Food and consumer practice
I’ve enjoyed the recent exchanges about cultural geographies of food, prompted by John Wylie’s arguments in favour of a greater emphasis on the performance of cultural geography. While I sympathise with these moves, my own preference would be for a greater emphasis on practice which would include the performative dimensions of everyday practices (like shopping, cooking and eating) but which would extend beyond a narrowly-defined emphasis on the performance of social life (defined as scripted, staged and self-consciously enacted for a real or imagined audience) to include more routinised and habitual forms of behaviour. While restaurant food and the work of ‘celebrity chefs’ undoubtedly has a theatrical element, concerned with dramatic performance and display, these ideas have less purchase in the domestic setting of everyday life where ‘feeding the family’ is more readily understood in terms of mundane practice and routinised behaviour than as performance or display (though see Finch 2007). Indeed, much recent work on ‘the family’ has emphasised the significance of family practices, examining the dynamic processes through which families are created and reproduced, revealing the multiple ways of ‘doing family’ in contemporary social life (see Jackson 2009 for a review of this literature).
In Theodore Schatzki’s account of practice theory, social practices are defined as organized bundles of human activity (2002: 59), or more succinctly as ‘bodily doings and sayings’ (ibid.: 72). Consistent with this view, there is now a growing literature on the food-related practices of everyday life, inspired by De Certeau’s pioneering studies of living and cooking in the second volume of The practice of everyday life (1998). More recently, too, there has been a welcome extension of practice-based research from cooking to eating, approaching food ‘through the gut’ in Elspeth Probyn’s (2000) compelling phrase.
By focusing on ‘bodily doings and sayings’, practice theory is also well placed to respond to the ‘materialist turn’ in food research (and in social science more generally), as flagged up by Jane Bennett’s recent work on ‘edible matter’ (Bennett 2007). In this work, Bennett praises recent food research in the commodity chain tradition (tracing commodities along the supply chain ‘from farm to fork’), arguing that it connects people and places at different points along the chain, giving consumers greater insight into what they eat and highlighting the exploitation of food workers and the greed of agri-business. But she argues that its anthropocentric allegiances are a significant weakness, figuring food as a resource or a means rather than engaging seriously with its agentic capacities as vital matter.
One model for what an alternative food geography might look like, attendant to food’s materialities and routinised practices, is Annemarie Mol’s work on consumer-citizens. In this work, Mol (2009) attends to the dual meaning of ‘taste’, referring simultaneously to physical sensations (experienced by the tongue and mouth) and to the kind of symbolic meanings associated with the possession of ‘good taste’ (as a series of social distinctions). Exploring the pleasures of health and fairness as revealed in contemporary food advertising, Mol argues that we should not oppose pleasure-seeking consumers with socially responsible citizens, defined by their pursuit of the common good. Rather, Mol argues, we should search for alternative models of the consumer-citizen where the exercise of good taste in relation to health or fairness brings together the expression of private pleasures and public goods (‘healthy and yummy’, ‘fair and delicious’).
Emphasising the embodied, skilled and socially-embedded nature of contemporary food practices (as well as taking their materialities seriously) provides a valuable antidote to current government rhetoric which often assumes a deficit model in terms of modern parenting practices and cooking skills. It is then only a short step to social policies that emphasise individual responsibility and consumer choice, conveniently ignoring the way those ‘choices’ are socially ordered, materially shaped and culturally normativised. As such, consumer practices are less easily ‘nudged’ in the directions that even the most well-intentioned government policies may desire. Adopting a practice-based approach to contemporary food geographies might therefore have significant policy relevance as well as intellectual appeal.
Peter Jackson, Geography, University of Sheffield, UK
References
Jane Bennett (2007) Edible matter. New Left Review 45 (May-June).
Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol (1998) The practice of everyday life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Janet Finch (2007) Displaying families. Sociology 41: 65-81.
Peter Jackson ed. 2009. Changing families, changing food. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Annemarie Mol (2009) Good taste: the embodied normativity of the consumer-citizen. Journal of Cultural Economy 2: 269-83.
Elspeth Probyn (2000) Carnal appetites: food sex identities. London: Routledge.
Theodore R. Schatzki (2002) The site of the social. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press.
Cultural geographies: food blog 
Hi Peter
Thanks for this post, it’s really interesting and seems to gel with the arguments that Sebastian made below about theorising food.
