Food stories: Consumption in an age of anxiety

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 147-165

  Jackson, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Anxiety; Cultural geography; Food; Life histories; Moral economy

Indexed keywords

CONSUMPTION BEHAVIOR; CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY; FOOD INDUSTRY; FOOD SECURITY; FOOD SUPPLY; LIFE HISTORY; MORALITY; POLITICS;

EID: 77951189926     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474474010363844     Document Type: Article

References (87)

1. Peter Jackson, Maps of meaning (London, Unwin Hyman, 1989, later republished by Routledge).
2. Ibid., p. xi.
3. There is a similar definition in the paper I co-authored with the late Denis Cosgrove two years earlier: 'If we were to define this "new" cultural geography it would be contemporary as well as historical (but always contextual and theoretically informed); social as well as spatial (but not confined exclusively to narrowly-defined landscape issues); urban as well as rural; and interested in the contingent nature of culture, in dominant ideologies and in forms of resistance to them'. Denis Cosgrove and Peter Jackson,
4. 'New directions in cultural geography', Area 19 (1987), pp. 95-101.
5. The quotation is from p. 95.
6. Jackson, Maps of meaning, p. ix.
7. Don Mitchell subsequently criticized this definition of culture as an arena or domain, arguing that these metaphors involved a reification of culture: 'There's no such thing as culture: towards a reconceptualization of the idea of culture in geography', Transactions IBG 20 (1995), pp. 102-16.
8. Jackson, Maps of meaning, p. 4.
9. Ibid., p. xi.
10. Stuart Hall and Jeff Henderson, eds, Resistance through rituals (London, Hutchinson, 1976), p. 10.
11. I am grateful to Jonathan Everts for alerting me to this neglected aspect of Geertz's work and for commenting on an earlier draft of this paper.
12. Clifford Geertz, The interpretation of cultures (New York, Basic Books, 1973). The quotation is from p. 30.
13. My editorial on this subject generated a number of critical responses: Peter Jackson, 'Re-materializing social and cultural geography', Social and cultural geography 1 (2000), pp. 9-14.
14. See, for example, Matthew Kearnes, 'Geographies that matter: the rhetorical deployment of physicality?', Social and cultural geography 4 (2003), pp. 139-52.
15. and Ben Anderson and John Wylie, 'On geography and materiality', Environment and planning A 41 (2009), pp. 318-35.
16. Margaret FitzSimmons, 'The matter of nature', Antipode 21 (1989), pp. 106-20.
17. Daniel Miller, Peter Jackson, Nigel Thrift, Beverley Holbrook and Michael Rowlands, Shopping, place and identity (London, Routledge, 1998).
18. Philip Crang, Peter Jackson and Claire Dwyer, 'Transnationalism and the spaces of commodity culture', Progress in human geography 27 (2003), pp. 438-56.
19. Ian Clarke, Alan Hallsworth, Peter Jackson, Ronan de Kervenoael, Rossana Perez del Aguila and Malcolm Kirkup, 'Retail restructuring and consumer choice I and II', Environment and planning A 38 (2006), pp. 25-46 and 47-67.
20. In their recent book, Worlds of food: place, power and provenance in the food chain (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006).
21. Kevin Morgan, Terry Marsden and Jonathan Murdoch distinguish two 'meta-regulatory trends' described in terms of neoliberalization, on the one hand, and the emergence of a new moral economy, on the other.
22. E.P. Thompson, 'The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century', Past and present 50 (1971), pp. 76-136.
23. James C. Scott, The moral economy of the peasant: rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1977).
24. John P. Powelson, The moral economy (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1998).
25. Andrew Sayer, 'Moral economy and political economy', Studies in political economy (Spring 2000), pp. 79-103.
26. See also, Andrew Sayer, 'Moral economy' (Department of Sociology, University of Lancaster, 2004): http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/sayer-moral-economy.pdf (accessed 24 July 2007) and.
27. '(De)commodification, consumer culture, and moral economy', Environment and planning D: society and space 21 (2003), pp. 341-57.
28. Paul Thompson, 'Markets, moral economy and the ethics of sustainable agriculture', in W. Heijman, H. Hetsen and J. Frouws, eds, Rural reconstruction in a market economy (Wageningen, The Netherlands, Wageningen Agricultural University, 1996, pp. 39-54).
