The Consumption of Food between Risk of Individualism and Political Participation (original) (raw)
Related papers
2014
Nowadays, we all live in a globalised world, a scenery where the control on their own daily experience is getting more and more evanescent. In this variable and dangerous scenery, food is becoming a source of incertitude and danger, too. A lot of people, as consumers, perceive that their relationship of trust with food producers is cracked, so the watchword is now "to distrust". But totally opposite sign processes live alongside these processes and these political fractures. Crisis of politics, meant in the traditional sense, in fact, if one side has alienated many people from political life, it has also changed the forms of participation. In fact, many people have started to vocalize their dissent through channels very different from the traditional ones. Consumption choices are included between them. In this essay we focused our attention on food consumption choices, and specially on biological food consumption, which shows that the relationship between man and environme...
Food in Society: Economy, Culture, Geography, 2001
ISBN 0 340 72003 4 (hbk); 0 340 72004 2 (pbk) http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780340720042/
The green political food consumer
Anthropology of food
This paper reviews the current literature on political and ethical consumers, and relates it to the topic of sustainable food consumption. A first aim is to problematise a somewhat simplistic view of the political and ethical consumer found in the literature. The paper sheds light on some of the dilemmas that confront green political consumers. We indicate that most existing studies say very little about consumers' thoughts, assumptions, and reflections about green consumerism in general, and about green consumerist tools, such as green labels, more specifically. Based on a literature review, we draw a picture of the typical concerned consumer as reflective, uncertain and ambivalent. This is connected to a second aim of the paper: to discuss a gap or mismatch between the production side and consumption side of green (food) labels. We conclude the paper by suggesting that green and ethical information schemes could become much more in line with the reflective nature of green, political consumers. We relate this discussion to concepts such as sub-politics and meta-politics. Le consommateur politique vert-une analyse critique de la recherché et des politiques en cours Cet article dresse un panorama de la littérature actuelle concernant les consommateurs éthiques et militants, en faisant le lien avec le thème d'une consommation alimentaire durable. Un premier objectif est de problématiser la vision quelque peu simpliste que présente la littérature. L'article met en lumière quelques uns des dilemmes auxquels font face les consommateurs militants « verts » en soulignant combien les études existantes disent peu sur les pensées, les certitudes et les réflexions de ces consommateurs quant à la consommation « verte » en général, et sur les outils de consommations tels que les labels bio tout particulièrement. Sur ces bases, nous dessinons le portrait d'un consommateur militant typique, réflexif, indécis et ambivalent. Le deuxième objectif de cet article est de mettre en valeur le fossé creusé entre la production et la consommation en ce qui concerne les labels bio. Nous suggérons en conclusion que les programmes d'informations éthiques et verts devraient être pensés davantage en adéquation avec la nature réflexive des consommateurs verts et militants. Cet article repose sur les concepts de sub-politique et de métapolitique.
The issue of food is indeed a systemic problem involving fundamental aspects of the social, cultural and economic organisation of our planet. This paper focuses on the main aspects related to the concepts of food security and food safety. While the first problem mainly affects less developed countries, the second concerns diet in the developed world. They are influenced by important factors such as the structure of food distribution, the effective access to food resources, the lack of confidence about the safety of the products, and the different consumption behaviours affected by social, economic and religious factors.
