Mucky carrots and other proxies: problematising the knowledge-fix for
sustainable and ethical consumption
Accepted for publication in Geoforum.
Sally Eden (corresponding author), Department of Geography, University of Hull
Christopher Bear, Department of Geography, University of Hull
Gordon Walker, Department of Geography, Lancaster University
Abstract
This paper uses evidence from focus groups in England to consider how consumers think
about and, more importantly, distinguish foods by both primary and secondary qualities, using
both their own judgement but also advice produced by various organisations acting as
‘knowledge intermediaries’, such as independent certification bodies. We thus consider the
‘sorting out’ that consumers do with food, particularly in developing typologies of ‘goodness’
and ‘badness’, and the cues on which they base these judgements, from the material
immediacy of ‘mucky carrots’ to the abstract remoteness of organic certification. In
particular, we problematise the ‘knowledge-fix’ that underlies attempts to provide knowledge
to promote more sustainable and ethical consumption. This raises problems of how
consumers give assurance schemes meaning, how ethical and sustainable schemes are subject
to re-fetishization and how consumers tend towards increasing scepticism and distrust of such
claims, thus making a ‘politics of reconnection’ far from easy.
Keywords: consumers; knowledge; trust; food; sustainable and ethical consumption
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Mucky carrots and other proxies: problematising the knowledge-fix for
sustainable and ethical consumption
Introduction
Researchers and campaigners are increasingly concerned about food consumption and
production practices in industrialised countries, because of their social and environmental
impacts across the world. This has now generated an agenda to promote quality, authenticity,
localness, sustainability, fairtrade, animal welfare and other attributes of food production and
sale that aim to change these practices, especially by increasing traceability for consumers.
Whilst this aim is worthy, this agenda has focused largely upon how food is produced,
distributed and sold, but very little upon how it is perceived, viewed and consumed. The
presumptions about how consumers value localness, authenticity, traceability and quality have
therefore been little verified, ironically despite the supposed importance of consumer choices
to the agenda (Goodman 2003, p.6).
This paper addresses this gap by taking a more consumer-oriented approach to knowledge
about food production. Using evidence from focus groups with consumers in England, we
explore how consumers think about and, more importantly, distinguish foods on the basis of a
range of qualities, both primary and secondary, using both their own judgement and
information from various organisations acting as ‘knowledge intermediaries’ between food
producers and consumers.
We thus consider the ‘sorting out’ (Bowker and Star 1999) that consumers do with food,
particularly in developing typologies of ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ with reference to the cues
on which they base these judgements and the ethical and political impact of those typologies.
In particular, we problematise the ‘knowledge-fix’ proposed to change consumer practices, by
showing how consumers use, trust and distrust different proxies that provide knowledge in
order to promote more sustainable and ethical consumption.
The distance problem of consumption
The agenda which this paper addresses posits that the distance (both cartographical and
cognitive) between food producers and consumers has increased in the developed world in the
twentieth century, because fewer people are directly employed in producing food, production
chains are more complex with more technological processes involved and fewer people know
how to grow their own food or how food is produced. So, modern geographies of food are
argued to distance consumers from producers and hide the very social relations and
environmental impacts that make food production possible (Duffy et al. 2005; Princen 1997;
Hudson and Hudson 2003). This “disconnection” agenda is also endorsed by policy and user
groups (e.g. Policy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food 2002, p.96).
‘Distance’ and ‘disconnection’ are presumed to occur in both cartographic and cognitive
space. First, food production and processing spaces are assumed to be separated from
consumption spaces. Second, the activities in production and processing spaces are assumed
to be less part of consumers’ everyday experiences and knowledge than they used to be, so
that even where people live adjacent to farms or food factories or walk past them every day,
they know less (or nothing) about what happens inside. So, the complex topologies of food
production matter, rather than solely its geographies, a point sometimes neglected in the
literature. Cognitive distantiation may be exacerbated through new technologies of
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production, such as genetic modification (Brom, 2000, p.129), which are even further from
the everyday understandings of most consumers. Hence, consumers may feel “increasingly
alienated from the way their food is grown and processed” (Duffy et al. 2005, p.17-18).
It is further argued that this disconnection reduces consumer trust in food and food providers,
especially where, as in the UK, food is overwhelming bought through large chain stores,
rather than small shops. Such distanciation is also frequently either blamed on (or simply
associated with) globalised food production, through concepts like commodity networks and
food miles (Hughes and Reimer 2004; Pretty et al. 2005). Whilst these usefully emphasise
the environmental externalities of transport, they obscure the argument that consumer
knowledge of food grown even in the same country - or the same county – may still be
problematic. Again, the agenda often confuses or conflates geography with topology, rather
than attending to their differences.
Geographers have recently approached this disconnection agenda using frameworks from
rural development, agrofood chains and political economy (e.g. Goodman 2000; Guthman
2003; D Watts et al. 2005). The result has been a production-oriented focus that emphasises
how food is produced (Goodman 2003, p.1), how labour and technology are involved, how
geography is co-constituted through production and how products are differentiated by their
geographies, particularly their origins (e.g. Ilbery et al. 2005; Parrott et al. 2002). In terms of
political economy, this has emphasised how the consumer is alienated from the conditions of
production, particularly from the exploitation of labour remote from consumption, an
exploitation that is then obscured by the marketing of luxury (e.g. Hartwick 1998). Such
researchers argue that we should reverse commodity fetishism and its clouding of the
conditions of production (e.g. Jackson 1999; Hartwick 2000; Hudson and Hudson 2003) to
reveal the unappetising underbelly of production, whether this be the treatment of chickens or
of sweatshop workers (e.g. M Watts 2004; Jackson 2002; Schlosser 2002), and reflect the
‘ethical turn’ in geography that has challenged the postmodernist approach to consumption
that dominated the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Hartwick 2000, p.1179).
The solution of reconnection
To correct this, approaches from political economy and rural geography have urged the more
deliberate, even “pedagogical” (Hudson and Hudson 2003, p.427), re-education of consumers
into ‘better’ consumer practices. We also see this knowledge agenda strongly reflected in
popular best-sellers which seek to raise consumer awareness of food production and green
and ethical consumerism (e.g. Elkington and Hailes 1989; Klein 2000; Schlosser 2002;
Lawrence 2004). Hartwick (1998, p.433) calls this the “politics of reconnection” and it is
urged by both academics and policy groups (e.g. Jackson et al. 2006, page 133; Policy
Commission on the Future of Farming and Food 2002). Reconnection arguments can be both
geographical, in linking the global North and South through fairtrade consumption (Goodman
2004, p.906), and topological, “thickening the connections” between consumers and
producers and thus “countering the inaccuracies” in consumers’ views (Crang 1996, p.56).