It seems like this would be an important section of the chapter, but we need some more material to work with for the cutting and pasting process. (I won’t have time to read any extras mentioned in these posts). So, would you mind elaborating on these points – especially the recommended readings – as if the text were written for a review chapter? You could also quote from the reviews that you mention. That would be helpful to get into the necessary detail. I’ll be summarising and quoting in the first draft of the chapter, so this will help.
To me, your post builds up nicely to its main point about food’s ‘agentic capacities as vital matter’, and I wondered if you could elaborate on what this ‘alternative food geography’ might look like. This sounds like the kind of ‘visceral politics’ that Hayes Conroy & Hayes-Conroy (2010) talk about, which is discussed in the Cook et al (2011) ‘Afters’ paper… (see refs page).
What do you think?
Ian
Ian Cook et al
December 5, 2011 at 2:43 pm
I’m hoping that Allison Hayes-Conroy can maybe add to this part too. She will be chipping in soon.
Ian Cook et al
December 8, 2011 at 5:30 pm
Hi Ian:
I’m happy to develop the argument a bit, particularly in relation to an ‘alternative food geography’ that takes seriously the agentic capacities of food as vital matter. But what did you mean about quoting from the reviews I mention? How much elaboration do you need?
Peter
Peter Jackson
December 8, 2011 at 4:25 pm
Hi Peter, thanks for the reply and for agreeing to chip in a bit more. The reason that it might be a good idea to include quotations from things we have already written is that a) it provided important details for others about what we’re saying; b) it’s a very quick way of adding detailed content to the blog/paper; and c) it gives me something to summarise and/or quote from in the editing process. It’s possible that, once that process is done, first time around, that I’ll be sending out a paper with well-developed arguments in many places and a few holes. That’s when the more collaborative bit of the final draft tends to take place, perhaps via a Google doc that we can all access and work on. That’s the rough plan and is more or less how we wrote the Afters paper, if I remember correctly. Let me know if you have any other questions, Best wishes, Ian
Ian Cook et al
December 8, 2011 at 5:28 pm
From Peter Jackson – a longer version of the original post above:
Food and Consumer Practice
I’ve enjoyed the recent exchanges about cultural geographies of food, prompted by John Wylie’s arguments in favour of a greater emphasis on the performance of cultural geography. While I sympathise with these moves, my own preference would be for a greater emphasis on practice which would include the performative dimensions of everyday practices (like shopping, cooking and eating) but which would extend beyond a narrowly-defined emphasis on the performance of social life (defined as scripted, staged and self-consciously enacted for a real or imagined audience) to include more routinised and habitual forms of behaviour (cf. Delormier et al 2009). While restaurant food and the work of ‘celebrity chefs’ undoubtedly has a theatrical element, concerned with dramatic performance and display, these ideas have less purchase in everyday domestic settings where ‘feeding the family’ is more readily understood in terms of mundane practice and routinised behaviour than as performance or display (though see Finch 2007). Indeed, much recent work on ‘the family’ has emphasised the significance of family practices, examining the dynamic processes through which families are created and reproduced, revealing the multiple ways of ‘doing family’ in contemporary social life (see Jackson 2009 for a review of this literature).
In Theodore Schatzki’s account of practice theory, social practices are defined as organized bundles of human activity (2002: 59), or more succinctly as ‘bodily doings and sayings’ (ibid.: 72). Consistent with this view, there is now a growing literature on the food-related practices of everyday life, inspired by Luce Giard’s pioneering studies of living and cooking in the second volume of Michel De Certeau’s The practice of everyday life (1998). More recently, too, there has been a welcome extension of practice-based research from cooking to eating, approaching food ‘through the gut’ in Elspeth Probyn’s (2000) compelling phrase.
By focusing on ‘bodily doings and sayings’, practice theory is also well placed to respond to the ‘materialist turn’ in food research (and in social science more generally), as flagged up by Jane Bennett’s recent work on ‘edible matter’ (Bennett 2007). In this work, Bennett praises recent food research in the commodity chain tradition (tracing commodities along the supply chain ‘from farm to fork’), arguing that it connects people and places at different points along the chain, giving consumers greater insight into what they eat and highlighting the exploitation of food workers and the greed of agri-business. But she argues that its anthropocentric allegiances are a significant weakness, figuring food as a resource or a means rather than engaging seriously with its agentic capacities as vital matter. Bennett is interested in exploring the ‘force of things’, where political agency is understood as a force, distributed across multiple, overlapping human and non-human bodies. For Bennett, food is an agent inside and alongside intention-forming, morality-(dis)obeying, language-using, reflexivity-wielding, culture-making human beings. It is capable of generating salient public effects, rather than a passive resource at the disposal of consumers.
