Alternative Food Networks and the Labor of Food Provisioning: A Third Shift?

Scholars have increasingly examined the sphere of consumption in alternative food networks (AFNs). However, research has largely overlooked women's experiences as food provisioners. This is problematic, as AFNs prescribe practices that could be expanding women's food provisioning labor. This article addresses this gap in the literature by examining how the physical labor of food provisioning varies for women engaged in AFNs relative to those not engaged in AFNs, and how diverse AFNs as well as socioeconomic status (SES) influence the labor of food provisioning for women engaged in AFNs. Using data from the 2012 Ohio Survey of Food, Agriculture and Environmental Issues, I demonstrate that women engaged in AFNs, relative to women not engaged in AFNs, exert more physical labor in food provisioning, that prioritizing local food systems involves more physical labor than prioritizing organic foods, and that women with lower household incomes who prioritize organic foods exert greater physical labor in food provisioning than women with higher incomes who prioritize organic foods. I conclude by arguing that women who prioritize local food systems are engaging in a third shift and that greater attention should be paid to the role of SES in shaping women's experiences as food provisioners in AFNs.     

Individual consumer food localism: A review anchored in Canadian farmwomen’s reflections

Local food movements have emerged in many parts of Canada to support local farmers, sustain the regional food supply, encourage the consumption of healthier foods, and address environmental concerns associated with conventional agriculture. The implementation of food localism to date, however, has remained primarily the responsibility of consumers. This paper seeks to examine the practical realities of individual consumer localism in order to understand how food localism operates at the household level. Local food scholarship and empirical data from a recent study of Canadian farmwomen’s food provisioning practices are used to assess the feasibility and implications of buy local and eat local messages for consumers. In particular, physical access to local food markets, financial constraints to buying local and food self-provisioning, and (gendered) labor requirements are examined in detail. Findings suggest that encouragement by local food advocates to ‘buy local’ and ‘grow food’ are not simple transactions for households; rather, such practices must be considered within the broader food provisioning context and the structural constraints therein. Although well-intentioned, these urgings delegitimize real constraints that exist for many individuals and households, in particular those outside of well-serviced urban areas, those who are food insecure, and those without the necessary resources (time, labor, skill, and expertise) to engage in local food provisioning. The ability of consumers to engage in individual localism will be limited as long as the broader context in which food provisioning activities are undertaken is ignored.     

Gender,class and rurality: Australian case studies

The interrelationship between gender and class in rural spaces has received little attention. While rural scholars have focused on the implications for class from processes of gentrification and agricultural and rural restructuring, these analyses have remained largely ungendered. Similarly, feminist rural studies have rarely explored subjectivity as gendered and classed. This paper contributes to rural theories of class and gender by drawing on the work of contemporary feminist class theorists to explore class as gendered and inscribed through personal memory, community narrative and through everyday values and interactions associated with work, leisure and family. To explore intersections of gender, class and rurality, the article draws on data from interviews from two separate Australian studies of farming families. Narratives highlighted the ambiguity of class, the gendered and classed nature of voluntary organisations in rural spaces, and moral values and signifiers associated with what it is to be a ‘good’ farmer and a ‘good’ community member. The data indicate how values of moral worth are gendered and classed and inscribed on farming women and men. This qualitative examination of gender and class in rural spaces draws attention to class as being more than a ranking on an occupational scale, property ownership or degrees of engagement in consumption. Rather, it reveals class as emotionally inscribed in ways that are gendered, economic and moral, and represented through symbolic signifiers and cultural narratives.     

Food Self‐provisioning in Europe: An Exploration of Sociodemographic Factors in Five Regions

This article presents the results of an international comparative study on food self‐provisioning, an activity still widespread in the countries of the Global North. We collected the data in a sociological survey done in 2010 as a part of the household energy use research project GILDED. We selected a region with urban and rural areas as a case study in each of the five EU countries, including Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. Our article raises two main research questions: (1) What is the level of food self‐provisioning in the regions? (2) Who participates in it? Additionally, we inquired into the motivations of self‐provisioners using the results of analyses of sociodemographic and food consumption habits for their interpretation. We found that the level of self‐provisioning varies considerably among the regions. Its share ranges from 13 percent in Dutch urban areas to 58 percent in German rural areas. The effects of some sociodemographic and geographic factors differ significantly among the countries. However, we can summarize that living in one's own property, living in a house or in a rural area, having a partner or children, being retired, or having a low income increases the probability of food self‐provisioning.     