Solutions to the problem of reconnection are often described as “alternative food networks…
that redistribute value through the network against the logic of bulk commodity production;
that reconvene ‘trust’ between food producers and consumers; and that articulate new forms
of political association and market governance” (Whatmore et al. 2003, p.289). But the
concept of ‘alternative’ food systems is problematic, firstly because it is often loosely defined,
secondly because it is not always obvious what such forms are alternative to and thirdly
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because it tends to idealise and promote certain forms of production and consumption
uncritically (Goodman 2003, p.5), so that ‘alternative’ comes to mean (often implicitly) food
chains that do not work through corporate or mass production and retailing (Whatmore and
Thorne 1997; also Raynolds 2000). Hence, many supporters of ‘alternative’ food networks
become suspicious when those networks succeed and grow (e.g. Goodman 2000; Guthman
2003; Mansfield 2004; Raynolds 2000). The expansion (and thus success) of organic
agriculture is a particular target, because some (especially Guthman 2003, 2004) do not
consider that ‘mass’ production can match the same (environmental and social) standards as
‘alternative’ production. It complicates the dichotomy of ‘good’ organic food and ‘bad’ fast
food, when the ‘alternative’ begins to become what it opposes.
Another form of reconnection is through consumers buying locally produced food - which
thus defines ‘alternative’ as close in physical and topological space through shorter supply
chains (e.g. D Watts et al. 2005). Direct ‘farmgate’ sales and farmers’ markets are argued to
avoid the joint evils of technological processing and corporate profiteering, thus “improving
food traceability and reducing the scope for commodity fetishism” (ibid., p.33). However,
‘local’ is a highly elastic concept and can be used to support agendas of ‘defensive localism’,
rather than more ethically or environmentally sustainable production, so that an easy
association of local with quality or authenticity is highly suspect (Winter 2003; Ilbery and
Maye 2006).
There are two other problems with such solutions. First, the literature on ‘alternative’ food is
often production-oriented (Goodman 2003, p.1), originating in agricultural studies and rural
development, but even work studying consumption has tended to address this agenda without
investigating consumers, especially by analysing the signs and ‘imaginaries’ of marketing and
advertising (e.g. Jackson et al. 2006; Barnett et al. 2005; Bryant and Goodman 2004;
Goodman 2004; Hartwick 1998). Advertising may contribute to the cultural resources
available to consumers in making sense of food, but analysing how products are sold is not
the same as analysing how they are bought or eaten. Authors frequently comment that more
work needs to be done to correct the “serious neglect” of consumers (Goodman 2003, p.6;
also Winter 2003; Ilbery and Maye 2006), but little has yet been produced. In this paper, we
do this by taking a horizontal view across myriad commodities that consumers encounter,
contrasting with the verticality in studies of commodity chains and agro-food networks.1 In
this ‘consumer’s eye’ view, different products and knowledges jostle for consumer attention
in the same spaces and times. Our approach does therefore provide less detail on individual
commodities, but provides more detail on the comparative and general processes applied by
consumers to make sense of and judge them.
Second, consumers and producers do not easily divide into ‘alternatives’ and their opposite,
because, like products, producers and systems jostle alongside each other in the same spaces
and times. For example, the vast majority of organic food in the UK is bought in the mass
market through multiple grocery chains (Soil Association 2006; Padel and Foster 2005), not
in ‘alternative’ spaces. Even in clearly separate spaces, like farmers’ markets, farm shops and
car boot sales, consumers are likely to be having fun and buying luxury or supplementary
items (e.g. Crewe and Gregson 1998), rather than doing their main, functional shopping, and
many products may still be sourced from conventional producers in other countries (Ilbery
and Maye 2006), so that these spaces still work within traditional capitalist logics (Holloway
and Kneafsey 2000). Moreover, neither consumers nor producers, in our experience, use the
term ‘alternative’ - rather, “local foods are expected to accord with normal shopping habits,
retail outlets and end-product formats” (Weatherell et al. 2003, p.241) - making this academic
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dichotomy problematic when discussing what consumers actually do and think. Furthermore,
urging consumers to ‘Buy British’ may connect to quite different but still locally imagined
geographies, rather than urging them towards ‘alternative’ foods, emphasising that production
geographies themselves are open to multiple constructions (also Holloway and Kneafsey
2000, pages 295-6).
We thus avoid the term ‘alternative’ because of these problems. More generally, we also seek
to avoid the kind of geographical fetishism which conceives of distance as the problem and of
local reconnection as the solution (e.g. Ilbery and Kneafsey 1999; cf. Barnett et al. 2005;
Princen 1997; Holloway and Kneafsey 2000; Massey 2004). Instead, we consider different
topological ‘reconnections’ that represent the conditions of production at the point of
consumption through both ‘alternative’ solutions critiqued above: buy locally and buy
ethically.
The ‘knowledge-fix’ and its problems
We call this a ‘knowledge-fix’ to the distancing of consumption from production, because
such topological reconnections explicitly go beyond a ‘spatial fix’ or geographical
reconnection by including diverse topologies of knowledge gathering, evaluating and
contesting, topologies which depend not upon physical relationships or proximity but upon
more precarious and complex links of trust. Buying ‘locally’ may rely on location being selfevident assurance because a farm shop is on a farm and consumers can see its operations and
talk to the growers about production. But buying ‘fairtrade’ coffee in England, where it is not
grown, must rely on other forms of assurance. As distanciation removes consumers from
person-to-person knowledge, new systems develop to provide knowledge through impersonal
assurance and disembedded information (Giddens 1990). Food assurance schemes are
examples of such systems (e.g. D Watts et al., 2005; Morris and Young 2004; Ilbery and
Kneafsey, 1999). Although consumers can detect and test many qualities of products for
themselves at first hand - like price, perishability, flavour, appearance, texture and even
nutrition – they cannot necessarily detect how much the producers were paid or what
pesticides were used in production, for instance. Food assurance schemes act as knowledge
intermediaries to provide this information.
But knowledge provision is problematic. Consider how the ‘deficit model’ of providing
information to the public has been debunked in recent years in the public understanding of
science literature (e.g. Wynne 1995; Irwin and Michael 2003; S Miller 2001). This model
assumes that if information about a risk or problem is provided, this will increase public
understanding and thus trust in policy or regulation about it and that information is a one-way
flow: from ‘those who know’ (usually the scientists or policy-makers) to ‘those who do not
know’ (usually the public). The comparisons with the knowledge-fix model in consumption
are obvious: information flows in one direction from producers – the good ones, anyway,
because the bad ones are deliberating withholding or disguising information about their nasty
practices – to the ignorant (alienated) consumer in order to generate and maintain trust in the
producers.