How food fears frame criticism of food system.pdf
Studia Humanistyczne AGH, 2018
The article investigates food fears in the context of the everyday food practices of customers of farmers’ markets in Małopolska Voivodeship, Poland. The qualitative analysis of 15 individual in-depth interviews mostly concerns topics of negative evaluation and narratives justifying the exclusion of specific products, food practices and institutions of the food chain. In particular, the study focuses on ways of defining food fears, such as chemicals in food, processed food, suspicious appearance and freshness of products and concerns associated with the place of purchase. An in-depth analysis of these topics reveals broader criticism of the food system within the narratives of the research subjects. This concerns redefinitions of relations between economic order and social institutions, removing particular cultural meaning from it, fragmentation and distancing of the production pro- cess from consumption, a lack of transparency in the food chain, and the associated ignorance. The diagnosis resulting from the interviews is expressed as food fears: it has ramifications connected to the engagement and practices of avoidance or minimisation of food threats and strategies of resistance. The analysis employs Mary Douglas’s structuralist theory of defining through negation and Peter Jackson’s food anxieties theory, as well as concepts of ignorance, distrust and social embeddedness of economic practices. Keywords: food fears, consumption, shopping patterns, farmers’ markets
Food, and the Unsettling of the Human Condition (2017)
Arena Journal, 2017
For all the importance of food, and for all of the theorists, practitioners and activists who have suggested that the planet faces a generalised and interconnected set of food crises, the widely shared popular sense in the global North is one of occasional spiked dismay and relative general comfort. On the one hand, close to home, good food is treated as a personal and individual choice — I/we/they need to eat less sugar and junk food. Beyond a certain moral and to an extent class-driven imperative to ‘make healthy choices’ concerning food with regard to one’s individual nutritional status, the foods one eats and their provenance have in many privileged centres of the North become deeply intertwined with questions of individual and collective identities and, in some instances, politics. On the other hand, in relation to the rest of the world, it is acknowledged episodically that in faraway places there exist zones of food insecurity brought on by droughts, hurricanes, or war. Inevitably such intrusions into the popular Northern consciousness are accompanied by fund-raising drives among aid agencies entrusted with the responsibility of ‘providing food to the poor’. The present article builds on the work of critical and engaged theorists in the task of taking this critique to a food-systems level. Our argument is simple: food is basic to living across all the domains of social life — ecology, economics, politics and culture — and this existential foundation is becoming profoundly unsettled by global capitalism, techno-science and digital mediatism, all intersecting in a world of swirling images, hyperbole and capital.
Proceedings of the XXVII Congress. Uneven processes of Rural Change: On Diversity, Knowledge and Justice, 2017
When it comes to food, the national context of Romania is almost a perfect sum of subsistence and semi-subsistence rural farms owned by families that use family labour based on family values in order to assure auto-consumption and sometimes to start a small, but sustainable business. Basically, this represents the permanence of an immutable pattern that followed the Romanian peasant through the Communist era characterized by forced industrialization and intensive agriculture. In terms of food, this pattern, anchored in profound traditional lifestyles, was defined, above all, by common sense or normal practices and activities. If normal is a difficult to define notion, common sense food-related practices should be the ones that provide the basic elements and functions of aliments: nutritional benefits/ healthiness and sensorial pleasure/ tastefulness. Nowadays, the urban leading role of the food supply chain is played by the supermarket that suffocates local producers and especially peasant non-certified agricultural products. The only products that penetrate the new conventional foodscape are those that comply with established quality schemes that are not easily affordable for the average consumer. Given this, the emergence of alternative food movements seems imminent. But in a country that still retains peasant markets, short food supply chains, the consumption of non-certified and non-labeled ecological agricultural products based on word-of- mouth recommendation or directly from the farm, can we call it “alternative”? The present paper aims to redefine the concept of normal food in the light of Romania’s national context of alternative food movements and practices and focusing on the sector of food service units in Transylvania.
Food, Citizens, and Market. The quest for responsible consuming
Is there a relation between consumer concerns in the food market, consumer behaviour and ideas about the future of agriculture and food production? People express all kinds of concerns on the agricultural system; sometimes these concerns are – partly – translated into consumer behaviour directed at influencing the structure of the agricultural system. Sometimes pressure groups and NGO’s manage consumer behaviour as a political instrument. Animal friendly meat will not be produced if nobody consumes it. Transforming agriculture in a more sustainable direction needs consumer support. But consumers consume very little sustainable and animal friendly products. That is why government officials criticize consumers for their doubled standards: citizens want a change of agriculture while consumers only incidentally buy environmental and animal friendly products. This reproach seems not to be justified. We defend that the notion of responsible consumption should be taken as an ideal. In this notion two aspects of consuming are brought together: in consumption consumers signal a direction and at the same time they support transformation into that direction. Ideals, however, cannot be direct morally binding. They function as a perspective, a framework and if one recognizes an ideal, it is clear that one wants to live up to it. The policy impact of this ideal should be finding ways to stimulate consumers in recognizing this ideal and stimulate that it has a practical impact.