Susanne Freidberg

The Ethical Complex of Corporate Food Power

In this paper I explore how nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the popular media in Britain have been able to pressure Britains top supermarkets to undertake ‘ethical’ reforms of their global supply chains. I argue that, although the ‘ethical complex’ of British supermarkets is the product of unique historical and geographic circumstances, it also testifies to the capacity of agro-food activists to amplify their influence through the popular media. More broadly, it complicates assumptions about the demise of the Habermasian ‘public sphere’ at a time when massive corporations control both the media and the food supply. Three case studies of NGO campaigns illustrate this point. At the same time, however, they point to tensions between the international scope of certain NGO campaigns for supermarket ‘ethical reform’ and the more localized concerns of their constituencies.

Culture, conventions and colonial constructs of rurality in south–north horticultural trades

Abstract This paper draws on comparative social history and convention theory to examine current transformations in the contemporary “Anglophone” and “Francophone” fresh vegetable trades between Africa and Europe. In the 1990s both British and later French supermarkets adopted codes defining standards of food safety, agricultural best practice and, in the UK, “ethical trade.” As conventions, these standards represent corporate efforts not only to assure but also profit from an increasingly comprehensive notion of food quality. These standards also promise to drive changes in retailers’ international fresh produce supply chains, but not uniformly. Comparative historical analysis of French and English conventions, as they apply to African fresh produce commodity chains, provides insight into the interplay between place, culture, and national and international political economies.

Gardening on the Edge: The Social Conditions of Unsustainability on an African Urban Periphery

Political ecology has done much to disassemble the dominant narratives used to define, explain, and manage environmental degradation in Africa. However, it has not seriously challenged a core assumption of these narratives: that the “natural” environment (that is, the environment containing natural resources) is the rural. This article argues for a critical analysis of human-environment relations in and around Africa’s cities, not simply because environmental problems in these areas have been for too long neglected. Such an inquiry also offers insights into the dynamic relationship between local ecological and economic change and the geographically and historically constructed social institutions governing daily production, exchange, and decision making processes. Drawing on research conducted in two market gardening villages outside of Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, the article examines how a combination of economic austerity and certain kinds of natural resource deterioration have transformed both the meanings and practices of daily work, thereby undermining potentially useful relations of collaboration and trust, both within and beyond the village. More broadly, this article argues that any analysis of how people cope with increasingly difficult material conditions in Africa’s peri-urban areas must consider how local social institutions have been shaped by a history of close urban contact.

On the trail of the global green bean: methodological considerations in multi‐site ethnography

The need to demystify and ‘ground’ globalization has spurred many calls for multi-site fieldwork. This article discusses how such fieldwork was used to examine the contemporary restructuring of fresh food commodity chains between Africa and Europe, at a time of increasing European concerns about food safety and quality. Drawing on convention theory and actor-network theory for conceptual guidance, qualitative fieldwork was conducted at sites of production, import and export in ‘anglophone’ (Zambia–London) and ‘francophone’ (Burkina Faso–Paris) commodity chains. The article also discusses the challenges posed by multi-site research, especially in realms where secrecy and deception are standard tools of the trade.

Editorial Not all sweetness and light: New cultural geographies of food

In the increasingly crowded world of celebrity chefs, Anthony Bourdain has hit upon a winning formula. Whereas Britain’s Nigella Lawson and Jamie ‘Naked Chef’ Oliver have cornered the cooking-as-sexy-and-fun market in cookbooks and TV shows, Bourdain’s writing is all about food as death-defying adventure. First came Kitchen Confidential, a career memoir that Bourdain admits will leave readers believing ‘that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths’. Then came A Cook’s Tour: The Search for the Perfect Meal, for which Bourdain, accompanied by a 24/7 camera crew (the tour also appeared on the Food Network), braved landmines in Cambodia, poisonous blowfish in Japan, and vegan potlucks in Berkeley. Barely a year later, as this issue of Social & Cultural Geography went to press, Bourdain prepared to release a variation on the same theme, or at least the same name: A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines. If this latest title intends to tap into the contemporary fascination with extremes and extremism of all kinds, the content of at least the first Cook’s Tour appeals to the more enduring appetite for food stories: that is, stories about eating something somewhere that are really stories about the place and the people there. What distinguishes Bourdain’s stories from, say, A Year in Provence or the film Chocolat (southern France figures prominently in this genre), is that he not only travels across many borders but also into places where cuisine and the rest of life are not such neat metaphors for one another. In one chapter, Bourdain’s visit to the hometown of the cooks in his ‘French’ restaurant takes him to (surprise!) Puebla, Mexico; in another, the quest for culinary perfection in Saigon seems suddenly obscene and meaningless after an encounter with a Vietnamese land mine victim. All the articles in this section are concerned with the not-so-neat kind of food stories. They are particularly interested in the relationships and contrasts between particular foods’ unrecorded ‘social lives’ (Appadurai 1986)— that is, the empirical conditions and relations of production, distribution and consumption— and the narratives told about them. Some such narratives are explicitly produced for public consumption, in the form of advertising or other forms of publicity (as we see in Domosh’s ‘Pickles and Purity’ and Hollander’s ‘Re-