Like the deficit model, we can debunk the knowledge fix in consumption. First, information
is not a one-way flow to a passive recipient: information about food can be re-interpreted,
validated, received, resisted and outright ignored. Second, a knowledge-fix overplays
cognitive and rational approaches to consumption, at the expense of aesthetic, emotional or
playful approaches (Crang 1996; Barnett et al. 2005). Third, information can have negative
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effects, as show in studies of the GM debate and similar ‘citizen science’ experiments (e.g.
Poortinga and Pidgeon 2004; Scholderer and Frewer 2003). Fourth, empowering consumers
through information assumes consumer sovereignty where consumers can act on choice (e.g.
National Consumer Council 2003; Food Standards Agency 2005), rather than assuming that
their choices are constrained by income, knowledge, personal circumstances, systems of
provision and social norms. Indeed, the ideology of consumer choice tends to be naturalised
in current debates about food, with the problematic effect of seeming to shift responsibility
from other powerful players, such as governments, food manufacturers and retailers, to
individual consumers.
Methodology
We turn now to our empirical study, for which we recruited six focus groups in the city of
York in northern England in late 2005. The first four groups were of local consumers, from
both genders and varied socioeconomic backgrounds, who were recruited by a professional
recruiter. They had to meet two conditions: they had to be involved in shopping for food for
their household on a regular basis and they had to be either regularly buying or at least
interested in one of several product categories, including organic food and functional food, to
ensure sufficient interest in discussing these topics. This is now a large proportion of the UK
public: the Food Standards Agency’s (2006, page 26) 2005 survey reported that 30% of
shoppers surveyed said that they regularly or occasionally bought organic food and the Soil
Association (2006) reported that in the same year 65.4% of shoppers surveyed said that they
had knowingly bought organic food, with 41% doing so at least once a month.
Having completed these four groups and found surprisingly few differences across them, we
decided to target more specialised consumers, to seek diversity. For the fifth group, we asked
a local allotment association to recruit allotment holders who mainly grew their own fruit and
vegetables. For the final group, we used a local wholefood shop, a vegan group and contacts
in the Soil Association (a UK NGO that researches and promotes organic farming and related
environmental activities) to recruit consumers who bought primarily wholefood and organic
food.
In all, 45 people participated and each group met twice, with a week’s interval during which
participants were given information about food assurance schemes to take home and look at.
All the groups were audio-recorded using digital equipment and fully transcribed. They were
analysed using grounded theory, namely systematic coding to saturation, and standard wordprocessing software. All participants have been given pseudonyms in this paper.
These groups are not intended to be representative nor to measure market share or awareness,
but to explore how consumers think about food production and evaluate information
promoting products as sustainable and ethical. Our findings are necessarily speculative, given
that they are based upon 45 people in one UK city. However, our research does have the
merit of being horizontal, in looking simultaneously and in some detail at how a range of
commodities and knowledges are encountered by a small but diverse set of consumers.
Having deliberately recruited the last two groups in different ways, we were surprised that,
although participants in the vegan/organic group were particularly aware of many nutritional
and environmental debates, there was not a great deal of difference in the way in which all six
groups discussed confidence and trust in information. The National Consumer Council (2001,
p.7) likewise found “a marked consistency across all socio-economic and age groups of key
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consumer concerns about food and farming”, suggesting that consumer concerns, other than
price, are not subject to strong cleavages of opinion. For example, even members of the Soil
Association in our groups were unsure and often misinformed about how the Soil Association
certifies organic produce. Hence, in what follows, although we will occasionally draw out
comparisons between groups, the differences were much less marked than we had expected,
which is itself interesting.
Detecting and classifying ‘good’ and ‘bad’ food through encounter
We began the first meetings of our focus groups by asking simply about how they shopped for
food. Without prompting, our participants immediately framed this within a dualistic
typology of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods, where the ‘bad’ foods were referred to as ‘crap’,
‘rubbish’, ‘fast food’ and ‘junk’ and the ‘good’ foods were raw and home-made.
Matthew
I’ve always believed in fresh fruit and veg. I don’t mind them [his daughters]
trying crap so long as they’re also eating fresh fruit and veg. (group 1)
Our consumers thus put into operation a vernacular ‘sorting out’ (Bowker and Star 1999)2 of
bad and good, a moral ordering for a whole series of other judgements. For example, ‘bad’
food was distinguished by type as ‘processed’, ‘pre-packed’, ‘packaged’, ‘ready meals’,
‘frozen’ (the opposite of fresh and unadulterated), or by its content or cooking methods, such
as ‘fried food’, ‘chips’, ‘sausages’, ‘baked beans’, ‘pizza’, ‘burgers’ (the opposite of fruit and
vegetables) or by the outlet it was bought from, such as ‘take-aways’ and ‘McDonald’s’ (the
opposite of home-made). ‘Bad’ food was not fresh because it was old, out-of-date or had
been stored too long, because shops used preservatives or other ‘unnatural’ processing and
storage practices to keep their food edible (to a degree). We heard a lot of this kind of
discussion, but will not report it in detail, not least because it will be familiar from recent
debates about the problems of diet in developed countries and the well-worn dichotomy set up
between bad (fast, industrially produced) food and good (fresh, organic, slow, home-made)
food (e.g. Guthman 2003, page 46). Instead, we want to think about how consumers make
these judgements about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ food and what this suggests that they know about
food production.
The criteria used by our participants in the first instance were ones they could judge for
themselves, that were detectable. So, fresh or un-processed food was more trusted because it
was seen raw - there was nothing hidden about how it had been processed.
Mark
If it looks as it should do when it grew, you tend to trust it. Certainly I do.
(group 1)
Hence, firsthand information was the most powerful way in which consumers classified food
as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, sometimes referred to as ‘primary qualities’ in consumer studies (Grunert
2002). For example, unnaturally stored or preserved bananas “don’t turn yellow, they go
from green to brown” (Mark in group 1), so they can be seen to be ‘wrong’. Participants cited
the evidence of their own senses, their bodily connection with food, the processes of
preparing it, cooking it and eating it:
Laura
Every time I buy a pre-packed salad from a supermarket, which isn’t that often
really, it always says washed and ready-to-eat, and I open it and put a little bit
in my mouth and they always taste funny. I’m always worried and think, you
know, I’m going to wash that. It doesn’t taste like it’s washed but that’s what
it says. (group 1)
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More emphatically, our participants used dirt on vegetables as evidence of their local and
‘authentic’ production, thus linking together the two reconnection agendas above: the visibly
local and and the assuredly ethical:
George
we use the [farm shop] for all the fruit and veg and home-cured… everything
meat… And we find that brilliant, because it’s all recently been picked – all
the leaves and salad stuff, tomatoes, mucky carrots, everything, so you do
know that it’s organically grown. (group 1)
We later visited the farm shop that George mentioned and found that it stocks many products
that are not organic. We return to the problem of outlets below, but the point here is that
George’s “mucky carrots” and the “bits of sand” on them that he mentioned later are visible,
physical evidence of closeness to the soil, of authenticity, of reality. In claiming to resist the
aestheticisation of the most mundane products, all six of our focus groups used visible and
tasteable imperfections as assurances of ‘good’ (raw) food.
