5. A SoP Approach to Understanding Food Consumption

For the evolving understanding of the incidence and (capacity for) treatment of diabetes, see the regular and increasing numbers of contributions to the Lancet and, especially and significantly, meta-studies. Note that it has begun to emerge that the issue might be related to the food system if without further analysis, itself reflecting a reactive, curative approach by health care to the social determinants of health, see Chap. 4.

For an account, sympathetic to the SoP approach, on how ‘development’ brings ‘bad’, commercialized food habits to the South, see Stevano, Johnston & Codjoe (2020) and Stevano (2020).

See Guthman and DuPuis (2006).

Apart from the highly contested labelling, packaging tends to be ignored, despite its ubiquitous materiality, unless a problem (increasingly with environmental damage through plastic), see Murcott (2019, p. 98).

See, for example, contributions to journals such as the Journal of Peasant Studies and the Journal of Agrarian Change.

See Marsden, Lee, Flynn & Thankappan (2010).

On the industrialization (and globalization) of food systems, see Cramer and Sender (2019), Cramer, Johnston, Muller, Oya & Sender (2020), Barrett, Reardon, Swinnen & Zilberman (2019) and Wrigley and Wood (2018). Note that the industrialization of food approach gave way in the work of Goodman to an assault by him and others on the SoP approach, inspired by Actor-Network Theory (ANT) focusing on the supposedly invalid separation of nature and society in the approach and more generally (Goodman 1999, 2001, 2002) and Goodman and Dupuis (2002) and see also especially the special issue of Sociologia Ruralis, 42 (4), 2002). See Fine (2002, 2004) for a defence of the SoP approach against these charges, and, for critique of ANT more generally, Fine (2003a, b, 2005). With tongue in cheek, it is apparent that the ANT SoP has evolved into the performativity approach, with its leading focus being upon finance, and the idea that economists make (financial) markets, having shifted focus away from food in general and the performing scallop in particular, from Callon (1986) to Callon and Caliskan (2005), the latter incomprehensibly claiming that, ‘What happens in the sector itself, how its markets are organized, its prices are set, networks built, research carried out are still left untouched in the systems of provision approach’. See Fine (2016) for a critique of performativity in passing, and Brisset (2019) for a balanced assessment. For the severest criticism of the policing of the nature/society dualism, see Malm (2019) and Fine (2019) for similar issues arising out of criticisms of Marx’s apparent neglect of the natural for the social.

See also Newman (2009).

On land grabbing more generally, see also collection introduced by Edelman, Oya & Saturnino (2013).

See do Nascimento, Frederico & Saweljew (2019) for the Brazilian case but also IDI (2017) for the indirect support offered to such land grabbing through financing from the World Bank.

As Sommerville and Magnan (2015, p. 137) put it, ‘financialization accelerates the concentration of land and resources into fewer and larger farming units’.

This differentiation across and within the food systems in promoting and in response to financialization is explored in some detail in Baines (2017).

With the role of the state crucial in this respect, as Visser, Clapp & Isakson (2015, p. 544) polemically observe, ‘states’ objectives have shifted from ensuring that agriculture is supported by finance to ensuring that finance is supported by agriculture’. Thus, subsidies to production can be capitalized in the value of land and securitized as a financial asset on condition of expanding, or constrained, production.

Isakson (2014, p. 758).

See also Ghosh (2010). However, the trend in food prices, necessarily roughly estimated, has been downwards, by about a third in real terms, over the past fifty years prior to the spikes around the global financial crisis. Burgeoning rent and land prices come with productivity increases at rates higher than price decreases.

See Fine, Heasman & Wright (1996, 1998) and Fine (1998) for these and other studies and their many implications. Guthman (2015, p. 2522) quotes from a US comedy show: ‘The government is really sending mixed messages here. First, they subsidize corn, making it so cheap we can gorge on subsidized corn syrup, and then they charge us more for health insurance just because our organs have caramelized …Well, I’m sorry’, he quipped, ‘but our bodies are the only growth industry America has left’.

See discussion of ‘store wars’ in Chap. 1 and notice how, in the UK context, convenience stores have increasingly become branches of the main stores, in petrol stations or standalone in urban settings with longer opening hours.

It does, however, engage with the material cultures of food or, more exactly, its production, and so on, short of consumption. Thus, often in the context of distancing, see above, (financialization of) food has become set in cultures of (in)security and the fear of the foreign (land grabs) (Larder, Sippel & Lawrence 2015), and to alleviate poverty and insecurity and promote food sovereignty through the private sector (Brooks 2016), with the World Bank to the fore with ‘a key role in advocating for more commodity exchanges in developing countries at the same time that it has portrayed large-scale land acquisitions as an important development opportunity’ (Clapp 2014, p. 806).