From behind the curtain: talking about values in LCA

PurposePractitioners of life cycle assessment (LCA) acknowledge that more input from social scientists can help advance the cause of life cycle management (LCM). This commentary offers a social science perspective on a long-running question within LCA, namely, how the field should manage not only stakeholders’ values but also those of practitioners themselves.MethodsMore than 60 interviews were conducted with LCA practitioners and their industry clients. Qualitative data were also collected through participant observation at several LCA and LCM conferences, a study of the field’s history, and extensive content and discourse analysis of LCA publications and online forums.Results and discussionResults show that LCA practitioners’ values are informed partly by the knowledge acquired through their LCA work. At the same time, LCA standards and professional norms implicitly advise practitioners to keep those values out of their work as much as possible, so as not to compromise its apparent objectivity. By contrast, many social scientists contend openly that value-based judgments, based on “situated knowledge,” can actually enhance the rigor, accountability, and credibility of scientific assessments.ConclusionsLCA practitioners’ own situated knowledge justifies not only the value choices required by LCA but also their evaluative judgments of contemporary life cycle-based sustainability initiatives. This more critical voice could advance the goals of LCM while also boosting the credibility of LCA more generally.

It's Complicated: Corporate Sustainability and the Uneasiness of Life Cycle Assessment

Abstract Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a technique and field of expertise aimed at modeling the complete ‘cradle-to-grave’ life of goods and services, as well as their multiple impacts on environmental and human well-being. Although not new, in recent years LCA has become a central tool in corporate and government initiatives to improve overall product sustainability. These initiatives show how corporate supply chains have become increasingly important sites and objects of knowledge production. But the production process is not straightforward. LCA practitioners must navigate complicated relationships with corporations that serve as both clients and sources of vital information. The challenges of generating knowledge deemed both credible and useful are compounded by the complexity, diversity and contingency of product life cycles, as well as by ongoing debates about exactly how product sustainability should be modeled and assessed. While some of these challenges are unique to LCA, others reflect tensions common to many fields that assess corporate conduct in order to improve it.

Big Food and Little Data: The Slow Harvest of Corporate Food Supply Chain Sustainability Initiatives

Over the past several years, many of the companies collectively known as Big Food have launched ambitious programs to assess and improve the sustainability of their raw material supply chains. Fueled partly by concerns about the risks posed by climate change and other environmental problems, these efforts differ from earlier corporate food supply chain governance in that they rely more on metrics of continuous improvement than compliance with standards. They also extend beyond high-value, high-profile products to include staple ingredients such as corn and soy. These commodities are sourced through long, complex, and traditionally nontransparent supply chains, where even the biggest food companies exercise surprisingly little clout over producers. This article examines how companies contend with this problem both within their own supply chains and as members of multistakeholder initiatives. The assemblage concept not only describes the many actors, technologies, and practices now working to get certain kinds of data flowing off farms; it also highlights the relational nature of this work and the uncertainty of its outcomes. More broadly, the article points to the limits of both corporate food power and the very notion of Big Food as an explanation for how that power is wielded.

Moral economies and the cold chain

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the spread of what we now know as the cold chain sparked controversy in both Europe and North America. This article examines popular distrust of early refrigerated transport and storage in light of larger debates about how best to procure good food at a fair price. Expanding on E. P. Thompsons concept of moral economy, the article shows that refrigeration proved controversial not simply because it helped de-localize and industrialize food supply. It also challenged norms that had previously governed trade in perishables, especially those concerning transparency, naturalness and freshness.

Trading in the secretive commodity

Abstract Over the past century and a half, a handful of transnational corporations have built fortunes trading commodity crops such as corn, soy and wheat. Graded and standardized, these commodities are considered uniform and therefore fungible; information about their origins need not accompany them to market. But in recent years major food brands, as part of broader ‘sustainable sourcing’ commitments, have begun to ask about the places and practices that produce these crops. Their inquiries have exposed the limits of the commodity traders’ supposedly unrivalled market intelligence. They also raise questions about how the advent of agricultural grades and standards made knowledge of crop origins seem unnecessary in certain commodity supply chains, and about how those supply chains might henceforth change, now that lack of such knowledge has become a liability.