CONFERENCE
RE-THINKING FOOD PRODUCTION-CONSUMPTION: INTEGRATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON AGRARIAN RESTRUCTURING, AGRO-FOOD NETWORKS AND FOOD POLITICS
November 30 - December 1, 2001
Participants - Abstracts
Fred Buttel (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
The recombinant BGH controversy in the United States: Toward a new consumption politics of food?
I am among those who are most closely identified with the position that consumption factors and consumption politics have played a relatively minor role in shaping the outcomes of struggles over agricultural biotechnology. In this paper I want to re-think and reformulate this position. Clearly, the role of social action in the sphere of consumption regarding GMO foods in Europe is in contradiction with my position. I therefore acknowledge the need to reassess my position about consumption. In this paper I will do so along two major planes. First, I want to acknowledge the artificiality of the distinction between production and consumption institutions that has undergirded my earlier writings on the topic. Second, I need to acknowledge that my position is based on the U.S. experience, and comparative observation suggests that the institutional nesting of consumption action differs greatly between the U.S. and other countries, including many European countries. I will maintain, however, that the institutional conditions in the U.S. underlying consumption politics -- including but not limited to the historic hegemony of an industrialized and McDonaldized agro-food system, the nature of the U.S. regulatory culture and its influence on product approvals and "conditions-of-production" labeling -- are not very propitious for the long-term efficacy of food movements such as the anti-GMO movement.
Melanie Dupuis and David Goodman (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Knowing Food and Growing Food: Beyond the Production-Consumption Debate in the Sociology of Agriculture
Lourdes Gouveia (University of Nebraska, Omaha) and
Arunas Juska (East Carolina State University, Greenville,North Carolina)
Preliminary title: Linking Consuming Bodies and Producing Bodies: Violence and the Regulation of Meat and Latino Immigrant Workers
The main objective of this paper is to explore the intersect between two seemingly independent US state regulatory efforts, associated with the meat industry, as a strategic site where meat producers and meat consumers also intersect. One regulatory effort is directed toward controlling nature and specifically bacteria compromising meat safety. This finds its more clear expression in the new HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points). It_s supporting institutional structure functions under the aegis of the USDA. The second regulatory effort is directed toward "controlling workers" or administering labor migrations. We are particularly interested in examining how immigration policies and enforcement strategies contribute to the regulation of Latino packing workers bodies, labor mobility and cross-border flows. Recently, this finds its most clear expression in the articulation of an "Interior Enforcement Policy," functioning under the aegis of the U.S. Immigration Control and Naturalization Services (INS). The policy was piloted among meatpacking plants and communities in the US Midwest under the name of "Operation Vanguard" and complemented by a more generalized enforcement system supported by the establishment of so-called "Quick Response Teams" or QRTs across the rural hinterland.
We argue that, in a context of competitive pressures to achieve high levels of efficiency and satisfy global investors, volume of processed meat and ever-increasing line speeds underpin both, the seemingly intractable bacteriological contaminations, and the equally intractable problem of workers injuries and turnover in meatpacking plants (See Juska et al). As consumers demand meat safety and immigrant workers demand better working conditions, packers seek ways to tame meat and tame workers without compromising (life) line speed. Increasingly, and in very indirect and complex ways, meat safety becomes tied to increasing levels of control and violence against workers bodies and their ethnic communities social fabric. Importantly, and in the true spirit of neoliberalism, both regulatory regimes are increasingly privatized and their performance hinges on the voluntary, cooperative, and self-policing behaviors of employers. It is this intersect between meat safety and violence toward workers, between the surveillance of animals and bacteria and surveillance of workers, between the production and consumption of _safe meat that we are most interested in exploring.