Carolan (2020), focusing on the links between food production and food consumption and noting that Walmart is the largest provider of ethical foods in the USA, finds very different and contested notions of ethical (or fair trade) foods between consumers and farmers. Indeed, although using a moral economy framing, he might just as well be describing the SoP approach, p. 18:

economic institutions and practices are founded on norms that instil within markets understandings of ‘the good’ and ‘the right,’ generating effects that have implications that touch on understandings of self-worth, status, subject-hood for actors throughout the value chain.

On conundrums around the material cultures of ethical foods, see Cramer, Johnston, Muller, Oya & Sender (2017) for limited impact on wages and working conditions and also Soper (2019, p. 328) for whom:

Conventional strawberries are larger and therefore fewer of them fill up a box. Farmworkers routinely pick more boxes in conventional than in organic, thus earning more, since under the piece rate system, farmworkers are paid per box. With short-term economic survival rather than long-term occupational health concerns in mind, strawberry harvesters would rather work on conventional farms because “la fresa orgánica es más chiquita” (organic strawberries are smaller).

Note that modern food systems expand both commodification (commercial provision both extensively and intensively) and commodity calculation (more capacity for own provision) but do not tend to underpin more casual commodity forms in food provisioning (charging neighbours for food, for example, or second-hand markets for food).

A more rounded approach is taken in the later Guthman (2015) if drawing upon Harvey in suggesting the body as a socio-ecological fix for agrofood capitalism. See also Guthman (2011, p. 182) for which, ‘The body is part of the spatial fix’, and Fine (2006) for a critique of the proliferation of fixes deriving from Harvey’s original spatial fix.

For our own take on all things neoliberal, see Fine and Saad-Filho (2016), Boffo, Fine & Saad-Filho (2018) and Bayliss, Fine, Robertson & Saad Filho (2020).

There are many ways in which food is ever-present from snacks through ready-made and convenient foods through takeaways, cafes and restaurants. These are complemented by fridge-freezers that can readily be raided and rationalise bulk purchases from hype-markets, through car trips, each of which, incidentally, does not originate with financialized credit (and debt) but is fuelled by it. See Rinkinen, Shove & Smits (2017).

Hence the social construction of the division between the natural and the artificial, as in bottling wine, for which see Brooks and Francis (2020) in what might be interpreted as the cork SoP.

Indeed, ethical systems themselves can be seen as subject to the 10Cs, see Fine (2013).

This is a form of commodity fetishism, in which the properties of commodities are as much concealed as revealed through being provided through the market.

More specifically, for example, the same object of consumption, such as a (McDonald’s) hamburger, can have both different material and cultural content in different situations, and these be differently determined too—as cheap food for the rich, or a treat for the poor, as emulation of, or cultural subordination to, America, as bog standard item of convenience or potentially tainted by poor working conditions and horse meat, Fine (2007).

This is not to suggest water implications of ever-expanding food systems are negligible as it deploys over 90% of the water used in economic activity, with meat eaters roughly indirectly responsible for twice the amount accounted for by vegetarians. By the same token, cattle are responsible for a significant contribution to greenhouse gases. Thanks to Tony Allan for these points.

But see also Iga (2014) who views globalization of food provisioning as disembedding consumer from the social and the natural, with localized responses leading to hybridity.

Although this is now complemented by authoritarian forms of freedom to choose through ‘nudging’ consumers to make the right choices.

Today, much is made of nudging as well as advising, by food product placement for example. Even if successful for some consumers, it raises the question of who buys the food if it continues to be supplied!

Interestingly, and with more than a tinge of irony, the financialization of food has itself been appropriately seen as, unwittingly, strengthening the omnivore’s paradox of ignorance through financial displacement, as opposed to locational displacement from knowledge through active participation in the production of food, or agriculture at least. As Clapp (2014, p. 797) puts it:

First, a new kind of distancing has emerged within the global food system as a result of financialization that has (a) increased the number of the number and type of actors involved in global agrifood commodity chains and (b) abstracted food from its physical form into highly complex agricultural commodity derivatives. Second, this distancing has obscured the links between financial actors and food system outcomes in ways that make the political context for opposition to financialization especially challenging.

See also reference to ‘greater distancing … by encouraging more abstraction of the commodity from its original form, in this case into a ‘virtual’ financial derivative product’ (p. 810). Ioris (2016) refers to ‘displacement, financialization and mystification’ (p. 85), and Leguizamón (2016, p. 313) to ‘the socio-ecological contradictions that arise from the processes of distancing and abstraction which accompany the financialization of the corporate food system under neoliberal globalization’. Note also that agro-tourism is a novel development in reuniting eating with its agricultural origins.

See also Guthman (2011) who points to a political economy of bulimia, one that promotes consumption while also insisting upon thinness.

Through participation in an ESRC research programme launched to research the (UK) Nation’s Diet in order to understand why consumers did not follow healthy eating guidelines, Murcott (Ed.) (1998).

Alongside other syndromes such as clinically and psychologically identified eating disorders, as well as socially constructed conditions around fatness and thinness, variously interpreted, Guthman and DuPuis (2006) and Pirie (2011).

See Lohman and Sexton (2010).