Food for Change: The Politics and Values of Social Movements

by Jeff Pratt, Peter Luetchford

Overview

Concern about our food system is growing, from the costs of industrial farming to the dominant role of supermarkets and recurring scandals about the origins and content of what we eat.

Food for Change documents the way alternative food movements respond to these concerns by trying to create more closed economic circuits within which people know where, how, and by whom their food is produced.

Jeff Pratt, Peter Luetchford and other contributors explore the key political and economic questions of food through the everyday experience and vivid insights of farmers and consumers, using fieldwork from case studies in four European countries: France, Spain, Italy and England. Food for Change is an insightful consideration of connections between food and wider economic relations and draws on a rich vein of anthropological writing on the topic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783710041
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	12/06/2013
Series:	Anthropology, Culture and Society
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Jeff Pratt is Senior Research Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Class, Nation and Identity (Pluto, 2003) and Food for Change (Pluto, 2013).

Pete Luetchford is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Fair Trade and a Global Commodity (Pluto, 2007) and Food for Change (Pluto, 2013).

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Food is at the centre of contemporary life. It is celebrity culture, sensuous pleasure, health, environment, sociability, and it is politics. This book is particularly concerned with the last of these, and more especially with the politics of where food comes from, who produced it and what is in it. While discussions in the media and by academics tend to treat different aspects of food as discrete, we maintain that the astonishing attention to its qualities and provenance is a shared reaction to broader social processes and transformations.

The background to those broader transformations is a set of dramatic changes over the last 50 years in the way food is produced and distributed. As a result many people now access more food, more cheaply, and in greater variety than at any time in history. But the revolution in provision also meets critical objections. Social and political movements have highlighted uncounted costs behind cheap food and have attempted to steer the sector in a different direction. Drawing on anthropological methods and concepts, we explore the way food has become a focal point for action (and reflection) on contemporary economic processes. Through case studies, we document the possibilities and problems people face in constructing an alternative food system, and interrogate variations between those alternatives.

The supporters of alternative food movements see the mainstream as sucking value out of their social world. Farmers find their livelihoods squeezed by the high cost of inputs for specialist industrial agriculture, and by the pressure of global competition. They see their income siphoned off by all the middlemen between the farm gate and the consumer. Some resist these processes by practising mixed farming systems and labour-intensive methods as a way of creating a more sustainable agriculture, less dependent on industrial inputs. This is one stimulus to the switch to organics. They also develop direct sales to customers to maximise the return to their labour, while some concentrate on more specialist foodstuffs which can command higher prices. For these strategies to be successful, farmers need to ally with customers who themselves view the mainstream food chain as a negative force which sucks the life and diversity out of towns, destroying livelihoods and local food cultures.

This book focuses on the movements or initiatives these people create, seen as strategies towards some measure of economic closure, some limit to the exactions of the open economy and to ever expanding market integration. The moves to greater economic closure can take many forms, from the more organised to personal projects or commitments. Some are built around locality: support for farmers' markets over supermarkets, sometimes merging with wider attempts to generate localised economies through local currency schemes. Others are built around networks, linking producers and consumers in more or less stable relationships through cooperatives, community-supported agriculture and other forms of solidarity economics. To capture the broad range of the reactions we use the terms 'initiative' and 'movement' interchangeably. But in all cases, participants share a sense of common cause against industrialised food provision, against cost-cutting, and against the obfuscation of provenance and content at the expense of quality and knowledge about food.

The phrase 'sucking the value out' is both graphic and ambiguous, deliberately so. In part these movements are concerned with monetary value, the way corporations in the food chain destroy the livelihoods of small farmers or shopkeepers. But they are also concerned with the destruction of values in the plural, whether of the social qualities of people or the aesthetic properties of things and places. These are often thought of as outside the realm of monetary value, and threatened precisely by the rationality of market and commercial calculation. These two meanings of value, sometimes opposed, sometimes combined, run through the book, whether discussing the ambitions of farmers or the quality of food.

The central chapters present four ethnographic case studies from the UK, Italy, France and Spain. They illustrate that each attempt to create alternative food systems needs to be understood in its specific context before it can be compared with others; and secondly, that although the mainstream and alternative are usually imagined as different in kind, in practice they overlap and borrow from one another. For example, initiatives designed to strengthen the independence of small farmers through the turn to 'quality' foods can end up reproducing features of the mainstream. For scholars this is an analytical problem, but for farmers and for shoppers it is more of a practical problem of negotiating between worlds, needs and desires. Even those most committed to producing and consuming alternatively make recourse to the products of the conventional economy at some point.