Julie Guthman (UC Berkeley)
Commodified meanings, meaningful commodities: re-thinking production-consumption links through the organic system of provision (working title)
The last several years has seen unprecedented public interest in the politics of food production, stemming from the increasingly apparent risks and outright failures of industrialized and globalized food provision. There is little doubt that this emerging politics feeds on the centrality of food, as both biological necessity and linchpin of human social life. While we, as agro-foodies, are well-versed in the unique characteristics of food, not least in the particular pleasure it brings, we have yet to systematically theorize how the social life of food intersects with a political economy of food production. Yet without such understanding, we are unlikely to affect the politics of production to which much of our implicit activism is addressed in intended ways. It seems crucial to understand how the meanings that animate the politics of consumption are translated and distributed as surplus value and rent, and, for that matter, how surplus value and rent value are translated into meanings. This paper is an attempt to further that understanding by considering these processes of translation in organic food provision, my particular area of expertise. As I have written about elsewhere, there is a phenomenal disjuncture between meanings and representations of organic agriculture and the political economy of organic food provision. Specifically, organic meanings have almost necessarily been de-stabilized to grow the organic market, greatly affecting the distribution of value (and ecological metabolism) from soil to sewer. The construction and enforcement of organic meanings through the regulatory process has been central to this process. My purpose for this paper, however, is more broad: that is to contribute to recent efforts to forge theoretical links between food production and food consumption. Particularly, I want to examine that moment of translation between taste and meaning and commodification (as well as the reverse). Accordingly, I begin with some recent interventions in conceptualizing taste and then explore their significance in value creation and distribution. I go on to consider what they offer in understanding the taste for organics specifically. Ultimately, I argue that they all present considerable, if different, problems for the commodification of organic food, which are only resolved by a re-making of organic meanings together with unintended distributions of value.
Mary Hendrickson and Bill Heffernan (University of Missouri-Columbia)
Opening Spaces through Relocalization: Opportunities Provided by the Failures of the Globalized Industrialized Food System
In this paper we explore several themes based on our intertwined research and outreach occurring in the past few years. First, we examine and discuss emerging global food chains that are embedded in strategic alliances, joint ventures and relationships – in short in networks of power. These emerging food chain clusters extend from the genetic material of seeds and livestock through production and processing and on to the food retailing level. In short, decisions are being displaced away from multiple actors situated in different localities to globalized decision-making located within a few firms that make up each cluster. While the roots of these phenomena are firmly grounded in long-term historical processes, it is important to document and understand what is emerging at the global level in order to create alternatives.
In the second part of the paper, we discuss our outreach work with farmers, consumers and communities in helping them to frame and understand the changes that are taking place in the food and agriculture system. This work is extremely important for challenging the global food system, and also for helping to empower farmers, eaters and communities to create alternatives. This work focuses on creating a different understanding of how they are situated in the global food system, and on discussing the implications of social, political and economic trends in the food system in a way that directly challenges neoliberal economics as the basis for all choices in the food and agriculture system. Basically, we lay out an analytical understanding of the strengths and weakness of the global system, and the opportunities found in the social, environmental and economic failures of the global system.
In the last section, we examine and discuss the Kansas City Food Circle and their role in generating alternative visions from the consumption side of the food equation. These visions are being implemented around the state of Missouri in many different ways. In the ideal sphere, this particular group generated an alternative vision rooted in Green philosophy of a decentralized, ecological food system. On the material side, they changed consumption patterns to directly challenge the quality of the food produced in the globalized, industrialized system, and the environmental, labor and social processes that produced that "bad" food. This work has now been institutionalized (within limits) in the University, and its outreach component. Several food circles are operating in Missouri, and parallel other local food projects that are scattered throughout the country. Mostly, these alternatives center on helping "eaters" understand the social, political, economic and ecological implications of their choices (or lack thereof), and encouraging eaters and their communities to support a more ecological, socially responsible food and agriculture system.
In conclusion, the work described above rests on the recognition of different forms of agency that are appearing in the food system, agency that is located within the spaces provided by the unsustainable, unjust nature of the global system. We remain cognizant of the incredible networks of power that shape the production and consumption relationships in the food system, and are critical of many emerging alternatives – for example cooperatives and organic production – that have not shown the capacity to ward off industrialized, rationalized relationships. However, we remain hopeful that public dialogues – fostered by the increasing public attention to industrialized agriculture's failures – as well as models of emerging alternatives can help relocalize production/consumption relationships in the food system in equitable ways. In other words, in relationships that are personalized and sustainable, and that are embedded in place and community.
