Over the past two decades, sales of fair trade coffee have grown significantly and the fair trade network has emerged as an important international development project. Activists and commentators have been quick to celebrate this sales growth, which has allowed socially just trade, labour, and environmental standards and practices to be extended to hundreds of thousands of small farmers and poor rural workers throughout the Global South. While recent assessments of the fair trade network have focused on its impact on local poverty alleviation, however, the broader political-economic and historically rooted structures that frame it have been left largely unexamined. In this study, Gavin Fridell argues that while local level analysis is important, examination of the impacts of broader structures on fair trade coffee networks, and vice versa, are of equal if not greater significance in determining their long-term developmental potential. Using case studies from Mexico and Canada, Fridell examines the fair trade coffee movement at both the global and local level, assessing its effectiveness and locating it within political and development theory. In addition, Fridell provides in-depth historical analysis of fair trade coffee in the context of global trade, and compares it with a variety of postwar development projects within the coffee industry. Timely, meticulously researched, and engagingly written, this study challenges many commonly held assumptions about the long-term prospects and pitfalls of the fair trade network's market-driven strategy in the era of globalization.
Fair trade is a fast-growing alternative market intended to bring better prices and greater social justice to small farmers around the world. But is it working? This vivid study of coffee farmers in Mexico offers the first thorough investigation of the social, economic, and environmental benefits of fair trade. Based on extensive research in Zapotec indigenous communities in the state of Oaxaca, Brewing Justice follows the members of the cooperative Michiza, whose organic coffee is sold on the international fair trade market. It compares these families to conventional farming families in the same region, who depend on local middlemen and are vulnerable to the fluctuations of the world coffee market. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book carries readers into the lives of these coffee producer households and their communities, offering a nuanced analysis of both the effects of fair trade on everyday life and the limits of its impact. Brewing Justice paints a clear picture of the complex dynamics of the fair trade market and its relationship to the global economy. Drawing on interviews with dozens of fair trade leaders, the book also explores the changing politics of this international movement, including the challenges posed by the entry of transnational corporations into the fair trade system. It concludes by offering recommendations for strengthening and protecting the integrity of fair trade.
In an era of escalating food politics, many believe organic farming to be the agrarian answer. In this first comprehensive study of organic farming in California, Julie Guthman casts doubt on the current wisdom about organic food and agriculture, at least as it has evolved in the Golden State. Refuting popular portrayals of organic agriculture as a small-scale family farm endeavor in opposition to "industrial" agriculture, Guthman explains how organic farming has replicated what it set out to oppose.
This important new cultural analysis tells two stories about food. The first depicts good food as democratic. Foodies frequent 'hole in the wall' ethnic eateries, appreciate the pie found in working-class truck stops, and reject the snobbery of fancy French restaurants with formal table service. The second story describes how food operates as a source of status and distinction for economic and cultural elites, indirectly maintaining and reproducing social inequality. While the first storyline insists that anybody can be a foodie, the second asks foodies to look in the mirror and think about their relative social and economic privilege. By simultaneously considering both of these stories, and studying how they operate in tension, a delicious sociology of food becomes available, perfect for teaching a broad range of cultural sociology courses.
The aim of this paper is to begin to examine the emergence of Farmers' Markets (FM) in the UK. It is suggested that FM represent a new type of 'consumption space' within the contemporary British foodscape, one which may be read as a heterotopic convergence of localist, moral, ethical and environmental discourses, mediated by networks of producers, consumers and institutions. Based on a preliminary analysis of some of the discourses employed by these actors, it is argued that FM can be understood simultaneously as 'conservative' and 'alternative' spaces. 'Conservative' in that they encapsulate a reactionary valorization of the local, linking localness to the ideas of quality, health and rurality, and 'alternative' in that they represent a diversifying rural economy arising in response to the difficulties being experienced by some UK farmers and a more general perception of a countryside under threat. Initial evidence from a pilot case study in Stratford-upon-Avon is used to support these suggestions and propose directions for future research.
The popular conception of Nova Scotians as a pure, simple, idyllic people is false, argues Ian McKay. In The Quest of the Folk he shows how the province's tourism industry and cultural producers manipulated and refashioned the cultural identity of the region and its people to project traditional folk values. McKay offers an in-depth analysis of the infusion of a folk ideology into the art and literature of the region and the use of the idea of the "Simple Life" in tourism promotion. He examines how Nova Scotia's cultural history was rewritten to erase evidence of an urban, capitalist society, class and ethnic differences, and women's emancipation. In doing so he sheds new light on the roles of Helen Creighton, the Maritime region's most famous folklorist, and Mary Black, an influential handicrafts revivalist, in creating this false identity.
About the Book Author Barbara Kingsolver and her family abandoned the industrial-food pipeline to live a rural life—vowing that, for one year, they'd only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is an enthralling narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.