Food has become the most prominent area in which people try to realise an alternative economy, and there are good practical reasons for this. But, and as a consequence, this is where we can best observe contradictions and difficulties in realising alternatives to the mainstream. Before sketching out the basis of these claims, we first need to say more about the politics of food.

Contesting Food

Critics of contemporary farming dispute its claims to efficiency. They argue that farming methods are not sustainable as they depend on exploitation of non-renewable resources: soils, water and fossil fuels. They take issue with social relations in production that pay workers wages below subsistence levels and farmers prices below production costs, such that they need farm subsidies or welfare to survive. They denounce the loss of knowledge about the provenance and content of food, its traceability. There have also been growing concerns about the quality of the food we eat, such as health scares generated by industrial farming systems as well as more widespread concerns about the way food processing affects our diet and nutrition (Caplan 2000; Du Puis 2000; Lawrence 2004, 2008). The furore over horsemeat in processed food dominating the headlines as we write is but the latest in a long line of food scandals (Taylor et al. 2013). The growing power of multinational corporations over all stages of our food supply chains is the main focus of dissent on these issues.

In place of mainstream food provision, critics advocate a return to more localised, smaller scale, mixed farming systems. As we shall see in Chapter 2, many studies argue that small farmers are crucial to strategies to create a more sustainable and equitable food system. There is also overwhelming evidence that over the last 50 years these farmers have struggled to live with intense competition from large scale specialist agriculture operating in increasingly integrated global markets. If we want to understand how this plays out and what alternatives are possible, we need to explore the choices made by actual farmers in specific circumstances. We need to see how and why small farmers go under, survive or invent new pathways; we need to look at the context in which they live, their rural society, its geographical possibilities, its links with townspeople, and prevailing food cultures. How does the enveloping commercial logic of industrial farming affect the choices made by those attempting to create a different kind of food economy while also maintaining a livelihood? Crucially, as we shall see, all these aspects have a history which shapes how farmers react to the present.

All the energy and inventiveness of farming families will only have a positive outcome if others buy their food from them. What do these customers want from such food? This is a notoriously difficult question to answer, even within one setting – small-town England – before we bring in the food cultures of Mediterranean Europe. Sometimes food is considered as fuel, sometimes as a carefully balanced mix of nutrients to replenish the body. It may also be the core element in family life, conviviality and identity formation. The meal itself then becomes the focus of memories and stories about the shared experience of those around the table. These variations mean that food is imbued with social and cultural significance, and that we need to think about these issues in a broad context. Yes, there is individual taste and choice in shopping, but there are also more collective processes at work. Some are economic, determining what kind of food is available and at what price, shaping our tastes (how many ways are there of sweetening breakfast cereals?) and what constitutes value for money. Other processes are social and cultural since so many identities, distinctions and meanings are bound up with food and its consumption.

Food is only one part of a world of increasingly complex and dispersed manufacturing chains. Most of us do not know where our shoes or mobile phones were made, let alone details of people and circumstances in distant factories. Even if we did know these details, there is a limit to how much we could carry that consciousness around in our daily, semi-automatic, engagement with the things that surround us. At an abstract level, the getting and spending of money can be analysed as a complex exchange of labour. In practice this tends to be blanked out: once you have paid your money, the thing is incorporated into your life and its origins have little relevance. The same is true for much of our food; in that apt phrase, there is so much that is 'not on the label' (Lawrence 2004). But the success of Felicity Lawrence's book shows that when it comes to food there is growing dissatisfaction with this state of affairs. In many circumstances, people do want to know more about where, how and by whom their food is produced. There are many overlapping reasons for this, from personal concerns about health and nutrition to the search for specialist quality food, from a commitment to environmental action to support for a local economy.

A number of recent books have engaged politically with modern food systems. They have revealed exploitation, waste and hidden dimensions to contemporary manufacturing and retail practices (Lawrence 2004; Stuart 2009). The extraordinary disparities in food supply and the uncounted external costs of industrial production have been repeatedly exposed, both at a global level and in the relation between cities and rural hinterlands (Roberts 2008; Steel 2008). Other books cover similar ground, but then offer solutions. Michael Pollan (2006), for example, gives an account of the iniquities of contemporary food production, and concludes by seeking answers by getting closer to the source of what he eats. Colin Tudge (2007) castigates industrial and commercial practices, and sets out basic principles of nutrition and agriculture as a process based in nature; while Raj Patel (2007) sheds light on corporate power in the global economy, and sketches a political agenda for social justice in food production.