Stuart Lockie (Central Queensland University, Australia)
'The Invisible Mouth’: Mobilizing ‘the Consumer’ in Food Production-Consumption Networks
The distanciation of production-consumption relationships in space and time, and the historically productivist bias of social theory, have contributed to the development of sociologies of food production and consumption as largely unrelated academic discourses. Production-based agri-food studies have tended to treat consumption as either a domain of social practice distinct from, but determined by, production, or as a source of ‘demands’ that producers must compete among themselves to meet. Both perspectives fail to deal either with the complexity of food consumption practices or their relationships with practices of food provision. One solution to this problem—informed by actor-network theory and commodity systems analysis—has been the examination of specific commodity chains, or networks, and the material and symbolic transformations that substances undergo as they move from the point of production to the point of ingestion. However, as a number of studies have found, simply adding the hitherto neglected activity of consumption to the end of the commodity chain has proved difficult; this method ultimately favoring the analysis of relatively small chains for niche and specialty foods for which specific actors may unproblematically be identified. This paper argues that while the conceptualization of production-consumption in terms of actor-networks is itself robust, the methodological injunction to simply follow actors through networks is problematic. Additional conceptual and methodological tools are needed that allow an examination of the ways in which actors seek to render others knowable and governable ‘at a distance’; that is, to order diffuse and complex networks. In much the same way, for example, that the point of production has become increasingly invisible to the consumers of industrially produced foods, so too are those ingesting food potentially invisible to its producers. ‘The consumer’ is, however, made knowable through the application of technologies including market research, survey data and point of sale record keeping. Investigation of the ways in which ‘the consumer’ is made knowable within rapidly extending organic food networks illustrates the ways in which ensuing discourses of ‘consumer demand’ are deployed to mobilize actors at multiple points within each network—including the point of ingestion from which this demand is purported to flow.
Terry Marsden (Cardiff University)
New Communities of Interest in Rural Development and Agro-Food Studies: A Exploration of Some Key Concepts.
This paper explores some of the key emergent tendencies affecting the direction of rural development in advanced societies with specific reference to the positioning of agri-food. It stresses the need to bring together aspects of political -economic and actor-oriented analysis and gives some examples of how this might be achieved. It is argued that there is now a need for the development of a broader and challenging theoretical agenda which incorporates more centrally the more normative debates surrounding aspects of the ecological modernisation and agro-ecology literatures. These, interpreted in a critical and constructive fashion, can begin to provide theoretical frameworks which allow scholars to assess changes within and from the 'agro-industrial' and the 'post-productivist' rural development logics.
Jonathan Murdoch (Cardiff University, UK)
The aestheticization of food: taste, time and typicality
This paper will show that new agro-food networks are attempting to assert a new 'aesthetics' of food. In line with the differing mixtures of conventions that underpin food networks, this aestheticisation process takes many forms; it thus holds differing implications for the commoditisation of food products usually seen to accompany the growth of global agro-food networks. On the one hand, we can identify a food aesthetics that works simply to enhance the status of the commodity and its place in the market; on the other hand, aesthetics can operate to promote non-market connections, associated, for instance, with local cultures of consumption and local environments of production. In order to examine, the aestheticisation process, and the means whereby food aesthetics can either be 'folded' into the commodity or the culture, we cite the example of the Slow Food Movement (based in Italy). We show that Slow Food promotes a strong aesthetic appreciation of food and we ask whether, in using aesthetics to build markets for typical products, the Movement is serving to strengthen local food cultures or to extend the commoditisation process into new arenas. We conclude with some general thoughts on the new aesthetics of food.
Laura T.Raynolds (Colorado State University)
Forging New Producer/Consumer Links Through Fair Trade Agro-Food Networks
The rapidly growing international fair trade movement raises important challenges to the destructive social and ecological relations which characterize the global agro-food system. This movement fosters the re-embedding of international commodity production, distribution, and consumption relations and the development of more just and sustainable agro-food networks. There are currently 284 producer organizations in 45 countries of the South engaged in the production of fairly traded coffee, cocoa, honey, tea, and bananas. The market for fair trade products continues to grow impressively in Europe and North America. To what extent has the fair trade movement forged new producer/consumer links which successfully challenge the abstract capitalist relations which fuel exploitation in the global agro-food system? I argue from a theoretical and empirical basis that the strength of the fair trade movement derives from its attempt to tighten producer consumer links and challenge market competitiveness based solely on price. Though not a panacea, the fair trade movement suggests provocative new possibilities for socially re-linking production, trade, and consumption and challenging the domination of the agro-food system by oligopolistic transnational corporations infamous for their socially and environmentally destructive business practices.
Sarah Whatmore (The Open University, UK)
Between production and consumption: The monstrous topicality of GM food
‘Eating scrambles neat demarcations and points to the messy interconnection of the local and the global, the inside and the outside…. food compels us to think about [ ] the social as a surface composed of relations of proximity’ (Elspeth Probyn, 1998: 161).
