Michael K. Goodman

Shifting plates in the agrifood landscape: the tectonics of alternative agrifood initiatives in California

Alternative food initiatives are appearing in many places. Observers suggest that they share a political agenda: to oppose the structures that coordinate and globalize the current food system and to create alternative systems of food production that are environmentally sustainable, economically viable, and socially just. This paper examines the potential of these initiatives through the lens of the concepts of ‘alternative and oppositional’ social movements and ‘militant particularism and global ambition’ developed by Raymond Williams and David Harvey. The three sections of this paper review (1) the current discussion of common themes and strategies in agrifood initiatives within the academic literature; (2) the history of these initiatives in California; and (3) results of our interviews with 37 current leaders of California organizations. We suggest that further understanding these initiatives, and success in the goals of the initiatives themselves, requires us to look past their similarities to examine their differences. These differences are related to the social forms and relations that have been established in the places from which these initiatives arise. ‘Social justice,’ in particular, may be difficult to construct at a ‘local’ scale. r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

Place geography and the ethics of care: introductory remarks on the geographies of ethics, responsibility and care

In a recent review article, Jeff Popke (2006, p. 510) calls for a ‘more direct engagement with theories of ethics and responsibility’ on the part of human geographers, and for a reinscription of the social as a site of ethics and responsibility. This requires that we also continue to develop ways of thinking through our responsibilities toward unseen others—both unseen neighbours and distant others—and to cultivate a renewed sense of social interconnectedness. Popke suggests that a feminist-inspired ethic of care might be instrumental in developing this expanded, relational and collective vision of the social, which is particularly prescient given the contemporary economic downturn throughout the globe. Thus, as the ‘moral turn’ in geography continues to evolve, this special issue seeks to bring together geographers working within feminist or feminist-inspired frameworks, and with a shared interest in the changing geographies of ethics, responsibility and care. The collection of papers has its origins in conference sessions on Care-full Geographies, organised by the Guest Editors at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in 2007. In this editorial we seek to position the papers within broader debates about care, responsibility and ethics that have emerged in geography and the wider social sciences in recent years, and to highlight the key issues that have framed these debates.

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.

Star/poverty space: the making of the ‘development celebrity’

What is it that gives celebrities the voice and authority to do and say the things they do in the realm of development politics? Asked another way, how is celebrity practised and, simultaneously, how does this praxis make celebrity, personas, politics and, indeed, celebrities themselves? In this article, we explore this ‘celebrity praxis’ through the lens of the creation of the contemporary ‘development celebrity’ in those stars working for development writ large in the so-called Third World. Drawing on work in science studies, material cultures and the growing geo-socio-anthropologies of things, the key to understanding the material practices embedded in and creating development celebrity networks is the multiple and complex circulations of the everyday and bespectacled artefacts of celebrity. Conceptualised as the ‘celebrity–consumption–compassion complex’, the performances of development celebrities are as much about everyday events, materials, technologies, emotions and consumer acts as they are about the mediated and liquidised constructions of the stars who now ‘market’ development. Moreover, this complex is constructed by and constructs what we are calling ‘star/poverty space’ that works to facilitate the ‘expertise’ and ‘authenticity’ and, thus, elevated voice and authority, of development celebrities through poverty tours, photoshoots, textual and visual diaries, websites and tweets. In short, the creation of star/poverty space is performed through a kind of ‘materiality of authenticity’ that is at the centre of the networks of development celebrity. The article concludes with several brief observations about the politics, possibilities and problematics of development celebrities and the star/poverty spaces that they create.

Geographies of food: 'Afters'

This third and final ‘Geographies of food’ review is based on an online blog conversation provoked by the first and second reviews in the series (Cook et al., 2006; 2008a). Authors of the work featured in these reviews — plus others whose work was not but should have been featured — were invited to respond to them, to talk about their own and other people’s work, and to enter into conversations about — and in the process review — other/new work within and beyond what could be called ‘food geographies’. These conversations were coded, edited, arranged, discussed and rearranged to produce a fragmentary, multi-authored text aiming to convey the rich and multi-stranded content, breadth and character of ongoing food studies research within and beyond geography.

Food geographies I Relational foodscapes and the busy-ness of being more-than-food

The study of foodscapes has spread throughout geography at the same time as food scholarship has spearheaded post-disciplinary research. This report argues that geographers have taken to post-disciplinarity to explore the ways that food is ‘more-than-food’ through analyses of the visceral nature of eating and politics and the vital (re)materializations of food’s cultural geographies. Visceral food geographies illuminate what I call the ‘contingent relationalities’ of food in the critical evaluation of the indeterminate, situated politics of ‘feeling food’ and those of the embodied collectivities of obesity. Questions remain, however, about how a visceral framework might be deployed for broader critiques within foodscapes and the study of human geography. The study of food’s vital materialisms opens up investigation into the practices of the ‘makings’ of meat, food waste and eating networks. Analysis of affect, embodiment and cultural practices is central to these theorizations and suggests consideration of the multiple materialisms of food, space and eating. There is, I contend, in the more radical, ‘post-relational’ approaches to food, the need for a note of caution. Exuberant claims for the ontological, vital agency of food should be tempered by, or at least run parallel to, critical questions of the real politik of political and practical agency in light of recent struggles over austerity, food poverty and food justice.

