Carol Morris

The local food sector

“Local food” is attracting considerable policy and public interest, but evidence is lacking about the emerging contours of the local food sector. This paper offers a preliminary assessment of the local food sector in the county of Gloucestershire. Based on interviews with farmers and retailers, it investigates the scope of local food production in the county, assesses the nature of the local food chain and considers the potential of local food production and marketing for adding value for the various actors in the chain, from producer to retailer. Questions are raised in the conclusion about the coherence and sustainability of the local food sector in the county given the differences in the ways in which producers and retailers construct “local” and some unintended consequences of the efforts to promote local food.

Product, Process and Place An Examination of Food Marketing and Labelling Schemes in Europe and North America

Considerable academic interest now revolves around the recomposition of specific (or ‘alternative’) food chains based on notions of quality, territory and social embeddedness.A key to such recomposition is the marketing of ‘difference’ through a range of accreditation and labelling schemes. Using examples from Europe and North America, this paper examines how ‘difference’ is constructed by producers and other actors in the food supply chain by combining the attributes of ‘product, process and place’ (PPP) in a range of marketing and labelling schemes. Results indicate that it is possible to identify ‘critical’ and ‘territorial development’ rationales that influence the ways in which the three Ps are combined. An examination of the rationales and practices sustaining such labelling schemes provides insights into some of the opportunities and threats shaping the emergence of new geographies of food production and consumption in Europe and North America.

'Seed to shelf', 'teat to table', 'barley to beer' and 'womb to tomb': discourses of food quality and quality assurance schemes in the UK.

Abstract In the current restructuring of agro-food systems quality is seen as increasingly important and in the United Kingdom this is evidenced by the growth in quality assurance schemes (QAS). The aim of this paper is to critically examine the process of introducing quality through QAS in the UK. This is done by identifying and analysing the key discourses in the farming and food industries surrounding this process. Drawing on Farmers Weekly as a data source, four main discourses are identified and analysed. These are discourses of organisational change within the agro-food chain; discourses surrounding the definition of quality; discourses of farmer acceptance of, and resistance to, QAS; and discourses which construct a particular representation of consumers. The implications of each of these discourses for the development of QAS are also discussed and key issues for further research identified.

Integrated farming systems: the third way for European agriculture?

Abstract The potential contribution of integrated farming systems (IFS) to the development of a more sustainable agriculture has been largely ignored within social science and by policy analysts. The goals of IFS are to sustain agricultural production, maintain farm incomes, safeguard the environment and respond to consumer concerns about food quality issues. IFS can be conceptualised as a `third way’ or middle course for agriculture between conventional and organic farming. This paper describes the origins and basic principles of IFS and positions this distinctive approach to agriculture within the agri-environmental debate. It also explores some of the implications of pursuing this `third way’ for farmers and the institutional and policy frameworks.

Agricultural Turns, Geographical Turns: Retrospect and Prospect.

It is accepted that British rural geography has actively engaged with the ‘cultural turn’, leading to a resurgence of research within the sub-discipline. However, a reading of recent reviews suggests that the cultural turn has largely, if not completely, bypassed those geographers interested in the agricultural sector. Farming centred engagements with notions of culture have been relatively limited compared with those concerned with the non-agricultural aspects of rural space. Indeed, agricultural geography represents something of an awkward case in the context of the disciplinary turn to culture, a situation that demands further exposition. In seeking explanation, it becomes evident that research on the farm sector is more culturally informed than initially appears. This paper argues that there have been both interesting and important engagements between agricultural geography and cultural perspectives over the past decade. The paper elaborates four specific areas of research which provide evidence for concern about the ‘culture’ within agriculture. The future contribution that culturally informed perspectives in geographical research can bring to agricultural issues is outlined by way of conclusion.

Farm Animal Welfare: A New Repertoire of Nature‐Society Relations or Modernism Re‐embedded ?

Within society, farm animal welfare is moving up the policy and moral agenda as many of the industrial processes associated with animal farming are now being called into question. In the academy, there is growing intellectual interest in the relationship of humanity to animality and the porosity or otherwise of the biologically and socially constructed boundaries between them. This paper uses the farm animal welfare debate to explore changes in society animal relations by looking in turn at the farm, at farm animals and at the notion of farm animal welfare itself. The paper explores the paradox that for as long as society eats and kills animals for food, we are necessarily bound up in a persistent modernist and essentialist conceptualisation of animals and nature. However, alternative approaches are investigated as part of what might be described as a more postmodern approach to animalian difference.