This essay explores the rise of ''speciality'' coffees over the past two decades, examining the changing structure and organization of the coffee trade. It concentrates on the shaping of consumption as retailers have moved from mass to niche marketing, imagining a class and generational map of the United States in their attempts to capture a segment of a shrinking market. Shifts in the consumption and marketing of a single commodity, such as coffee, are related to a wider set of social and cultural changes, and the essay concludes with a consideration of these changes and of an anthropology that attends to them.
What should we have for dinner? When you can eat just about anything nature (or the supermarket) has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the foods might shorten your life. Today, buffeted by one food fad after another, America is suffering from a national eating disorder. As the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous landscape, what's at stake becomes not only our own and our children's health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth. Pollan follows each of the food chains--industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves--from the source to the final meal, always emphasizing our coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. The surprising answers Pollan offers have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us.--From publisher description.
This paper proposes a new theory of value based on the observation of how people use this term. In everyday life the word value is commonly used to refer equally to what might be regarded as the incommensurable polarity between value as price, and value as priceless, sometimes portrayed as the contrast between value and values. My theory starts from trying to learn how people manage to use value as a means of bridging this divide. As such it opposes itself to ‘bottom-line’ theories of value. These range from vulgarised forms of Marx’s labour theory of value, to the way management consultants tried to impose a universal belief in shareholder value. An example is provided of how such bottom-line thinking undermined a UK government audit called best-value, and is also found in highly reductionist attempts to impose new-age values in management. By contrast, examples are given of how value is created in the process of bridging the divide between value and values, starting from the work of Zelizer and the case of concubines in 5th century BC Athens. Further examples range from the department store John Lewis to the Swedish social democratic state. Finally the application of this theory is considered in relation to a recent attempts to evaluate the impact of the mobile phone on low-income Jamaicans.
Recent theoretical discussions of the ‘spaces of hospitality’ have remained largely abstract, and have also ignored the commercial hospitality industry. At the same time, commercial hospitality is becoming increasingly important for the branding and promoting of cities. This paper highlights the connection between urban regeneration, commercial food and drink spaces, and the idea of the ‘hospitable city’ as it is conceived in both theoretical writings and in accounts of urban regeneration. The paper highlights the work of hospitality in the commercial sector, but also argues that commercial hospitality should not be seen as merely calculative, instrumental, economic exchange.
Fairtrade was founded to alleviate poverty and economic injustice through a market-based form of solidarity exchange. Yet with the increasing participation of transnational food corporations in Fairtrade sourcing, new questions are emerging on the extent to which the model offers an alternative to the inimical tendencies of neoliberalism. Drawing on a qualitative research project of Kenyan Fairtrade tea, this paper examines how the process of corporate mainstreaming influences the structure and outcomes of Fairtrade, and specifically the challenges it poses for the realization of Fairtrade’s development aspirations. It argues firstly that whilst tea producers have experienced tangible benefits from Fairtrade’s social premium, these development ‘gifts’ have been conferred through processes marked less by collaboration and consent than by patronage and exclusion. These contradictions are often glossed by the symbolic force of Fairtrade’s key tenets – empowerment, participation, and justice – which simultaneously serve to neutralize critique and mystify the functions that Fairtrade performs for the political economy of development and neoliberalism. Second, building on recent critiques of corporate social responsibility, the paper explores how certain neoliberal rationalities are emboldened through Fairtrade, as a process of mainstreaming installs new metrics of governance (standards, certification, participation) that are at once moral and technocratic, voluntary and coercive, and inclusionary and marginalizing. The paper concludes that these technologies have divested exchange of mutuality, as the totemic features of neoliberal regulation – standards, procedures and protocols – increasingly render north south partnerships ever more virtual and depoliticized.
A strong current of food-systems research holds that local food systems are preferable to systems at larger scales. Many assume that eating local food is more ecologically sustainable and socially just. We term this the local trap and argue strongly against it. We draw on current scale theory in political and economic geography to argue that local food systems are no more likely to be sustainable or just than systems at other scales. The theory argues that scale is socially produced: scales (and their interrelations) are not independent entities with inherent qualities but strategies pursued by social actors with a particular agenda. It is the content of that agenda, not the scales themselves, that produces outcomes such as sustainability or justice. As planners move increasingly into food-systems research, we argue it is critical to avoid the local trap. The article’s theoretical approach to scale offers one way to do so.
This article takes on the cultural politics of “if they only knew” as it relates to alternative food practice. It draws on surveys and interviews of managers of two kinds of alternative food institutions—farmers' markets and community-supported agriculture—to illustrate the color-blind mentalities and universalizing impulses of alternative food discourse. The ways in which these discourses instantiate whiteness may have a chilling effect on people of color who tend not to participate in these markets proportionate to whites. Minor exclusionary practices may have profound implications for shaping projects of agro-food transformation.