Ecological embeddedness: An interrogation and refinement of the concept within the context of alternative food networks in the UK

Among their many ‘alternative’ characteristics, food networks that seek to reconfigure the relationship between producers and consumers are understood as having the potential to be beneficial for the rural environment and landscape. One of the ways in which this characteristic has been conceptualised is through the notion of ‘ecological embeddedness’. Although the roots of this concept lie in economic sociology, where the social embeddedness of economic relations has been the focus of interest, agro-food researchers have extended its meaning to suggest that alternative or ‘quality’ food production can also be seen as increasingly embedded in ‘natural’ or ecological processes. However, this paper argues that until now the notion of ecological embeddedness has lacked conceptual clarity. As such, the aim is to interrogate and refine the concept of embeddedness, specifically as it pertains to ecologies within the context of food production on-farm. Ecological embeddedness, it is argued, must encompass more than just recognition of the general influence of the natural environment on economic activity. Specifically, it must reflect a change in the relations between economic actors and the natural environment that produces a benefit to both. The paper also establishes how the concept of ecological embeddedness might be operationalised in research practice as a means of exploring the ecological dimensions of alternative food networks. An illustration of this empirical application is provided. The paper concludes by asserting the value of ecological embeddedness as a concept, in spite of the observed limitations of embeddedness in other contexts and the challenges that are associated with its ecological application.     

Being close: The quality of social relationships in a local organic cereal and bread network in Lower Austria

Experience of the drawbacks of a globalised and industrialised food system has generated interest in localised food systems. Local food networks are regarded as more sustainable food provision systems since they are assumed to have high levels of social embeddedness and relations of regard. This paper explores the social relations between food actors and how ‘local’ and ‘organic’ are expressed by detailing how actors describe qualities of their intra-network relationships, how they understand ‘local’ and how they are connected within the food system. A study from the province of Lower Austria in Austria, where organic cereals and bread are produced and marketed, serves to illuminate these issues. Actors agreed that geographical closeness contributed to the social closeness they experienced and that social relationships were a strong reason for being in the network. However, the meaning of ‘local’ was elastic depending on where inputs and consumers could be found. Furthermore, despite strong commitment to organic production methods and the local market, actors faced constraints that made them hybrids between organic and conventional, and between locally focused and globally dependent. Thus, the binary thinking along the local-global and organic-conventional divide does not hold. While it is important to not make a causal link between high quality of social relationships and local food networks, the case described here indicates the possibility of such a link.     

Relational responsibilities in responsive evaluation

This article explores how we can enhance our understanding of the moral responsibilities in daily, plural practices of responsive evaluation. It introduces an interpretive framework for understanding the moral aspects of evaluation practice. The framework supports responsive evaluators to better understand and handle their moral responsibilities. A case is introduced to illustrate our argument.Responsive evaluation contributes to the design and implementation of policy by working with stakeholders and coordinating the evaluation process as a relationally responsible practice. Responsive evaluation entails a democratic process in which the evaluator fosters and enters a partnership with stakeholders. The responsibilities of an evaluator generally involve issues such as ‘confidentiality’, ‘accountability’ and ‘privacy’. The responsive evaluator has specific responsibilities, for example to include stakeholders and vulnerable groups and to foster an ongoing dialogue. In addition, responsive evaluation involves a relational responsibility, which becomes present in daily situations in which stakeholders express expectations and voice demands. In our everyday work as evaluators, it is difficult to respond to all these demands at the same time. In addition, this article demonstrates that novice evaluators experience challenges concerning over- and underidenfitication with stakeholders. Guidelines and quality criteria on how to act are helpful, but need interpretation and application to the unique situation at hand.     

Putting place on the menu: The negotiation of locality in UK food tourism,from production to consumption

This paper uses a case study of tourism in the Lake District and Exmoor to explore the relationship between ‘local food’ and sustainable rural tourism in the UK. Drawing on qualitative interviews with tourists, food producers and café, pub and restaurant owners, I use an approach based upon the commodity chain to trace the shifts in the discursive and material understandings of the ‘local’ that take place throughout the tourist food chain. These shifts are shown to occur in response to the need to negotiate the tensions between the ideals and the practicalities of food production and consumption which occur as a result of the relationships that exist throughout the food chain. Such conclusions are shown to be important for our understanding of the links between ‘local food’ and sustainable rural tourism because they indicate that we must attend to the values, as well as the practicalities, that drive the contemporary food sector at all stages of the food chain, from production to consumption.     