Growing Goods: The Market, the State, and Sustainable Food Production

Within Europe and North America the integration of environmental concerns into agriculture has become a domain almost exclusively defined by public policy. In this paper it is contended that we are currently witnessing a new direction in attempts to reconcile agricultural production and environmental protection, in which the market is playing an increasingly important role. The paper takes as its focus the rapidly expanding number of what are termed ‘market-oriented initiatives for environmentally sustainable food production’ (MOIs), in which the incentive for food producers to manage the environment positively comes directly through the market. The number of MOIs, in both Europe and North America, has proliferated recently, although some have been established for many years. However, both older and newer forms of these MOIs appear to be the focus of a new rural development, food quality, and sustainable farming agenda. In an attempt to make a contribution to this emergent debate, this paper sets out to address the extent to which these MOIs are capable of contributing to the development of more environmentally sustainable food production. In this paper we consider the drivers of this new approach, review the various types of MOI that are emerging in both Europe and North America, and examine the different approaches to environmental management that MOIs adopt. The paper also offers a reflection upon the potential contribution of MOIs to the delivery of environmental goods in food production and the implications of this for public sector approaches.

Genetic technologies and the transformation of the geographies of UK livestock agriculture: a research agenda

This paper presents an agenda for research into the geographies of UK livestock agriculture as these are being reconfigured through the increasing intervention of genetic techniques and technologies. After discussing three particular techniques, four areas of research are identified. The first three relate to different spaces and scales at which the effects of genetic techniques can be examined: the animal body and animal-human relationships; the farm and other rural spaces; and the national and international networks of genetic knowledge-practices relating to livestock. The fourth area outlines an agenda for engaging with Foucaults notion of biopower as a possible means of gaining a theoretical purchase on three key issues which span these three scales: knowledge, power and life. In its reflections on the wider implications of the proposed research the paper aims to speak to a number of audiences within and beyond the discipline.

Cultural spaces of climate

Climate change has become a dominant environmental narrative at the start of the twenty first century. The political and media focus on the possible implications of climate change, however, the predominantly scientific discourse in which this is couched, and the increasingly globalscale of climate thinking, have obscured the culturally specific and spatially and temporally distinctive meanings of climate more generally (Ross 1991; Hulme 2008a, b). Climate and its cultural significance have, in effect, become decoupled, and popular conceptualisations and discourses of climate, and its manifestations through local weather, have been replaced by a global, and predominantly scientific, meta-narrative. Moreover, contemporary debates over the ‘imminent’ climate threat obscure a long, complicated history of public engagement in meteorological science and changing ideas about climate. There have been different ideological and symbolic constructions of climate at different points in history and in order to better understand these distinctive meanings, it has been argued that there is a need to reintroduce particularity to the debate (Hulme 2009). Recent geographical scholarship, for example, has called for research that considers the ‘idea’ of climate as a “hybrid phenomenon” which can and should be constructed, not only through the use of meteorological statistics but also “inside the imagination”, through “sensory experiences, mental assimilation, social learning and cultural interpretations” (Hulme et al. 2009: 197), while there is a need to understanding of how different groups of people in different spatial contexts conceptualise and understand climate and its fluctuations (Hassan 2000; Adger 2003). Such work would investigate climate (and weather) as a function of personal memory, experience and intergenerational transfer of ‘climate knowledge’ (Hulme 2009: 330), and by definition, demands a more intimate spatial resolution than global perspectives can offer. Various publications have begun to focus on cultural histories of attitudes toward the weather (Jankovic 2001: Golinski 2007; Boia 2005; Anderson 2005), the myriad ways in which humans have understood the idea of climate across a range of temporal and spatial scales (Fleming et al. 2006), and the genealogy of climate change debates (Fleming 1998). Such approaches are demonstrating the importance of spatially, temporally and culturally Climatic Change (2012) 113:1–4 DOI 10.1007/s10584-012-0416-6

An exploration of the co-production of performance running bodies and natures within "Running Taskscapes"

This article explores the interrelationship between particular “natural” spaces and the production of middle- and long-distance performance running bodies. It argues that running bodies and nature are actively co-produced, thus blurring the commonly made distinction between the “social” and the “natural”. In doing so, the article extends the geography of sports literature by adopting a “post-constructivist” perspective on nature as elucidated in Tim Ingolds concepts of “dwelling” and “taskscape”. This illuminates the (re)production of sporting bodies through the materiality of nature and in turn contributes to research on embodiment within sports studies that highlights the importance of space and the natural environment. The article draws on ethnographic material and textual sources to illuminate the running taskscape associated with the production of performance running bodies and highlights how three forms and functions of nature are co-produced through this mode of dwelling.