David Goodman

Knowing food and growing food: Beyond the production–consumption debate in the sociology of agriculture

What does the rise of organic food as a social phenomenon mean politically? What political impact does this form of consumption have on society? Is it a small and unimportant “blip” in the overall march of globalized, industrialized food and rationalized consumption systems. Is it even, perhaps, complicit in this process? Or is it a radical break ? The array of answers to these questions forms the “production–consumption debate” currently taking place in the examination of agro–food systems. If agro–food networks are conceptualized as interactive, socio–ecological metabolic circuits linking agricultural nature, social labor, the corporeal and the symbolic, then this paper argues that analytical concern in agrofood studies has focused overwhelmingly on the production ‘moment’ in these circuits. Despite the lessons of numerous ‘food scares’, anti–GMO movements and the mad cow disease pandemic, an asymmetry now holds sway in agro–food studies between production and consumption even though in other fields, as Jackson (1999) notes, consumption has been “duly acknowledged” (p. 95). As this asymmetry is addressed, a contemporary reformulation of the ‘agrarian question’ might investigate the potential for new forms of progressive food politics, ranging from ‘weak’ struggles over the modes of social orderings, such as knowledge systems, to more formal alliances between producers and consumers

Globalising Food: Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring

In an increasingly global world, societies are being provisioned from a bewildering array of sources as new countries and new food commodities are drawn into international markets. Globalising Food provides an innovative contribution to the area of political economy of agriculture, food and consumption through a revealing investigation of the globalisation and restructuring of localised agricultural sectors and food systems. The book draws on new theoretical perspectives and wide-ranging case studies from Britain, the USA, India, South Africa, New Zealand and Latin America. The key themes addresses range from giant multinational food corporations, rural industrialisation and World Bank policies, to the regulation of pollution, labour relations, urban food politics and environmental sustainability. Globalising Food offers important insights into the problems, consequences and limits of the industrialisation of agriculture and the provisioning of food in a global world as we approach the new millenium.

Agro-food studies in the 'age of ecology' : Nature, corporeality, bio-politics

The theoretical purview and contemporary political relevance of agro-food studies are restricted by their unexamined methodological foundations in modernist ontology. The nature-society dualism at the core of this ontology places agro-food studies, and their ‘parent’ disciplines in the orthodox social sciences, outside the broad intellectual project that is advancing the greening of social theory, and militates against effective engagement with the bio-politics of environmental organizations and Green movements. The disabling consequences of the erasure of nature in agro-food studies are explored by analyzing several recent theoretical perspectives: the consumption ‘turn’ in the work of Fine, Marsden and their respective colleagues, and Wageningen actor-oriented rural sociology. The merits of actor-network theory in resolving these ontological limitations are then considered using brief case-studies of food scares, agri-biotechnologies, and the recent proposals to regulate organic agriculture in the United States.

Alternative food networks: knowledge, practice, and politics

Part 1 1. Introducing Alternative Food Networks, Fair Trade Circuits and The Politics Of Food 2. Coming Home To Eat? Reflexive Localism and Just Food 3. Bridging Production and Consumption: Alternative Food Networks as Shared Knowledge Practice Part 2: Alternative Food Provisioning In Britain And Western Europe: Introduction And Antecedents 4. Rural Europe Redux? The New Territoriality and Rural Development 5. Into the Mainstream: The Politics Of Quality 6. Changing Paradigms? Food Security Debates and Grassroots Food Re-Localization Movements in Britain and Western Europe Part 3: Alternative Food Movements In The US: Formative Years, Mainstreaming, Civic Governance And Knowing Sustainability 7. Broken Promises? US Alternative Food Movements, Origins and Debates 8. Resisting Mainstreaming, Maintaining Alterity 9. Sustainable Agriculture as Knowing and Growing Part 4: Globalizing Alternative Food Movements: The Cultural Material Politics of Fair Trade 10. The Shifting Cultural Politics of Fair Trade: From Transparent to Virtual Livelihoods 11. The Price and Practices of Quality: The Shifting Materialities of Fair Trade Networks 12. The Practices and Politics of a Globalized AFN: Whither the Possibilities and Problematics of Fair Trade? 13. Concluding Thoughts

Reconfiguring the rural or fording the divide?: Capitalist restructuring and the global agro‐food system

Recent analyses of the restructuring of the agro‐food system draw uncritically on the industrial restructuring literature, notably regulation theory and Fordism/post‐Fordism debates on capitalist transition. We question the extension of this periodisation and conceptual framework to the political economy of agrarian restructuring. We also interrogate the theoretical foundations of several related literatures concerned with international food regimes, the ‘new internationalisation’ of agriculture, the repositioning of agriculture‐industry relations, and the reconfiguration of rural space. Our general argument is that the industrial restructuring debates provide an inadequate conceptual architecture for analyses of the dynamics of change in agrarian production structures and rural spatial organisation.