The political economy of alternative trade: Social and environmental certification in the South African wine industry

Despite recent critical analyses of the nature and impacts of social and environmental certification, the increasingly complex landscape of voluntary, industry and third-party codes and certification processes that have emerged in specific sectors is poorly understood. In particular, little is known about the potential threats posed by an increasingly complex and contested ‘ethical’ landscape in undermining radical initiatives designed to bring about improvements to material and social well-being. In response, this paper explores the current dynamics of social and environmental certification in the South African wine industry. Drawing on fieldwork in the UK and Western Cape, the paper analyses the overlapping and sometimes conflictual processes of social and environmental certification, and the role of key drivers in establishing them within the wine industry. It explores whether attempts to capture a portion of the expanding market for ‘ethical’ wines and the expansion of corporate interests in ‘responsibility’ and ‘ethics’ work to depoliticize the meaning and nature of transformation. The implications of the findings are that, in the absence of legislative requirements to transform the wine industry, social codes and civic conventions are likely to remain significant, but that greater understanding is required of the different meanings and outcomes of transformation and empowerment being deployed within the industry. The paper concludes that a significant problem facing transformation and alternative trade in the wine industry, and more broadly, lies in the growing gap between the abstract ethical discourse of corporate actors, on the one hand, and the moral experience of workers on the other.     

Consuming conventions: sustainable consumption, ecological citizenship and the worlds of worth

In light of the recognition that current patterns of consumption in the developed world are environmentally damaging, the question of sustainable consumption has become increasingly prominent in public and policy discourse. This paper joins an emerging body of work that critiques the behaviorist perspectives that currently dominate the field and specifically, a case is made for using conventions theory (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991) to complement the ‘social practices’ approach to consumption, sustainability and everyday life. Drawing on a qualitative study of persons who identified themselves as attempting to live in ways that are environmentally more friendly, the analysis first explores the ways in which sustainable consumption intersects and overlaps with other practices and imperatives. Attention is paid to the competing demands of day to day living and the ways in which cultural conventions work - or not - to legitimate practices of sustainable consumption. The second part of the analysis discusses the citizenship relations that are articulated through practices of sustainable consumption and here, attention is paid to the conventions that underpin the imperative to reduce the environmental impacts of personal consumption. Taken together, I consider the possibility that environmental conventions might be emerging from the empirical material alongside the ways in which these might operate in support of sustainable consumption. To conclude I suggest that the experiments in practice encountered here are unlikely to generate the conventions through which sustainable forms of consumption can be normalized and integrated into everyday lives.     

Beyond bifurcation: Examining the conventions of organic agriculture in New Zealand

The last 10 years have witnessed numerous attempts to evaluate the merits of new theoretical approaches – ranging from Actor Network Theory to ‘post-structural’ Political Economy and inhabiting a ‘post-Political Economy’ theoretical space – to the explanation of global agricultural change. This article examines Convention Theory (CT) as one such alternative approach, assessing its potential in the context of ongoing change within commercial organic agriculture in New Zealand. More specifically, CT is used to expose the insufficiency of recent ideas of conventionalisation and bifurcation, both reflecting more traditional Political Economic approaches, as explanatory concepts for the emerging condition of the New Zealand organic sector. In this paper, the concept of worlds of justification as developed in CT is utilised to address the emerging complexity of organic production. While farmers supplying a more diversified domestic market can be distinguished from those supplying export markets, an exclusive focus on such distinctions ignores the influential role of extra-economic factors on the viability of organic production systems. Thus, in addition to what are classified as market and industrial worlds in CT, the paper addresses aspects of civic, green, domestic, inspired and renown worlds. Producers' selections of organic certification organisations are used to demonstrate the interaction of these worlds in the development of the organic sector in New Zealand. The article concludes with the imperative to move ‘beyond bifurcation’ and acknowledge the greater complexity of negotiated outcomes that might be achieved from a CT perspective than from existing political economy-derived models like conventionalisation and bifurcation.     

Foodwork as re-articulation of women's in/visible work: A study of food allergy blogs

This paper advances our understanding of foodwork as the organization of women's work and racialized, gendered, and classed inequalities in the provisioning, preparation, and consumption of food. Drawing on notions of the in/visibility of women's work, I conceptualize foodwork as the articulation of visible and invisible women's work in the social organization of everyday food practices. The analysis of three blogs, written by women with, or mothers of children with, food allergies, provides a glimpse into the everyday living with food allergy. The investigation of the actual practices of allergy foodwork shows that they are interactive and intersectional patterns of work and make everyday life possible. The paper maps directions for research to explore how foodwork could be organized differently starting from the transformative potential of everyday food practices, blogs, and food allergy.     