29. Lawrence Busch, 'The moral economy of grades and standards', Journal of rural studies 16 (2000), pp. 273-83.
30. Clare Hinrichs, 'Embeddedness and local food systems: notes on two types of direct agricultural market', Journal of rural studies 16 (2000), pp. 295-303.
31. Roger Lee, 'Shelter from the storm? Geographies of regard in the worlds of horticultural consumption and production', Geoforum 31 (2000), pp. 137-57.
32. Kiri Le Heron and David Hayward, 'The moral commodity: production, consumption, and governance in the Australasian breakfast cereal industry', Environment and planning A 34 (2002), pp. 2231-51.
33. Michael K. Goodman, 'Reading fair trade: political ecological imagining and the moral economy of fair trade foods', Political geography 23 (2004), pp. 891-915.
34. Frank Trentmann, 'Before "fair trade": empire, free trade, and the moral economies of food in the modern world', Environment and planning D: society and space 25 (2007), pp. 1079-102.
35. This literature includes Susanne Freidberg's analysis of 'The ethical complex of corporate food power', Environment and planning D: society and space 22 (2004), pp. 27-43.
36. Clive Barnett, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke and Alice Malpass's study of 'Consuming ethics: articulating the subjects and spaces of ethnical consumption', Antipode 37 (2005), pp. 23-45
37. and Daniel Miller's work on 'The poverty of morality', Journal of consumer culture 1 (2001), pp. 225-43. For a more comprehensive review of this literature.
38. see Jeff Popke, 'Geography and ethics: everyday mediations through care and consumption', Progress in human geography 30 (2006), pp. 504-12.
39. For an elaboration of these arguments, see Peter Jackson, Neil Ward and Polly Russell, 'Moral economies of food and geographies of responsibility', Transactions, IBG 34 (2009), pp. 12-24.
40. Conceptualizing supply chains in a linear fashion 'from farm to fork' has frequently been criticized but the metaphor is a remarkably persistent one in academic and policy circles. See Peter Jackson, Polly Russell and Neil Ward, 'Mobilising the commodity chain concept in the politics of food and farming', Journal of rural studies 22 (2006), pp. 129-41.
41. Susanne Freidberg, 'Editorial: not all sweetness and light: new cultural geographies of food', Social and cultural geography 4 (2003), pp. 3-6.
42. The research is funded by the European Research Council (award number: 230287).
43. Iain Wilkinson, Anxiety in a risk society (London, Routledge, 2001). The quotation is from p. 42.
44. Madeleine Bunting, 'The age of anxiety', The Guardian, 25 October 2004.
45. For an analysis of the 'dysfunctional' nature of British food and farming and the need for re-connection along the supply chain, see the Report of the Curry Commission, Farming and food: a sustainable future (Cabinet Office, 2002).
46. Anthony Giddens, Sociology (5th Edition) (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2006).
47. Durkheim demonstrated that, however personal the causes of individual suicides might be, rates of suicide differed significantly by age, social class, marital status and religious group. Emile Durkheim, Suicide: a study in sociology (New York, The Free Press, 1951).
48. In Civilisation and its discontents (London, Hogarth Press, 1930), Freud describes a process of 'cultural evolution' whereby 'civilized man has exchanged some part of his chances of happiness for a measure of security' (p. 92).
49. The sublimation of instinct and 'the aggressive tendencies in mankind', Freud argued, had given rise to a sense of 'social anxiety' as well as to feelings of personal guilt (p. 107).
50. Joanna Bourke, 'Fear and anxiety: writing about emotion in modern history', History workshop journal 55 (2003), pp. 111-33.
51. The quotation is from p. 112.
52. The example refers to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies' work on 'mugging': Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, Policing the crisis: mugging, the state and law and order (London, Macmillan, 1978).
53. expressed in the language of Stanley Cohen's, Folk devils and moral panics (London, MacGibbon & Kee, 1972).
54. David Miller and Jacquie Reilly, Food scares in the media (Glasgow, Glasgow University Media Unit, 1994).
55. Bourke, 'Fear and anxiety', p. 129.
56. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid fear (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2006), p. 5.
57. Ulrich Beck, Risk society: towards a new modernity (London, Sage, 1992), pp. 40-1.