The agentic capacities of food as vital matter are also central to Allison and Jessica Hayes-Conroy’s recent work on the ‘visceral politics’ of food (as reported in Cook et al. 2011). They are interested in the way bodies ‘feel’ food, arguing that, in the visceral realm, ‘food links up with ideas, memories, sounds, visions, beliefs, past experiences, moods [and] worries, all of which combine to become material – to become bodily, physical sensations’ (ibid.: 113). David Sutton (2001) makes a similar point in his ethnographically-based work on food and memory among current residents and ex patriots from the Greek island of Kalymnos, arguing that food’s memory power derives from its synaesthetic properties — its ability to evoke memories via different sensory registers. These accounts all contribute to new ways of figuring a politics of difference, where difference is understood not just as socially constructed but also as involving more fluid visceralities. Making a closer visceral connection to food therefore holds out the potential for effecting significant political change.
These ideas can be illustrated by recent work on the art and science of cheese-making, where protein bundles, fatty acids and metabolic enzymes all contribute to the lively materiality of the finished product, to say nothing of the complex interactions between dairy herds and fodder, climate and vegetation. In Heather Paxson’s (2011 work), for example, the process of artisan cheese-making is understood as involving a balance of aesthetic creativity and intuition combined with accurate measurement, meticulous record-keeping and scrupulous hygiene. It is a process which she describes in terms of ‘synaesthetic reason’, bringing together cross-sensory apprehension (of taste, smell and touch) with reasoned analysis, combining quasi-mystical elements with an acknowledgement of market-based tastes and conventional understandings of acceptable retail form.
One model for what an alternative food geography might look like, attendant to food’s materialities and routinised practices, is Annemarie Mol’s work on consumer-citizens. In this work, Mol (2009) attends to the dual meaning of ‘taste’, referring simultaneously to physical sensations (experienced by the tongue and mouth) and to the kind of symbolic meanings associated with the possession of ‘good taste’ (as a series of social distinctions). Exploring the pleasures of health and fairness as revealed in contemporary food advertising, Mol argues that we should not oppose pleasure-seeking consumers with socially responsible citizens, defined by their pursuit of the common good. Rather, Mol argues, we should search for alternative models of the consumer-citizen where the exercise of good taste in relation to health or fairness brings together the expression of private pleasures and public goods (‘healthy and yummy’, ‘fair and delicious’).
Emphasising the embodied, skilled and socially-embedded nature of contemporary food practices (as well as taking their materialities seriously) provides a valuable antidote to current government rhetoric which often assumes a deficit model in terms of modern parenting practices and cooking skills. It is then only a short step to social policies that emphasise individual responsibility and consumer choice, conveniently ignoring the way those ‘choices’ are socially ordered, materially shaped and culturally normativised. As such, consumer practices are less easily ‘nudged’ in the directions that even the most well-intentioned government policies may desire. Adopting a practice-based approach to contemporary food geographies and paying greater to their complex materialities might therefore have significant policy relevance as well as intellectual appeal.
References
Jane Bennett (2007) Edible matter. New Left Review 45 (May-June).
Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol (1998) The practice of everyday life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ian Cook et al. (2011) ‘Geographies of food: afters’. Progress in Human Geography 35: 104-120.
Treena Delormier, Katherine L Frohlich and Louise Potvin 2009. Food and eating as social practice: understanding eating patterns as social phenomena and implications for public health. Sociology of Health and Illness 31: 215-228.
Janet Finch (2007) Displaying families. Sociology 41: 65-81.
Peter Jackson ed. 2009. Changing families, changing food. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Annemarie Mol (2009) Good taste: the embodied normativity of the consumer-citizen. Journal of Cultural Economy 2: 269-83.
Heather Paxson (2011) The ‘art’ and ‘science’ of handcrafting cheese in the United States. Endeavour 35: 116-124.
Elspeth Probyn (2000) Carnal appetites: food sex identities. London: Routledge.
Theodore R. Schatzki (2002) The site of the social. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press.
David E. Sutton (2001) Remembrance of repasts: an anthropology of food and memory. Oxford: Berg.
Ian Cook et al
December 19, 2011 at 8:16 pm