worlds of food place power and provenance in the food chain apr 2008

[...]... more instructive to other regions that are engaged in making this transition Finally, Chapter 7 examines how the three themes of place, power, and provenance play out in the conventional and ecological food systems, blurring the boundaries between them and creating increasingly complex worlds of food 1 Networks, Conventions, and Regions: Theorizing Worlds of Food Introduction Food is a long-standing... particularly inXuential variant has examined the construction of food commodity chains The investigation of commodity chains or networks in the food sector has strong theoretical roots The Wrst examples of agri -food commodity chain analysis appeared during an early round of Marxist theorizing on the sector The political economy of food chains identiWed an increasingly rapid destruction of traditional... of the US and the UK, for example, the key trends include the increasing popularity of convenience foods, the decreasing amount of time devoted to preparing meals, the falling share of money devoted to food in the household budget, the primacy of price when buying food, and, more recently, burgeoning concerns among all classes of consumer about the quality and safety of food Some of these trends appear... require further work: one, the key role that nature plays in the production and consumption of food; two, the activities of political institutions situated at diVering levels of the polity—including regions, nation-states, and international organizations We attempt to integrate these two features into Storper’s general approach in order to conjure up diVering worlds of food The notion of worlds of food that... particularly the emphasis on cheap food on the one hand and the growing demand for healthy food on the other Another example might be the growing interest in local food, which is often equated with fresh and wholesome produce, and ‘global sourcing’, which aims to transcend the constraints of locality and seasonality Conventional food retailers are acutely conscious of the need to accommodate these conXicting... were less interested in the issue of comparative scale and more interested in a pioneering world of food, we decided to sacriWce the former for the sake of the latter What is perhaps most distinctive about California from the perspective of this book is that it is playing a pioneering role in the conventional and the alternative food systems After focusing on the frontier worlds of Tuscany and California,... globalized food products Moreover, these ‘alternative’ food cultures oVer means of resisting the further standardization of food As the Italian Slow Food organisation (www.slowfood.com, accessed 16 May 2005) puts it, industrialization and standardization in the food chain can best be challenged by a rediscovery of the richness and aromas of local cuisines Let us rediscover the Xavours and savours of regional... history of their food As we shall see, the corporate agribusiness sector, particularly in the US, argues that consumers have little or no interest in the place and provenance of their food, whereas consumer, health, and environmental campaigners beg to diVer Far from being an innocent technical arena, then, food labelling policy is a key site of the quality battleground’ in the contemporary food chain. .. anonymity of manufactured products, the legacy of which is a ‘placeless foodscape’ (Ilbery and Kneafsey, 2000: 319) Although it is often conXated with place, provenance has a much wider meaning Its literal meaning—which is the place of origin or the earliest known history of something—is an ambiguous amalgam of the spatial and the social, of geography and history With respect to food, we use the term in the. .. forces promoting globalization interact with natures and cultures that are spatially ‘Wxed’ in some way In the following pages we consider Networks, Conventions, and Regions 9 the ‘Wxity’ of nature and culture and show how the interaction between mobile and Wxed resources underpins the new geography of food Nature Food is necessarily a mix of the organic and the inorganic (Fine, 1994; Fine and Leopold, . and the Transformation of Labour Jim Glassman Industrial Transformation in the Developing World Michael T. Rock and David P. Angel Worlds of Food Place, Power, and Provenance in the Food Chain Kevin. emphasis on cheap food on the one hand and the growing demand for healthy food on the other. Another example might be the growing interest in local food, which is often equated with fresh and wholesome. Data Morgan, Kevin. Worlds of food : place, power, and provenance in the food chain / Kevin Morgan, Terry Marsden, and Jonathan Murdoch. p. cm.—(Oxford geographical and environmental studies) Includes