58. So, too, for the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, 'anxiety is freedom's actuality': The concept of anxiety (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 42.
59. Sheldon Ungar, 'Moral panic versus the risk society: the implications of the changing sites of social anxiety', British journal of sociology 52 (2001), pp. 271-91.
60. Sean P. Hier, 'Risk and panic in late modernity: implications of the converging sites of social anxiety', British journal of sociology 54 (2003), pp. 3-20.
61. For further discussion of this point, see the Introduction to Peter Jackson, ed., Changing families, changing food (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
62. This is what Kierkegaard implied when he argued that 'Whoever is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility': The concept of anxiety, p. 156.
63. Clarence Perrow, Normal accidents: living with high risk technologies (New York, Basic Books, 1984).
64. Wilkinson, Anxiety in a risk society, p. 15.
65. To quote Wilkinson in full: 'anxiety is conceived not so much as a personality defect but, rather, as a function or consequence of the social predicaments and cultural contradictions in which individuals are made to live out their everyday lives': Ibid., p. 17.
66. The anticipation of consumer anxiety may provoke a commercial response (withdrawing potentially dangerous goods from supermarket shelves, for example) which incorporates consumers in a discourse of fear even where they themselves regard such fears as groundless.
67. The project was entitled 'Manufacturing meaning along the food commodity chain' and was funded via the AHRC-ESRC Cultures of Consumption programme (award number: RES-143-25-0021).
68. Some of the material in the following section also appears in Peter Jackson, Neil Ward and Polly Russell, 'Manufacturing meaning along the chicken supply chain: consumer anxiety and the spaces of production'.
69. in David Goodman, Michael K. Goodman and Michael Redclift, eds, Consuming space (Aldershot, Ashgate, in press).
70. The consumer interviews were conducted by Katie Schofield and Neil Ward in Newcastle in 2006-7. They were designed to capture a range of views about food safety and quality issues, including attitudes to chicken consumption (the focus of our current research). Interviewees included men and women of different ages, different occupational groups and diverse educational backgrounds.
71. For valuable European evidence on the loss of consumer confidence in food, see Unni Kjaernes, Mark Harvey and Alan Warde, Trust in food: a comparative and institutional analysis (Basingstoke, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007).
72. For a more popular account of public concerns about food safety see Felicity Lawrence, Not on the label: what really goes into the food on your plate (London, Penguin, 2004).
73. Elspeth Probyn, Carnal appetites: food sex identities (London, Routledge, 2000), see, in particular, pp. 130-4.
74. Ibid., p. 132.
75. Interview with David Gregory, head of food technology, Marks & Spencer (M&S), February-March 2004.
76. This and subsequent interviews were recorded by Polly Russell and are deposited at The British Library (National Life Stories, accession number C821). Extracts from some of the interviews can also be accessed via the Food Stories website: http://www.bk.uk/learning/citizenship/foodstories/index.html).
77. Interview with Mark Ranson, agricultural technologist at M&S, January 2004.
78. As one of the referees pointed out, meat producers have disguised its animal origins from consumers for generations. In doing so, the industry is responding to consumers' qualms about meat's animal origins while simultaneously adding value and shelf life.
79. The use of additives in Dutch chicken was reported in the BBC's Panorama programme (Chicken Run, 23 May 2003).
80. See also, Lawrence, Not on the label, p. 15.
81. Interview with Paul Wilgos, senior agricultural technologist at M&S, January-June 2004.
82. Interview with Audrey Kley, chicken grower, September 2003.
83. Interview with Ray Moore, hatchery manager, November 2003.
84. An authoritative account of recent changes in the chicken industry is provided by Jane Dixon, The changing chicken (Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2002).
85. Interview with Catherine Lee, chicken buyer at M&S, February 2004.
86. Interview with Andrew Mackenzie, protein category manager at M&S, February 2004.
87. Claude Lévi-Strauss made these remarks in his discussion of why certain animal species were accorded totemic significance: Totemism (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973), ch. 4.