From the mundane discomforts of indigestion or the sour grimaces that mimic the odour of foodstuffs on the turn to the collective anxieties that aggregate around any number of toxins and diseases freighted by food, eating marks the most immediate and commonplace enactment of Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that ‘the lived body is our general medium for having a world’ (1962: 130).The metabolic impressions that the flesh of others imparts to our own is an enduring axiom of social relations with the non-human world and the porosity of the imagined borders which mark ‘us’ off from ‘it’. The potency of this vector of intercorporeality seems to grow as the moments and spaces of cultivating and eating, animal and meat, plant and fruit, become ever more convoluted. The troubling spectres of fleshy mutability that haunt the shadowy regions between field and plate mass with particular intensity in the event of ‘food scares’. Such events are endemic to the relentless industrialisation of food over the last half century and emblematic of the threadbare fabric of trust (dis)connecting industrial food production and consumption as we enter the 21st (Griffiths and Wallace, 1998). It is hard to imagine a less propitious context for the clandestine advent of genetically modified (GM) foods – the more monstrous in their topicality for being undetectable by texture, smell or appearance in the field and positively unrecognisable on the plate, anonymous ingredients in the welter of processed foods that passes our lips.
Incredible as it seems with hindsight, the corporate and state agencies most implicated in the fabric of industrial agri-food networks behaved as if they were unaware of, or indifferent to, the potency of the dissonance between popular apprehensions of the hyphenated spaces between growing and eating and their own polished assertions that the hyphen is incidental, conveying nothing significant – “trust us”. However, just as governments and corporations have been slow to acknowledge the misfit between their own logistical cartographies of food and the more intimate geographies inhabited by consumers, so too have the research accounts of social scientists. The topological ‘compulsion’ that Probyn attributes to eating has been widely resisted in agri-food studies which have tended to fracture along an economic / cultural faultline and, through their conversations and alignments with political economy and cultural studies respectively, to reiterate the compartmentalization of production and consumption.
In this paper, I want to weave two moments in the rhizomatic geographies of a particular legume - the soybean (Glycine max). In its manifold guises as seed, plant, bean, oil, flour and emulsifier (lecithin) (the list goes on), soya transacts the crop / food faultline not simply by its motility and indeterminacy but in its tendency to change the conditions of possibility, the valency of connections along the way. The two moments that I trace below are those of its becoming an industrial crop and a Frankenstein food. As industrial crop, the soybean is the artefact of energetic associations between plants and people in which ecological adaptation, seed selection and plant breeding have all left their mark on its agronomic properties. In its GM incarnation the soybean has become one of a number of transgenic crops fabricated under the trademark Roundup ReadyTM that have been genetically enrolled to tolerate a broad spectrum (ie indiscriminate) glyphosate herbicide Roundup®. The crops and herbicides that bear the Roundup logo are produced and marketed by Monsanto, one of the largest agri-chemical corporations in the world. As Frankenstein food, soya is amongst the most ubiquitous and discreet components of industrial diets with two of its derivatives - soya flour and soya oil - finding their way into a host of processed foodstuffs from margarine, confectionary and soft-drinks to take-away and oven-ready meals. Here, soya galvanises hectic currents of anxiety about the surreptitious presence of transgenic materials in the things we eat into improbable lines of force that are even now realigning everyday eating habits and the organisational practices of food retailers, manufacturers and government agencies.
These moments of becoming ‘Genetically Modified’ pervert the nutritional configuration of the soybean’s social qualities as a protein-rich foodstuff and re-align its socio-material valency in peculiar and contradictory ways that refuse the uni-directional geographies that would project originary points of production through frictionless trajectories to terminal points of consumption.
Michael Redclift (King’s College London, UK)
Chewing Gum in the United States and Mexico: the everyday and the iconic.
John Wilkinson (CPDA, Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
The Final Foods Industry within the Changing Face of the Global Agrofood System: Up Against a New Technology Paradigm and a New Demand Profile
Transgenics create a profound rupture in the agrofood system and implode existing rules, norms and conventions all along the food chain, while at the same time exposing the cultural and institutional roots of countries and regions. For some actors, the radical character of biotechnology innovation calls for new mechanisms of appropriation whereas other see their rights, traditions and collective practices threatened with extinction. As innovation advances towards the market new regulatory debates are posed – segmentation, traceability and identity preservation. And for the consumer, the debates turn on issues of labelling and certification.
Organics, are increasingly posed as the alternative to transgenics, both normatively and in the practical choices of consumers, producers and even governments. While radically opposed to transgenics on questions of patents and the privatisation of genetic resources, the organic movment also requires a new regulation of the agrofood system if its special qualities are to be distinguished both from transgenics and conventional agrofood. The different interests involved in the struggles over regulation involve all the stages of the agrofood chain and affect the basic institutions and cultures of countries and regions.
This paper will explore the way in which these heterogeneous interests and values are being negotiated arguing at the same time that their understanding involves a parallel negotiation of heterogeneous but complementary analytical approaches.
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