Lorna
We’ve got a friend who’s got an allotment and he keeps dropping carrier bags
off at our house. It’s broad beans at the moment and then his new potatoes and
they’re all just black soil, and you just have to wash them off and everything.
We’re actually growing tomatoes at home. When you go to pick a tomato off
its vine, the smell on your hand and everything, it’s different, it’s beautiful.
(group 2)
By comparison, food that is too clean, vegetables that do not have dirt clinging to them,
carrots that are not mucky – all these were cited by participants as suspicious evidence of
overzealous intervention with powerful cleaners and other technologies, such as chilling,
during industrial processing. Barbara (in group 3) made this also a historical point: “you used
to buy a sack of potatoes from the farmer, they’d have soil on and you’d rub the soil off,” but
no longer. The food suffers, and its very hyperreality, its extreme cleanliness, is another
signal that it is not as natural but a result of overprocessing and mass, industrialised food
production – and thus ‘bad’:
Mabel
Sally
your supermarkets and like we’ve said, they’re all washed – piles and piles of
carrots, say. But then at the moment I think they’re looking quite sad, are the
carrots. Usually they’re looking quite bright and shiny and all washed but these
are looking dull as though they’ve had them there a week or so.
They’re not the right colour though sometimes when you get them in the
supermarket. They’re too orange. (group 4)
For the vegan/organic group, even produce labelled as organic in supermarkets (and thus
guaranteed to have been certified as organic) failed to seem organic because the
supermarket’s quality criteria made it again hyperreal: “too big and perfect to be organic” and
“too regular.” This is not solely a visual judgement, but also uses touch and taste, where the
texture of food becomes an indicator of, for example, how a chicken has lived, how much
room it has had to move about (to build up muscles and bones) and thus how well it has been
treated:
Gabrielle
I stopped buying organic chickens from supermarkets because I’m sure there’s
something really weird about them.
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Laura
The ones from the farm shop, which are not organic, they have more the
texture of the ones from the village, a much rougher texture. (vegan/organic
group)
This vernacular typology emphasises the kinds of highly contingent knowledges that matter
for our consumers. The way that our participants talked about food, especially its
authenticity, often emphasised their intimate bodily connection with it but also naturalised
food production as earthy, rather than mechanised, again reflecting the academic dichotomy
above between mass industrial production and homely, trustworthy, ‘real’ local production.
But these easy detections became problematic as our discussions developed. Constant
reflexive monitoring of changing conditions and their relationship to the individual makes
trust dynamically unstable and contingent (Giddens 1990). Whilst firsthand sensory
experience was cited as powerful in connecting consumers to the quality of food, it was also
fallible. Our participants suspected that their senses were being fooled, because food could
have been sprayed and thus polluted or contaminated by invisible agents, while still looking
fresh. Here, people suspected the mass industrialisation ‘hidden’ in products, again sharing
the general agenda described above, if not detailed knowledge of food production processes.
Jenny
even when you sort of buy bags of salads it’s actually sprayed with
preservatives to try and maintain freshness. So you think you’re actually
getting a fresh product that’s preservative-free and it actually isn’t. All sorts of
hidden things. (group 2)
When we move on to food qualities that are not identifiable by the consumers’ senses, such as
ethical or organic production, the typology between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ food becomes much
more precarious. Where people are absent and systems of production are invisible,
consumers need to develop trust in other ways (Giddens 1990), so consumers grappled for
‘cues’ (Scholderer and Frewer 2003) to identify (or verify) qualities that they could not
themselves experience through their senses. Such cues represent secondhand knowledge
about food’s ‘credence qualities’ (Grunert 2002; Einsiedel 2002), so-called precisely because
they require belief in the intermediary providing the knowledge. Such credence qualities rely
on different proxies - stand-ins for the consumer’s own senses - which are differently
interpreted and trusted. We next consider two proxies: spaces and labels.
Secondhand information by spatial proxies
The simplest proxy used by our consumers was the trustworthy space of a specific retail
outlet. The most positively regarded was the farm shop, because its produce was thought to
be fresh and recently picked, so the food supply chain was seen as shorter in both space and
time. This reflects the geographical agenda outlined above (especially D Watts et al. 2005;
Policy Commission 2002), whereby shortening the geographical chain also shortened the
topological chain, reducing the number of ‘middle-men’ that people had to trust, and
generated confidence in the connection. “You just assume that because it’s from a farm shop
that it’s going to be OK” (Alison, group 3). The example of farmers’ markets is similar,
wherein “consumers make assumptions about the quality and freshness of the products simply
because of the consumption context” (Holloway and Kneafsey 2000, p.292). The supply
chain is constructed to be closer, simpler and, therefore, safer:
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Facilitator
Sarah
So those kind of things that you might buy at the farmers’ market or farmers’
stall, do you feel that they’re going to be better? [There is a general ‘yes’ in
response.] Why?
Because they’re straight out of the field. One day I had to wait while they
went to pick more carrots out of the field at the farmers’ market. He’d gone to
get some… I saw these things of sprouts and mucky carrots and said ‘oh, I’ll
come back and get some of them – I’ll just go take this turkey to the car’.
When I got back she’d sold out and said, ‘Don’t worry, he’s gone to the field
to get some more’. And he brought them, just picked them out of the field,
they were dripping wet. (group 4)
The allotment and vegan/organic groups particularly deplored the ‘food miles’ implicit in
supermarkets, as transporting food can be bad both for the food itself (making it stale) and for
the environment due to fossil fuel use. All six groups thus clearly echoed the agenda above,
in that their talk favoured the farm shop, the farmers’ market and the local butcher as most
likely to provide visibility, traceability and confidence about production. These three
attributes of food can overlap, but they do not have to. Visibility relates to how consumers
see the food or the location of food production and/or sale and often, but not always, relies on
geographical proximity, as we explore below. By comparison, traceability can be produced
through more remote production and/or more depersonalised and disembedded modes of
production and sale, exemplified by the product labels of assurance schemes appearing on
supermarket shelves. Consumer confidence may require both, one or neither of these and, in
some cases, visibility can substitute for traceability and vice versa, emphasising again the
contingent complexities of different proxies for consumer trust.