Understanding and (dis)trusting food assurance schemes: Consumer confidence and the ‘knowledge fix’

This paper uses evidence from focus groups with consumers in England to consider how consumers understand and evaluate a range of proxies or intermediary organisations that offer assurance about food and consumer products, particularly voluntary certification schemes. This addresses the current concern in developed economies about providing information in order to reconnect consumers with food producers and to support moves towards more local, fairly traded and sustainable production. However, we show that such a ‘knowledge fix’ approach of providing information may not reconnect consumers so easily. Participants found it particularly difficult to work out what certification involved and what kinds of organisations were providing assurance. They built vernacular typologies and comparative judgements that did not necessarily identify or prioritise ‘independent’ third-party certification as the gold standard, not least because of the practical difficulties of monitoring complex supply chains, and expressed confusion and scepticism about how well food assurance schemes could work in practice. Our results therefore problematise the knowledge fix urged in the literature and emphasise instead the need to better understand how consumers make sense of assurance information in different contexts.     

After the ‘Organic Industrial Complex’: An ontological expedition through commercial organic agriculture in New Zealand

This article uses the evolving understandings of commercial organic agriculture within two research programmes in New Zealand to address three problematic claims and associated framings that have underpinned analysis of the political economy of commercial organic agriculture. These three framings are: 1) that recent commercial developments in organic agriculture have become organised around a grand binary of large-scale, corporate, industrialised organic agriculture that is inhabited by pragmatic newcomers to the industry, against a small-scale, local, authentic remnant of the original organic social movement. This grand binary is most popularly recognisable in the claim by author Michael Pollan of the existence of an ‘Organic Industrial Complex’ that is slowly subsuming authentic organic agriculture. This relates to claim 2) that commercialisation creates inevitable pressures by which organic agriculture becomes ‘conventionalised’. Finally, claim 3) positions organic agriculture alone as the only option for enabling improved environmental outcomes in agriculture. The Greening Food and ARGOS research programmes in New Zealand have studied the emergence of commercial forms of organic and other ‘sustainable’ agriculture in the period since 1995. A series of key engagements are highlighted in the unfolding history of these two programmes which demonstrate moments of transition in understandings of commercial organic, particularly in relation to situations of engagements between the research team and wider actors in the organic sector. These key engagements establish a clear sense in which the three major framings around the political economy of organic commercialisation could not explain the unfolding dynamics of the New Zealand organic sector. Rather, engagement with diverse actors enabled a whole new set of theoretical questions that opened up new areas of politics, contestation and elaboration of commercial forms of organic agriculture – particularly around shifts in power to the retail end of the agri-food chain, around new forms of agri-food governance, and around the politics of new audit systems. Within these shifts, the ontology of some of the researchers within these projects underwent parallel transformation. These transformative influences operated in two simultaneous directions. While the engaged research strategy of the two programmes clearly discomforted the researchers’ underlying assumptions for framing the major trajectories of commercial organic development, the presence of the two research programmes also had an important enactive power in the sector by both rendering ‘thinkable’ particular trajectories and economic experiments and also by reinforcing a ‘metric-centric’ tendency in the evolution of global environmental audit systems. Seen in this light, these engagements open up new questions about the research programmes themselves in terms of the emerging politics of what Philip Lowe describes as a more ‘enactive’ rural sociology and help direct attention to an emerging ‘ontological turn’ in the practice and politics of research.     

Neighborhood poverty and children's food insecurity

Food insecurity among children and their families negatively affects children's health and well-being. While the link between household resources and food insecurity is well-established, family income alone does not explain food insecurity; neighborhood disadvantage, shown to affect other areas of children's development, may also play a role in food insecurity. This study examines associations between neighborhood poverty and children's food insecurity, and whether family characteristics account for identified associations. We merge data on kindergarten-age children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten 2010–11 Cohort (ECLS-K:2011) with data on poverty rates from the American Community Survey (ACS) and on food access from the USDA's Food Environment Atlas using children's residential census tracts (N = 12.550 children in 3750 tracts). Using a series of multilevel models, we test for associations between neighborhood poverty, household economic, demographic, and parenting characteristics, and food insecurity at the child, adult, and household levels. Children living in higher-poverty neighborhoods are more likely to experience food insecurity than those in lower-poverty neighborhoods. Associations between neighborhood poverty and household- and adult-level food insecurity disappear when household characteristics are controlled. However, living in a very high poverty neighborhood remains predictive of child-level food insecurity, which may be an indicator of severe hardship. Findings indicate that neighborhood poverty may be a useful proxy to identify vulnerable children.     