Spectacular Foodscapes: Food Celebrities and the Politics of Lifestyle Mediation in an Age of Inequality

Abstract This editorial introduces a special issue of Food, Culture & Society and works to add a parallel, substantive take on the phenomenon of the food celebrity and the mediated, everyday cultural politics they create. We start by exploring the concept of the foodscape. Specifically, we argue that food celebrities represent a fundamental component of contemporary foodscapes, how they “perform” and function, and the socio-material means by which they are produced. We then explore the key roles and privileges of food celebrity, arguing that the celebrity chef is not the only high-profile, mediating figure at work on the foodscape. Key food celebrity paradoxes are identified and discussed: food celebrities must work to be authentic and aspirational, accessible yet exclusive, responsibilizing but also empowering. We conclude with a short contextualization of the papers in this special issue, and argue for the rich potential of food celebrity scholarship as a way to better understand food inequalities.

Neoliberalism and the problem of space: competing rationalities of governance in fair trade and mainstream agri-environmental networks

Neoliberal political ideologies have been criticised for their blanket prescription of market reform as the solution to almost any social or environmental problem. This chapter thus examines the ability of market-based solutions to deal with the spatial and social diversity that characterises environmental problems in agriculture. In doing so, the chapter draws on case studies of the international fair trade movement and the regionalisation of natural resource management measures in Australia. Both these cases accept the neoliberal view that social and ecological degradation arises from the failure of markets to reflect the full cost of production, and seek, therefore, to achieve social and environmental objectives through the parallel pursuit of economic rationality. In Australia, voluntary planning and educational activities coordinated at a range of scales from the very local to the water catchment, encourage compliance with locally developed management plans and codes of practice that link the expression of private property rights with a ‘duty of care’ to the environment. In the process, landholders are re-defined as prudent and self-reliant businesspeople for whom sustainable resource management is an essential component of financial viability. Fair trade, by contrast, seeks to transfer social and environmental ‘duties of care’ through the entire fair-trade commodity chain. Auditing, certification and the payment of farm-gate price premiums enable Western consumers to become ‘partners’ in the economic and social development of small and marginalised farming communities; guaranteeing that the ‘fair price’ paid for commodities is reflected in the incomes and, importantly, expenditures of the people receiving them. Despite their differences, these cases are allied in their opposition to protectionist trade policies, their commitment to building the viability of farms as productive business units through exposure to ‘the market’, and their appeals to self-responsibility, empowerment and democratisation. And, ultimately, both fail, by themselves, to deal adequately with the spatial and social diversity that underlies agri-environmental processes and problems. Neither approach, it is suggested, should be abandoned. However, complementary processes of fair trade and bioregional planning are required if either are to achieve their maximum impact.

Celebrity Ecologies: Introduction

Out of the efforts of environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to raise their profiles amidst frenetic global mediascapes, the construction of celebrity in a dispersed post-Fordist promotional landscape, the continual mainstreaming of ecological concerns, the commodification of anxiety and the celebritisation of politics, a particular breed of ‘charismatic megafauna’ has emerged, blinking, into the daylight: the ‘environment-saving’ star. It can sometimes seem that every celebrity, from global megastars to Z-listers, is in the business, whether as the face, voice or embodiment of concerns about climate change, clean water, deforestation and over-fishing, of getting us to think, care and do differently in order to ‘save the planet’. Dedicated websites exist to catalogue and share the environmental, charity and humanitarian efforts of celebrities of all stripes. LooktotheStars.com reveals that Greenpeace is supported by 58 different celebrities, and tells us what other causes they are associated with or support (looktothestars.com 2013). Koerner, writing for Ecorazzi.com (which details green celebrity lifestyles), provides an insight into the clothing choices of actress Helen Hunt, who wore a ‘simple navy blue strapless ecofriendly gown designed by H&M’ and the textile recycling NGO Global Green, on the red carpet at the 2013 Oscars. As Koerner states, ‘There’s nothing like taking a risk on one of the biggest red carpets of the year and doing it in an eco-friendly way’ – because, according to Hunt, the combination of celebrity and environmentalism is ‘[W]in, win, win!’ (Koerner 2013). But is the marriage between celebrity and environmental issues always win, win, win? Popular scepticism and some of the research in this issue indicate not. Perhaps we should ask instead: is celebrity – with its individualised mode of power, its concentration of wealth, its imbrication in systemic profit-making – the exact opposite of what biodiversity and the environmental crisis needs: participation, co-operation, regulation against exploitation and systemic political change? There are many persuasive factors that could be mobilised to support this strand of argument. Celebrity tends most often to appear as part of latecapitalist consumer culture, tied to the ideology of economic growth, to be deployed as a resource to sell more and more stuff, with the lives of its D-and Z-list ‘celetoids’ (Rojek 2001) both proliferating and becoming more fleeting, just like the products built around planned obsolescence that they are sometimes paid to promote (Turner 2010).