Let us illustrate this. The shortest supply chain for our mainstream consumers was ‘pick your
own’, again because of the visibility and geographical proximity of production to the
consumer: as Lorna said about carrots (in group 2, held in August), you can “go and pick
them out of the ground at the moment.” For the allotment group, the chain was even shorter
because food was home-grown. This avoided the problem of secondhand information,
because they were in control of how their food was produced – they could choose what to
spray (or not), whether to be organic (or not), what seeds to plant and when to harvest (to
follow the seasons). There are no intermediaries in this chain (unless the seed or seedlings are
bought in) and traceability was guaranteed through their own efforts.3
Tom
You know that it’s not infested with pesticides or herbicides. You know that
it’s good for the environment because it hasn’t come half way round the world.
(allotment group)
For those who did not grow their own food, the next best thing was the proxy of the farm
shop. This presents visible evidence seemingly without intermediaries, because the fields and
the crops therein surround the consumer and “you can see it growing” (George, group 1).
But, as mentioned above, the farm shop near York that they were referring to also imported
much of its fresh produce, especially from the Netherlands, and stocked a wide range of
processed foods from the UK and other countries, from flavoured olive oils to ice cream and
cakes (also Ilbery and Maye 2006). Our participants were thus deploying a similar localism
as in some of the academic literature (see Ilbery and Kneafsey 1999; Barrett et al. 2002; for a
critique, see Parrott et al. 2002; Winter 2003), allowing location to stand for ‘good’,
regardless of other attributes or verification. Trust was not based on production qualities, but
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outlet qualities and the (perceived) shortening of the supply chain, although in practice this
proximity was partial and product-specific.
Other outlets were similarly trusted as proxies, because of familiarity and one-to-one
relationships that had been established over time. This represents the ‘face work’ (Giddens
1990, p.86) necessary to re-embed faceless systems, such as food production, and anchor
trust. For example, the vegan/organic group trusted their local wholefood shop as an outlet
and named it continually throughout.
Brenda
Facilitator
Brenda
Chantal
Brenda
I trust them. They say ‘this food has been grown by Ann and it’s all organic’
and I would trust that.
How do they know?
Because the woman, Ann, works in the shop and she’s the one who grows it in
her own garden and brings it in. I would trust that, because I think I trust
individual people more than
[interrupting] Because you see the people there, don’t you? It’s not some big
organisation that you’ve never seen and has all kinds of middle men
[interrupting disparagingly] Managers. (vegan/organic group)
Groups 1-4 and the allotment group spoke similarly about the local butcher’s and, in both
cases, the shop space rather than the product itself demarcated trust and the face work
(Giddens 1990) of the employees, themselves seen as knowledgeable about food, supported
this trust. Here, the retailer, rather than the site of production, is visible and can generate
consumer confidence. Similarly, our participants still perceived a strong immediacy of the
meat supply chain, despite the butcher being an intermediary, because the links between the
retailer and the producer were identifiable and close.4 Here are two examples of, respectively,
visibility and traceability for a local butcher:
Paul
Facilitator
Paul
Tom
Steve
I get free-range from the butchers round the corner from me. It hasn’t got freerange on but it’s got a sell-by date and everything like.
How do you know it’s free-range?
Because I’ve seen the bloke delivering them from the farm. (group 3)
if you go to the local butcher or the farmers’ market, you’re actually talking to
people who are serving you or running it or whatever and the same when
Hudson’s [a local butcher] was open. You went in and talked to people,
talked to the other customers and talked to the butcher.
Yeah. And as Mike said, he could tell you where he got his beasts from. He
could tell you whose beast it was. He knew whose meat it was that he was
selling – not just anybody’s meat. He knew – he didn’t buy it at a trade place
or anything. He bought it from farms, from dealers. (allotment group)
Hence, “what producers are selling to consumers at farmers’ markets is, in part, the aura of
personal relations and social connection” (Hinrichs 2000, p.299), rather than simply the
materiality of their foods. The idealisation of personal service in the past ironically becomes
novel by comparison to the far more common impersonal and self-service approach in
supermarkets which dominate food sales today.5 So, beyond the power of firsthand
information about food, trusted intermediaries provide secondhand information, especially
where the food topology is short and simple – that is, traceable. But both these means of
knowledge are precarious - a legacy of distrust can encourage reflection and destabilise trust.
11
For example, our participants debated whether food that was produced properly or organically
could be detected by their senses and whether they could trust the farm shop, the local butcher
and other immediate intermediaries to provide trustworthy food.
Mabel
Sarah
Mabel
Steve
Well, you can [get old-fashioned vegetables] from these farmers’ carts and
farmers’ markets and so on.
Yeah, but you don’t know they haven’t got any chemicals on, do you?
True enough. (mainstream group 4)
I think like when we shop at a farm shop, I would tend to believe them.
Whether I can fully believe them - I think I can believe them, so that’s why
we’re tending to buy there now rather than the supermarkets. (allotment group)
Another, but weaker and smaller, version of the outlet proxy is the supermarket’s ‘organic
shelf’ or ‘section.’ This was mentioned in groups 1-4 as separate, identifiable and trusted as
providing better organic food. For them, it is not the information on products that matters, but
the space that is demarcated – either explicitly by displays or implicitly by association – as
organic. The space is the proxy and makes life easier because everything therein can be
quickly picked up without further analysis. Rather than a politics of reconnection, this is a
politics of demarcation, between commodities and between (or within) consumption spaces.
Even where more information about organic standards and certification is provided within this
demarcated space, consumers like Steve (in group 2) do not read them for information: “I
don’t look at the sign. I just go because it’s organic.”
At the same time, this demarcation was problematised. The organicness of supermarket food
was disputed because of the incongruity between what ‘organic’ stands for and what mass
industrial food production and retailing stands for. This is epitomised by Tesco, currently the
UK’s biggest retailer, which sells more than one-quarter of UK food. In a 2005 survey in
England (Food Standards Agency 2006), 92% of shoppers said that they bought most of their
household food through supermarkets, 4% at ‘local’ shops and 2% at markets, emphasising
that consumers are still overwhelmingly ‘conventional’ rather than ‘alternative’ (Winter
2003). Moreover, 76% of organic sales in the UK are through multiple retailers (Soil
Association 2006, p.48) and Tesco again has the biggest single share of the organic food
market (ibid., p.20). This emphasises the tension within this typology between trust and use,
because people use Tesco and buy organic there, but trust it less than the outlets that they use
less. Only the vegan/organic group did not fit this pattern, not least because several of them
used a local, wholefood retail cooperative for their main food shopping, rather than
supermarkets like Tesco.
Laura
Chantal
Laura
And it’s the fact that it’s Tesco’s. To me it just knocks on the head anything.
