Recent decades have seen a rapid increase in the rate of conversion from conventional to organic farming, as organic farming shifted from an alternative production approach practiced by a small number of idealists, to the de facto alternative to mainstream conventional production. Although there has been considerable academic debate as to the role of agri-business penetration into the production and marketing chains of organic farming (‘conventionalization’), less is known about how the economic drivers of conventionalization are negotiated into practices at (...) the farm level. Drawing on Bourdieu’s conceptualization of economic and cultural capitals, the direct connection between symbols of ‘good farming’ and the economic requirements of maintaining a viable farming business (i.e., the ‘taste of necessity’) is demonstrated. Findings indicate that conventional and organic farmers in the study sites identified a similar range of cultural symbols, but organic farmers emphasized different symbols within this range. This diversity and selectivity demonstrates the fragmentation and contestation of ideals resulting from economic challenges at the time of the study. Economic capital is important to the decision to consider conversion to organic farming, but formal conversion reflects re-weighting of forms of cultural capital. The author argues that recognition of the impact of economic pressures on conventional farming, which in the study sites often led to reduced input use rather than intensification, is missing from the conventionalization debate. The mainstreaming of organic farming production has presented conventional farmers with a set of alternative or re-weighted symbols and a crucible for reflexive consideration of their own standards and practices of farming. (shrink)

We add a political culture dimension to the debate over the politics of food. Central to food politics is the cultural granting of authenticity, experienced through the conjuring of relational presences of authorship. These presences derive from the faces and the places of relationality, what we term the ghosts of taste, by which food narratives articulate claims of the authorship of food by people and environments, and thus claim of authenticity. In this paper, we trace the often-conflicting presences of authenticating (...) ghosts in food along a prominent axis of current debate: the local versus the global. The three cases outlined here—Greek food, Thousand Island dressing, and wild rice—illustrate the recovery and suppression of the lingering spirits of both local and global faces and places in what we taste, and show the mutually interdependent consequence of culture and economics in food politics. (shrink)

There has been widespread academic and popular debate about the transformative potential of consumption choices, particularly food shopping. While popular food media is optimistic about “shopping for change,” food scholars are more critical, drawing attention to fetishist approaches to “local” or “organic,” and suggesting the need for reflexive engagement with food politics. We argue that reflexivity is central to understanding the potential and limitations of consumer-focused food politics, but argue that this concept is often relatively unspecified. The first objective of (...) this paper is to operationalize reflexivity and advance understanding of reflexivity as an important tool for understanding the lived experience of food shopping. Our second objective is to explore the range of reflexivity observed in a mainstream “shopping for change” market sector. To do this, we draw from in-depth interviews with shoppers at Whole Foods Market (WFM)—a retail venue with the stated goal of making consumers “feel good about where [they] shop.” This group is chosen because of our interest in investigating the reflexivity of consumer engagement with the corporatized arm of ethical consumption—a realm of concern to food scholars as alternative agricultural initiatives are absorbed (both materially and symbolically) into corporate institutions. Our analysis suggests that shopping at venues like WFM is primarily motivated by traditional consumer pleasures, even for politicized consumers, a finding that poses serious limitations for a consumer-regulated food system. (shrink)

There has been widespread academic and popular debate about the transformative potential of consumption choices, particularly food shopping. While popular food media is optimistic about “shopping for change,” food scholars are more critical, drawing attention to fetishist approaches to “local” or “organic,” and suggesting the need for reflexive engagement with food politics. We argue that reflexivity is central to understanding the potential and limitations of consumer-focused food politics, but argue that this concept is often relatively unspecified. The first objective of (...) this paper is to operationalize reflexivity and advance understanding of reflexivity as an important tool for understanding the lived experience of food shopping. Our second objective is to explore the range of reflexivity observed in a mainstream “shopping for change” market sector. To do this, we draw from in-depth interviews with shoppers at Whole Foods Market (WFM)—a retail venue with the stated goal of making consumers “feel good about where [they] shop.” This group is chosen because of our interest in investigating the reflexivity of consumer engagement with the corporatized arm of ethical consumption—a realm of concern to food scholars as alternative agricultural initiatives are absorbed (both materially and symbolically) into corporate institutions. Our analysis suggests that shopping at venues like WFM is primarily motivated by traditional consumer pleasures, even for politicized consumers, a finding that poses serious limitations for a consumer-regulated food system. (shrink)

This research examines the structure and development of the organic sesame network from Burkina Faso to explain the declining trend in organic sesame export. The paper addresses particularly the question whether the organic sesame network is structurally (re)shaped as a conventional mainstream market or whether it still presents a real alternative to conventional sesame production and trade. It is found that over the last decade organic sesame is increasingly incorporated into mainstream market channels. But contrary to the well-known case of (...) conventionalization in California, where organic agriculture grew into mainstream agro-food arrangements, this study illustrates a case where organic sesame agriculture shrank into mainstream agro-food arrangements. The weak coherence between the production and marketing nodes in the organic sesame chain resulted in failures to vertically mediate information, balance power relationships in and across sesame chains, build trust, and limit price volatility and speculation, resulting in a shrinking organic sesame market. For developing a viable alternative to conventional sesame trading, relations between production and trading nodes in the organic networks need to be strengthened through public–private partnerships, combined with other public and legal reinforcement. (shrink)