Understanding the concept of food sovereignty using the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP)

This article deepens the understanding of the emerging food sovereignty concept using a case study of a home-grown school feeding programme that promotes local food demand – supply linkages. A school feeding programme in four selected districts in Ghana is analysed with respect to community involvement in programme implementation and management as well as its socio-economic impacts. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches was used in data collection and analysis. Results showed a significant improvement in household food access and months of adequate household food provisioning, which were used as measurement proxies for food sovereignty, as a result of access to local market created by the Ghana School Feeding Programme. However, the study recommends more empirical evidence from research to support the claim that using locally produced food for school feeding actually reduces poverty and malnutrition in rural farming communities.     

Relational rurals: Some thoughts on relating things and theory in rural studies

This paper considers how shifts within the social sciences towards conceptualising spatiality in relational terms have unfolded in rural studies in particular ways over the past decade or so. A period in which networks, connections, flows and mobility have all established themselves as compelling conceptual frames for research, the rural has increasingly been recast in relational terms as a multi-authored and multi-faceted space, constituted through local-global interconnections and their place specific, sometimes contested, manifestations. In this way, the multiple meanings of the rural continues to be a focus of critical concern, as are the implications ‘of’ and ‘in’ rural spaces for some of the major issues currently being faced by governments and citizens around the world; including climate change and food security. Apprehending the complexity of the rural in these terms, we argue, requires not only thinking space relationally, but at the same time being epistemologically relational or theoretically pluralist. That is, recognising the co-constituent production of rural space through material and discursive phenomenon, processes and practices, and thus the value of existing theoretical resources (social constructionism, political and economic materialism) in relation with the critical and rigorous appraisal of ‘new’ concepts and ideas to better comprehend rural space in its multidimensional complexity and particularity. To this end, we identify Cindi Katz's notion of ‘countertopography’ as a promising conceptual and methodological addition to the rural scholar's toolkit insofar as it attends to a politics of location and differentation in relation to global processes. We conclude our discussion by sketching out possible objects of countertopographical analysis for understanding ongoing processes of change in rural space(s).     

Of organic farmers and ‘good farmers’: Changing habitus in rural England

In recent years, numerous studies have identified the importance of cultural constructions of ‘good farming’ to farming practice. In this paper, we develop the 'good farming' construct through an empirical study of organic and conventional farmers, focussing on how change occurs. Drawing on Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital, habitus and fields, we argue that the dynamics of the ‘rules of the game’ in the agricultural field have simultaneously led to a broadening of the ‘good farming’ ideal, and to a fragmentation, whereby individual farmers prioritise a subset of this broad range. We demonstrate that gradual devaluation of existing ways to achieve cultural capital is essential to the development of new symbolic values. In line with this, we offer a critique of the implied static nature of cultural capital in the studies of farmer responses to agri-environmental schemes. We also point out that the alterations in perception and practices of farmers who converted to organic farming for 'pragmatic' reasons may be greater than sometimes implied.     

The voice of troubled youth: Children's and adolescents' ideas on helpful elements of care

This article presents the findings of a qualitative study in a Flemish centre for children and adolescents with emotional and behavioural disorders. The aim of this study was twofold. First, we wanted to examine how youth reflect on their own behaviour and that of their peers'. Secondly, we wanted to know what, according to the youth, are the most significant helpful elements of treatment. Analysis shows a continuum of negative behaviour, ranging from relatively ‘normal’ disruptive behaviour such as arguing, up to serious disruptive behaviour such as physical aggression. This behaviour has a negative influence on the climate of the organization. ‘Availability of staff’, ‘nearness of staff’, ‘a clear set of rules and boundaries’, and ‘some time on my own/some alone time’ are perceived as helpful elements of treatment. ‘Strictness’, ‘not listening’, and ‘inappropriate staff attitudes and interventions’ are perceived as counterproductive elements of treatment. Results are discussed and recommendations both on the orthopedagogical as well as on the scientific level are formulated.     

Text,competence and logic: An exercise

Professional medical practice, like other organizational conduct, relies upon records which document transactions between members and their clientele. Medical practitioners employ a set of conventions providing for the systematic recording and interpretation of medical record cards that forms a social organization underlying the records cards' ordinary usage. In this paper we examine these conventions and develop a computer program which captures elements of their structure and use. By doing so we illustrate one way in which sociological analysis can contribute to the design of intelligent systems. We also suggest that the emerging discipline of Artificial Intelligence might find recent developments in sociology pertinent to its concerns.