The organisation’s too big for our country, for our environment
And it’s [organic food in supermarkets] also highly packaged, which is quite
strange. It’s not even in biodegradable packaging. Some Sainsbury’s organic
products have started to come in biodegradable packaging, which just about
makes sense, but it’s still far too much packaging.
It should be illegal really. It’s got so many airmiles [meaning ‘food miles’].
(vegan/organic group)
In particular, participants were worried about being deluded by their own confidence into
assuming that food was indeed produced to organic standards, so they expressed much doubt
12
and confusion about what the term ‘organic’ meant and how it is regulated. We were
surprised to find that group discussion tended towards scepticism rather than confidence; that
is, although participants would start out with positive assertions about organically, locally or
healthily produced foods, this would soon be undermined by others pointing out flaws in their
knowledge or information, ways in which this could be suspect, especially drawing on the
legacy of foot and mouth and BSE in the UK. Once the group collectively articulated ‘the
issue’, participants began to ponder the uncertainties and difficulties of successfully resolving
it, thus challenging the confidence that existed before their debate began. Similarly, Burgess
(2003) noted that providing more information about sustainable consumption to households
does not necessarily change their behaviour or attitudes, although it may promote much more
discussion of consumption practices. So, knowledge provided is not simply accepted nor
does it necessarily cause behavioural change, but it can prompt vehement debate.
Moreover, lack of knowledge can itself be a choice. Wynne (1995) argued that not just public
understanding but also public ignorance is socially contructed as a contingent response to a
lack of agency, in the case of workers at the Sellafield nuclear power plant.
“Ignorance was not a cognitive vacuum, or a deficit by default of knowledge, but an
active construct, and one with cognitive content, about the social dimensions of
science. It was part and parcel of the dynamic construction of social identity” (Wynne
1995, p.380).
He argued that, if workers chose to understand the science involved in their jobs, they would
have had to confront unpleasant risks, so technical ignorance was a positive part of the
workers’ “social intelligence” (ibid., p.380). To put it another way, if the workers looked too
closely at what they did, their social relationships and daily routines might become
inoperable, so a level of ignorance enabled those very relationships to continue and thus
needed to be deliberately maintained. Trust thus may be a tacit acceptance of circumstances
in which other alternatives are largely foreclosed (Giddens 1990, p.90). We can compare this
to consumers who shop in a supermarket everyday, who similarly may not consider the
production and transport of most of the things they are buying, or they may consider it but not
act upon it, because doing so would fundamentally challenge their shopping practices. In
such cases, we may block things out to make life easier. Changing this by making people
think is the purpose of this politics of reconnection, but providing information will not easily
fix this problem of normalised ignorance.
Second hand information by label proxies
After space, a second proxy is labelling and other forms of assurance information. As
mentioned, we gave our participants some cards about fifteen food assurance organisations
operating in the UK to read between the two group meetings. The organisations included the
Soil Association and Organic Farmers & Growers, which are the main certifiers of organic
food in the UK, the Marine Stewardship Council, which runs a scheme to certify sustainable
fisheries across the world, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
(RSPCA), which approves products against animal welfare standards via the ‘Freedom Food’
logo in the UK, and the international FairTrade logo. These are all attempts to use knowledge
to connect consumers with food production in order to promote sustainable and ethical
consumption – that is, attempts at a knowledge-fix in line with the agenda above.
When we reconvened for the second group meetings, most participants initially expressed a
lot of confidence in these assurance schemes, although they varied greatly in which ones they
trusted most, depending on whether they recognised the organisation’s name (see Eden et al.
13
2007). As might be predicted, both the allotment group and the vegan/organic group
recognised the Soil Association: “I definitely would respect anything they labelled” said
Brenda. But the Soil Association was also widely recognised across groups 1-4, as was the
FairTrade logo on the ethical grounds of “giving the people who grow it and pick it a fair
deal” (Matthew, group 1). In general, there was much support for what we can identify as
non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which people in opinion polls consistently say they
trust more to tell the truth than, for example, companies, industrial scientists, government and
government scientists (e.g. Worcester 2001; Frewer et al. 1996).
But how far do such proxies reconnect people with food origins and production processes?
For example, prior to giving out these cards, we found that when we asked people whether
they read ‘labels’ on food, they talked almost entirely about processed food, taking it for
granted that ‘fresh’ food has no labels because it has no packaging and is unadulterated, so it
is obvious what is in it and nothing is hidden. When we tried to talk about organic labelling
on fresh foods, they were somewhat confused because they associated ‘organic’ primarily
with fresh fruit and vegetables (also Padel and Foster 2005) and labelling with processed food
– their vernacular typology conflated ‘good’ with ‘organic’ and ‘fresh’. Note how Lorna
equates organic and farm-fresh carrots, for instance:
Lorna
you can buy some carrots from like the supermarket and they actually leave an
orange rim on your pan now when you boil them, which you never, ever, ever
used to get an orange mark when you boiled carrots. But you can go and buy
organic ones or fresh ones from the farm shop and they don’t leave marks.
(group 2)
The point of assurance schemes is to provide information that consumers cannot get or test for
themselves, such as about the chemicals used in production, the welfare of livestock and the
treatment of workers. Indeed, in a 2005 survey (Food Standards Agency 2006, p.78), 47% of
shoppers surveyed said (unprompted) that the issue they wanted more information on was
“chemicals in food”, far outweighing other issues. But one problem is that, because such
schemes provide information that consumers cannot get (credence qualities), equally
consumers can never verify that information, so they can never be sure and continue to lack
knowledge personally.
Tom
there’s no way I can work out whether FairTrade coffee is actually working. I
just believe. Well, clearly very pleased in their ethos and I accept, well, I know
[speaking to another participant] you’ve had dealings with them over 25 years,
but you cannot check it personally, so you assume it does what it says on the
can. And because you believe in it, that makes it OK. (allotment group)
Brenda
There’s no way to know, really [if anyone checks the claims]. I know the Soil
Association are very strict, because I know people who are organic growers
and I’ve read about it, but the other ones I wouldn’t know. (vegan/organic
group)
“Only a label will distinguish organic from conventionally produced food” (Goodman 2000,
p.217). Not for many consumers. We have shown above how consumers use their own
senses to judge taste, texture, perishability, and apply their own criteria to distinguish organic
qualities. Moreover, a label does not distinguish organic from non-organic for them either,
because a label must itself be interpreted. Indeed, organic food is an excellent case for testing
14
the reconnection of consumers with producers, because it necessitates thinking about
processes of production, yet it also is surrounded with considerable doubt and confusion about
what the term means and how it is regulated.
Mark
Sarah
Mark
Facilitator
Mark
Sarah
Sarah
I think I sometimes buy organic food because, at the end of the day it might not
be any different from the non-organic food, but at least I feel better about it.