The issues raised by these books are also analysed in more scholarly work, mostly by geographers and sociologists (e.g. Goodman et al. 2012; Kneafsey et al. 2008; Morgan et al. 2006). Three main approaches dominate these writings, though there are overlaps between them: the political economy of commodity chains, actor network theory, and convention theory. We now describe the broad parameters of these debates as a prelude to our own approach.

Political economy is concerned with the way that food production is subsumed into capitalist relations and industrial processes, and the profound consequences of this for social relations and relationships with nature (Goodman & Redclift 1991). This underpins discussions of how alternatives are 'conventionalised' as they are adopted by powerful interests, and de-politicised into technical and rational problems (Guthman 2004a, 2004b). Hence, standards for organics are watered down to minimum technical criteria, or calls for food sovereignty become administrative problems about food security (Goodman et al. 2012). Political economy is precisely helpful in unpacking how powerful interests take control of the food industry, even those parts that at first sight appear alternative. We have written about this elsewhere (Pratt 2009; Luetchford & Pratt 2011) and it is an influence throughout the book, but we should also note that political economy tends to focus on the powerful and what they do. As capitalist relations, practices and commodity chains become the norm, there is the danger that everything else is either subsumed within them or become invisible. One response to this problem has been the development of actor network theory, which questions the relentless, seamless logic of modernity and capitalism, and suggests instead that social processes are contingent and contested by multiple human and non-human actors.

Political economy and actor network theory are more concerned with what people do than why they do it. They assume people have specific material interests and document how they succeed or fail in achieving their goals. Both approaches seem to be predicated on a particular rationality that looks remarkably like a Western, modern, capitalist view of the world in which people struggle over economic value. To deal with that, some analysts have turned to convention theory to consider why social and economic arrangements take a given form. Convention theorists maintain that there has to be agreement between participants about what social and economic arrangements should look like. These agreements include a diverse range of possible conventions, such as a concern with market performance, industrial efficiency, civic worth, public knowledge and environmental concern, all of which combine to build 'common perceptions of the structural context' (Morgan et al. 2006: 19). This is useful inasmuch as it identifies values attached to economic arrangements, ideas about sustainability and health for example, and how these come to be a common concern. On the other hand, we need to remain alive to the danger that identifying and documenting shared meanings presumes a bounded, harmonious society, something political economy precisely warns against.

This brief summary of academic approaches to alternative food provision allows us to identify key themes. Chief among these is the question of values, introduced earlier. In academic literature, the question of values is most often broached by suggesting that consumers are either being 'reflexive' in their shopping by taking into consideration the conditions under which things are produced (Goodman et al. 2012), or are expressing 'care' for significant others through the exercise of choice (Kneafsey et al. 2008). These kinds of generalisation tell us something about what consumers say they want to do, but they reveal little about the cultural context for their values or the different agendas people live by. In contrast, our anthropological approach through case studies documents the values people adhere to in their everyday lives, the practices they engage in to prioritise different agendas, the projects they develop, and the way contradictory commitments can pull them in different directions. The evidence is that people are adept at living with contradictions, though that often means compromise and reassessment of political and economic ambitions. The case studies illustrate these tensions, particularly those between monetary value, associated with market relations, and the search for other kinds of value in the production or consumption of food. The next task is to clarify our approach by looking at the way these themes are explored in economic anthropology.

Concepts and Oppositions in Economic Anthropology

Two premises might be said to underpin economic anthropology. First, through engagement with other societies and cultures, anthropologists have questioned the universal applicability of Western models of economic behaviour. In their research they have encountered worlds in which the most important aspects of economy involved such things as the mass slaughter of pigs or strengthening social ties by giving away yams, and this has led them to identify principles other than those predicated upon the rationality of individual actors seeking their own personal satisfaction. Second, as they have increasingly moved to study capitalist societies and cultures, anthropologists note that even here market rationality is not the only principle that underpins economic activities, despite its practical and moral force. Let us look at these two observations in more detail.

(Continues…)

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Copyright © 2014 Jeff Pratt and Pete Luetchford.
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Table of Contents

Preface
1. Introduction
2. Farming And Its Value by Jeff Pratt
3. Food And Consumption by Peter Luetchford
4. Tuscany, Italy by Jeff Pratt
5. The Tarn, France by Myriem Naji
6. Andalusia, Spain by Peter Luetchford
7. Sussex, England by Sara Avanzino
8. Food Activism
9. Economics And Morality
Afterword
Bibliography
Index