RNA chain growth rates in Escherichia coli

Abstract The rate of RNA chain growth was measured in vivo in Escherichia coli cultures growing in various media at 29 and 37 °C. For this purpose, the bacteria were allowed to assimilate [ 3 H]uracil or [ 3 H]guanine into their RNA for short time-periods. The RNA was then extracted and hydrolyzed with alkali, and the radioactivity measured in the resulting nucleotides and nucleosides. The data thus obtained allowed the calculation of individual nucleotide step-times in RNA chain growth, the step-time for a particular nucleotide being defined as the average time required for adding the next nucleotide to the end of a nascent RNA chain carrying that particular nucleotide as its growing end. In bacteria growing exponentially in a glucose-Casaminoacids medium at 29 °C with 1.07 cell generations per hour, the uridylic acid step-time was estimated to be 42 msec, the cytidylic acid step-time to be at most 67 msec and the guanylic acid step-time to be 20 msec. Assuming an equality of the step-times of guanylic and adenylic acids, the average RNA chain growth rate was estimated to be 26 nucleotides/second at 29 °C. At 37.5 °C both the generation period as well as the nucleotide step-times were found to be 60% of the corresponding values at 29 °C, giving an average RNA chain growth rate of 43 nucleotides/second. The nucleotide step-times in E. coli growing at 29 °C in a succinate medium with 0.63 cell generation per hour and in a proline medium with 0.33 cell generation per hour were found to be longer than the corresponding step-times during the faster growth in glucose-Casaminoacids medium. The increases in nucleotide step-times with increases in the generation period observed here are not nearly great enough, however, to account for the great variations in the rate of RNA synthesis observed under these three different physiological conditions. Thus bacteria appear to adjust their specific content of RNA according to their physiological needs by varying both the rate of RNA chain growth and the number of nascent RNA molecules under synthesis at any time.

Ontology matters : The relational materiality of nature and agro-food studies

This paper examines the question of ontological choice in agro-food studies, and emphasizes that such choices are consequential, determining analytical points of entry, arenas of theory and praxis, and normative positioning. These questions are explored by examining the privileged place of the labour process in the development of agro-food studies and, as a more specific illustration, in analyses of agro-biotechnology. It is suggested that the modernist ontological priorities embedded in the unreconstructed conceptualization of the labour process not only have been ignored but also have found an unexamined place in post-structuralist agrarian political economy. The discussion closes by reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of actor-network theory as an alternative avenue of critical engagement with the ‘new’ bio-politics of agro-food networks.

An improved method of counting radioactive acrylamide gels.

Abstract A new method for counting sliced acrylamide gels is described. The method essentially consists of dissolving the sample at the relatively low temperature of 37° with a mixture of H 2 O 2 and NH 4 OH.

Organic and conventional agriculture: Materializing discourse and agro-ecological managerialism

This introduction situates key themesfound in papers given at a recent workshop on thechanging material practices, meanings, and regulationof US organic food production. The context is theemergence of an international bio-politics ofagriculture and food and, more particularly in the US,the contradictions of sustainable agriculturemovements catalyzed by the rapid scaling up of organicagriculture from a niche activity to nascentindustry.

Sustaining Foods: Organic Consumption and the Socio-Ecological Imaginary

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the symmetrical socio-ecological conceptualizations of sustainable consumption against technocentric and ecocentric approaches, illustrated by minimalist “standards” oriented organic food production and international eco-labeled organic products. This truncated green imaginary encourages niche production for consumers who can afford to pay premium organic prices and are knowledgeable about the health risks of conventionally produced foods. Technocentric green consumerism represents an “inverted quarantine,” permitting privileged bodies to avoid harmful substances that potentially contaminate the metabolic relations of the less fortunate. In risk politics, green consumerism becomes a dimension of technological competition based on market segmentation rather than a societal project that is open to all. The technocentric imaginary is “place-less” since actual production conditions are secondary to the nutritional and symbolic properties of the product at the point of sale and consumption. Sustainable consumption creates an international patchwork of production zones, differentiated by cost-price criteria, and supplying high-income consumers in distant markets. Efforts to link market-based socially progressive forms of organic production with equitable food access for consumers are compromised by dependence on charitable sources of cross-subsidy to offset premium prices. This experience indicates that robust state institutional initiatives are needed to rupture and reconfigure the present market-embedded identity between agro-ecologically sustainable production and the ability to pay to consume sustainably. In market economics, publicly funded programs create the necessary room to develop socio-ecological projects that comprehensively addresses issues of sustainability, social justice, and food poverty at the sites of both production and consumption.