You hope it is.
I hope it tastes better and often it will taste better but I think often there’s selfdelusion that I’ve bought organic food, it will be better for me and I’ll be more
relaxed about it.
And that’s pollution…
Well, perhaps. Without someone doing scientific analysis of it, I have to
believe that it is organic and if it tastes better than something that’s not, that’s
as far as I’m concerned.
Unless you grow your own, you don’t know, do you? (group 1)
Organics are supposed to be regulated, because I did watch a programme about
organic once and they said there were so many things that had to be specified
and go through before they could actually put that it was organically grown on
it. I think the ground had to be so long without having any chemicals on it. But
who keeps up with it all? (group 4)
There were two diehard sceptics in the six focus groups, dismissive of the practices of
certification and regulation in general, although somewhat ironically one of them was highly
supportive of the principles of organic production and Fairtrade economics. Rob in particular
frequently argued that certifiers and regulators can be fooled by the food producers, as in this
exchange, in comparison with the positive authenticity of ‘dirt’ described above, he uses ‘dirt’
as a way for producers to deceive certifiers:
Rob
You could put 50% organic, 50% normal and cover it with dirt and you’d look
at it and think ‘straight out of me granddad’s field’! (group 4)
Logo overload?
So far, by taking a more consumer-oriented perspective, we have raised some problems for
the knowledge-fix by looking at how consumers understand and compare assurance examples
in a horizontal way. There are two problems here. First, there seem to be more assurance
examples than ever for people to make sense of. The UK’s National Consumer Council
(2003) argued that consumers’ understanding of product labelling, including assurance
schemes and endorsement practices, is low and what understanding there was was confused.
For example, a programme shown on terrestial television shortly before some of the focus
group meetings about the practices of battery chicken rearing (reminiscent of Schlosser 2002)
was confused by Alison with three different proxy qualities: certification to organic standards,
the Assured Food Standards ‘red tractor’ mark on food that meets the legislative standards of
UK food production regardless of origin, and chicken promoted as a low-fat food. Note how
she mingles her own visible evidence of the chickens’ skin, learnt from the programme, with
assurance provided by the label proxies, although neither the programme nor the ‘red tractor’
proxy specified organic produce:
15
Alison
They were talking about the tractor one – what’s that called again? Food
Assurance something or other [she means the Assured Food Standards ‘red
tractor’ scheme]. And it turns out that actually means nothing and it’s on loads
of stuff. And I’ve been shopping this week and I was looking at everything
and I looked, I went to Morrisons [supermarket] and I looked at their organic
chickens. And every one of them had these hock burns on. Every one of them
organic chickens had these hock burns. Do you know what that is? What
happens is, they feed the chickens up so fast so the legs don’t develop fast
enough to hold them up, so they end up buckling down on their knees and
crawling about in all their own… you know. And it burns all the skin and
they’re living in all these conditions. This is organic chickens! This had the
Food Assurance thing on it. So obviously whatever it is they’re doing isn’t
good enough. They’re not monitoring things enough…. [and later:] chicken is
meant to be the low-fat food… And they did a test where it was all drained out
of the chicken when it was cooked and they had a pint of fat out of one
chicken. And that was covered. That was one of the ones that was covered by
this Food Assurance thingy. (group 3)
Second, assurance schemes may have to compete with each other, again as brands do, for the
same ‘aware’ consumer market, bringing the danger of ethical label fatigue (Goodman 2004:
10). In a challenge to mass production, it is not so much ‘no logo’ (Klein 2000) as ‘which
logo?’ Some schemes therefore generated a complicated trade-off dilemma for our
participants, who tried to weigh up the different criteria to judge ‘good’ food. Are low food
miles or localness more important criteria than being fairly traded or organically grown? Is
avoiding big corporations more important than supporting organic production?
Kate
I do the local food/organic food compromise. I’d rather buy something local –
when I say local, sort of France – than something organic from Australia. But
if it’s organic and European then I’ll buy it. (vegan/organic group)
Gabrielle
It seems better to buy non-organic in the market than organic in Tesco’s,
doesn’t it? (vegan/organic group)
This is a direct confrontation between the two types of ‘alternative’ food networks described
earlier, again illustrating how important it is to consider consumption as a comparative
practice, not an either/or state. Evidence so far suggests that the ‘local’ wins at the moment in
the UK: in a 2005 survey of UK shoppers, over 80% said that they would prefer to buy a
locally grown non-organic product rather than an imported organic product (Soil Association
2006, page 58).6 And despite this professed enthusiasm, organic and local food remain a very
small share of total food sales in the UK (ibid., p.75; Ilbery and Maye 2006).
A problem of opinion and some conclusions
Julie
If you buy processed food, it’s so far divorced from actually growing it, isn’t
it? You buy it and it’s already cooked, you just see it as a meal, without even
thinking what’s in it, from the point of view of where the constituent bits came
from. (group 1)
Julie, who elsewhere expressed strong anti-government and generally right-wing views, here
nicely expresses the classic Marxist argument about the alienation of consumption from
16
production and the concealment of the social and environmental conditions of production (e.g.
Fine 2002). We quote her to illustrate that our participants were often aware of the more
general agenda that we outlined at the beginning of this paper, because they articulated both
the agenda and the problems of implementing it throughout (also Weatherell et al. 2003),
although they did so in vernacular rather than academic language. But there is a caveat. The
way that people talk about food does not necessarily match the way that they consume it. In
other words, it is likely that the focus groups indicated ‘ideal’ diets and expectations of what
is ‘good’, rather than what foods the participants actually buy or eat. For example, in a 2005
of UK shoppers (Food Standards Agency 2006, page 24), 67% said that they knew they
should be eating the government-recommended amount of five portions of fruit and
vegetables a day, but only 30% said that they were eating this many.
We do not therefore use our focus group evidence to argue that the population in general is
now buying more ethically, although the organic market is certainly growing, with an
estimated increase of 30% in the UK and 14% globally in 2005 (Soil Association 2006).
Instead, we have shown how our sample of consumers judge different knowledges about
production, from the material immediacy of mucky carrots to the abstract remoteness of
organic certification. In the case of assurance schemes, this has practical importance, because
assurance claims hold no value if they do not resonate with consumer perceptions, if they fail
to generate purchases and if they thus fail to sustain (or expand) ‘better’ food production as
part of the reconnection agenda.
We have therefore problematised the sometimes easy knowledge-fix proposed for
reconnecting consumers and producers, using empirical examples of how consumers in our
focus groups talked about and judged food. Information about food is contingently valued in
the context of intermediaries, location in time and space and histories of relationships with
food providers, both faceless and personally known. The way our participants talked about
direct sales and farm shops reflects the academic and policy agenda described above, but
these outlets were not seen as ‘alternatives’ but as readily routinised within ‘mainstream’
consumption (and even these were not unproblematically trusted simply because they were
short supply chains). But participants also inclined more towards scepticism and suspicion as
group discussions continued. Assurance schemes attempt to provide information to counter
the distancing of consumers from food production but, when our participants talked about
these schemes, they recast the problem of not knowing about food and its production to the
problem of not knowing about the assurance intermediary and its knowledge. In other words,
instead of having a problem with how food production is distanced from consumers, we have
a problem with how the intermediary assurance organisations are distanced from consumers.
In Figure 1, we suggest therefore that assurance schemes effectively replace multiple ‘blackboxes’ of food growing and processing with one ‘black-box’ of assurance. Such black-boxing
(Latour 1987) wraps up the complexity of food production (and certification) systems and
packages it out of sight, providing a standardised shorthand for ease of use or, as here, for
quick purchase decisions. The point of black-boxing is that the outputs of complexity (in this
case, ‘good’ products) can be accepted uncritically, without needing to know about the
processes involved. Against this definition, the assurance box might be more grey than black,
in that it may provide more information than before. For example, naming the assurance
organisation may prompt consumers to actively search for further information about it, for
example, on the internet. In this sense, the box of certification is by its nature more
transparent and open than the box of industrial production which is protected by commercial
confidentiality. Indeed, certification schemes may seek the legitimation of transparency by
17
publishing audit reports, because their interests are in opening up the black-box of food
production more generally.
But schemes, like brands, compete with each other as they are sold through the biggest retail
outlets in the UK. This risks re-fetishizing food, with consumers habitually choosing their
favourites not because of price or taste, but because of ethical or sustainable attributes. Often,
independent certification is wrapped up with mainstream branding, for example when the Soil
Association certifies Tesco’s ‘organic’ range of products, but only the ‘UK5’ identifier (in
small type on the product packaging) tells the consumer this. Rather than unveiling
connections, assurance schemes reconnect in a simple, convenient, pick-it-off-the-shelf
manner that seeks to be in the public interest but ironically works within the existing
consumerist approach to food. This is problematic because it is precisely this unthinking
approach that so many have criticised: the solution of assurance itself can therefore become a
problem for assurance.
Moreover, the assurance schemes partake of and benefit from the logoisation that is common
to modern consumption, using the tools of what they are supposed to be opposing (Jackson
2002; Goodman 2004). This is not a new problem: there are many examples of resistance and
alternative movements being commercialised by the mainstream, once they prove profitable,
which generate discomfort amongst commentators who would rather retain a small but purist
market than use consumerism, even if the sector benefits. But is such conventionalisation not
necessary to grow the market, especially amongst time-poor consumers?
There is a positive aspect to this. Although proxies like farm shops, known-by-name retailers
and assurance schemes do not necessarily provide a knowledge-fix to the reconnection
problem, the very fact that they raise debates and awareness may be useful. Indeed, Hartwick
(1998) thinks of a ‘politics of reconnection’ as mainly occuring through the deconstruction of
commodification, rather than through assuring the product itself. We note that our
participants moved from initial confidence in many of the fifteen assurance schemes to
increasing scepticism and distrust of their claims, as well as of associated companies,
government and media. If nothing else, this was at least evidence that questioning about food
production and regulation was prompted by such information, although not evidence that such
information influenced their consumption knowledge or practices. Although Wynne (1995)
suggests that ignorance might be socially intelligent, the everyday routinisation of food
consumption can also be questioned and disturbed, if not overturned. Hence, ambivalence
might itself be a positive and constructive state (Bauman 1991), certainly in comparison to
blind acceptance of the status quo.
To conclude: the knowledge-fix is easy to argue but difficult to implement. So, rather than
arguing for reconnection through information, let us look more closely at how consumers
think about reconnection and why they often do not (perhaps deliberately) think too much
about the origins of the food that they routinely buy. Whether we call this a politics of
reconnection, a politics of traceability or a politics of informed consumer choice, the point is
that it should raise questions for consumers about food production and not necessarily lead
them to expect simple or easy answers – the ‘knowledge fix’ itself can be problematic if that
is its effect.
Second, let us put consumers back into research. Too many papers evoke them merely as
constructs, thus making large assumptions about consumer knowledge, rather than
investigating how that knowledge itself is produced and consumed in a complex and
18
comparative network. We have looked in detail at how real consumers think and talk about
food, but we have only drawn on a small sample of 45 people, leaving plenty of scope for
more empirical work.
Third, we have plenty of good research on specific commodities and their vertical supply
chains, but again this is not how consumers see the world. We need to think about how to
integrate theoretical frames that deal with the complex verticalities of production with frames
that deal with the (equally complex but in very different ways) horizontalities of consumption
and, in particular, how people weigh up seemingly contradictory or competing information
from multiple sources in order to make sophisticated judgements about that most basic
necessity: food.
Acknowledgements
This work was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Science in Society
programme, under project RES-151-25-00035. We would like to thank all our participants
and interviewees and especially our recruiter in York and the Soil Association for helping us
to set up the focus groups. All participants have been given pseudonyms. Thanks also to
Lewis Holloway for his comments and those who provided feedback on an early version of
this paper at Lancaster University in 2006.
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Notes
1
Fine (2002, pages 84-5) uses ‘horizontal’ quite differently, to indicate horizontal
generalising and theorising, e.g. regarding gender or a (sub)disciplinary approach.
2
Bowker and Star (1999, page 219) mainly deal with more formalised systems of
classification in their work, but even in this more informal case, classification still does
important political and ethical work.
3
Similar arguments were raised when participants discussed cooking with fresh ingredients,
instead of buying processed foods with ‘hidden’ content.
4
By comparison, the Food Standards Agency’s (2006, page 22) annual survey of UK
shoppers reported that local butchers’ shops and market stalls are less trusted than other
outlets for meat, on hygiene grounds.
5
This paper does not have space to address the importance of nostalgia in such arguments,
other than to note that time is as important as space in theorising these reconnections, yet is
largely ignored in the literature.
6
An estimated 66% of primary organic produce sold by UK multiple retailers is produced in
the UK, although this varies by sector from 97% for dairy products to 11% for fruit (Soil
Association 2006, page 49-50).
Figure 1. Simplified knowledge topologies and black boxes for food consumption.
(see attached)
22
grow your own
field
(production)
pick your own
field (production)
buy at a
farm shop
field (production)
buy at a
supermarket
buy produce
that is
independently
certified
consumer
consumer
consumer
shop
factories
(processing)
field (production)
trucks, planes etc.
(transport)
shop
consumer
shop
consumer
factories
(processing)
field (production)
trucks, planes etc.
(transport)
verification by intermediaries