Orign Of Food

British Food Journal
Biographies and geographies: consumer understandings of the origins of foods
Ian Cook Philip Crang Mark Thorpe

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Ian Cook Philip Crang Mark Thorpe, (1998),"Biographies and geographies: consumer understandings of the origins of foods", British Food Journal, Vol. 100 Iss 3 pp. 162 - 167
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Biographies and geographies: consumer understandings of the origins of foods

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Ian Cook
Lecturer in Human Geography and Cultural Studies, Department of Geography,
University of Wales, Lampeter, Wales
Philip Crang
Lecturer in Human Geography, Department of Geography, UCL, London, UK
Mark Thorpe
Research Associate, Department of Geography, UCL, London, UK
This article argues for a biographical and geographical understanding of foods and food choice. It suggests that such an approach highlights one of the most compelling characteristics of food – that being the way in which it connects the wide worlds of an increasingly internationalised food system into the intimate space of the home and the body. More specifically, and based on ongoing empirical research with 12 households in inner north London, the article explores one aspect of food biographies, through an interlinked consideration of what consumers know of the origins of foods and consumers’ reactions to systems of food provision. It concludes that a structural ambivalence can be identified, such that consumers have both a need to know and an impulse to forget the origins of the foods they eat.
We would like to record our thanks to the 12 households who took part in this research, not only for allowing us to invade their domestic lives, but for the quantity and quality of conversation, and sometimes food, they gave to us.
And we would particularly like to extend our deepest thanks to Anne Murcott for her unstinting support and help. British Food Journal
100/3 [1998] 162–167
© MCB University Press
[ISSN 0007-070X]

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The next time you arrive home with a carload of goods from the supermarket, pause for a minute or two before you start packing them away. Subject one or two of the items to some lateral thinking. Treat them not simply as mass-market consumables, but as small cultural artefacts, each with its own background and biography. Have a go at deconstructing your weekly shop. That cheery-looking bunch of bananas, for example. Britain does not grow bananas – yet – so the odds are they have travelled a long way to grace your fruit bowl. Where did they start their journey? And what about the bunch of grapes? Who, or what, gave them their high-gloss finish? … The odds are that you will be able to supply remarkably few answers to the questions. The past decade or two have seen the globalisation of the
British shopping basket as supermarkets scour the world to satisfy our newly acquired appetite for exotic fruits or out-ofseason greens. … Such global supply lines would have staggered our grandparents... but they also mean that we know less than ever about the way our food is produced
(Nicholson-Lord, 1997).

Deconstruction? Cultural artefacts? Foods as things with their own biographies? Globalisation? Many readers may already be mentally filing this call for a lateral analysis of our shopping bags in a drawer marked “rather fanciful social scientific studies of food”.
Before pushing that drawer shut, however, let us pause to note quite where this quotation comes from. It is not from the pages of an academic journal devoted to material culture, though one could find its sentiments echoed there (Cook and Crang, 1996). Nor is it an extract from a scholarly anthropology collection on the “social lives” or “cultural biographies” of things (Appadurai, 1986), from a paper on the cultural politics of contemporary culinary preferences (Cook et al., in

press; Narayan, 1995), or from a Marxian critique of the “fetishistic” quality of commodities in consumer culture (Jhally, 1990), though again it could have been from any of these. In fact, it is the introduction to a recent article on fair-trade and ethical consumerism, on sale at the checkouts of one of the UK’s largest food retailers as part of a theme issue of Sainsbury’s: The Magazine marking the charity Comic Relief ’s Red Nose
Day.
In this short paper we want to reflect on that article’s idea of foods having a biography, one which has been the basis of our still ongoing work within the ESRC-funded “Eating
Places” project. Indeed, we want to suggest that such an idea – one based on a recognition that foods have lives before and after they appear on the supermarket shelves – is at the heart of a distinctive perspective that human geography, as one of the social sciences, can contribute to studies of food choice. This perspective has a number of elements, but at its centre is a concern with the many different places, people and social institutions foods travel through as they move “from farm to fork”.
Such an approach is especially helpful in so far as it gives concrete expression to the way in which food choice is at the same time both intensely personal, bound up with individual tastes and household experiences of domesticity, and thoroughly public, an important aspect of citizenship nationally and, indeed, globally. Food purchase, use and consumption bring together the private and the public, the local and the global. For food providers, and other food agencies, this means that pursuing their public concerns depends upon some understanding of, and responsiveness to, consumers’ private habits and desires. As consumers, it means that our mundane, everyday routines of food shopping, cooking and eating are developed in relation to

Ian Cook, Philip Crang and
Mark Thorpe
Biographies and geographies: consumer understandings of the origins of foods

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British Food Journal
100/3 [1998] 162–167

increasingly internationalized food supply networks. Hence, our dietary intake and health are affected by practices far away from our direct experience. And, in reverse, our food choices have effects that reach far beyond our own domestic worlds.
In this paper we want to explore one particular aspect of these connections between private and public worlds: the knowledge consumers have about the geographical origins of the foods they consume. While never complete, this knowledge plays an important role in food choice and food consumption.
The stereotypical portrait of ignorant consumers, epitomised by the apocryphal child who answers that milk “comes from” a supermarket shelf and not a cow (Willis, 1991), is overdrawn and misleading. In contrast, an important feature of a biographical approach to food is the highlighting of a two-way relation between understandings of food and understandings of place or geography. Put another way, the question “what food is this?” is in part a question of “where does this food come from?”. This is the case among not only commentators in the mass media or pressure groups but also, as we shall see, those food consumers taking part in our ongoing research project, designed, among other things, to examine and document the nature of people’s understandings about the origins of their food. Based in north London and including work with both food consumers and providers, the study incorporates an intensive qualitative component involving 12 socially differentiated households (see Appendix for further details). The argument we advance here stems from that research but constraints of space mean that a close account of its empirical findings is left for elsewhere. We start with a reminder of notions of “the consumer” and “consumer knowledge” which our research suggests are unduly simplified. Consumer understandings of food provision The extent of consumer knowledge
At the risk of slight caricature, we want to suggest that two very different portraits of consumers and their relations to food providers are currently locking horns in debates over food consumption. Crucially, each has a rather different understanding of the extent of consumer knowledge about the origins of what they eat. On the one hand,

there are those who appeal to the knowledgeability and the power of the consumer, and her/his centrality in influencing the behaviour of retailers and regulators. They cast the consumer as sovereign, making informed choices which food providers, at least the commercially successful ones, must understand and be responsive to. They identify a “new focus on the consumer” in food industry best practice (Kham and
McAllister, 1997), and are more concerned with improving the quality of understanding that food providers have of consumers than the knowledge those consumers have of food provision. On the other hand, there are less optimistic commentators who question this consumer knowledge and power: who point to the huge quantity of food advertising directed at influencing consumers (over £500 million worth in the UK in 1990) and its skewed character towards processed and “comfort” foods; who emphasise the role of food provision and composition, rather than consumer understanding, in determining nutritional intake (Fine and Leopold, 1993); and who highlight the partiality of the information that consumers have to act on and the protocols this information is presented through (so, for example, while some foods are labelled as organic, non-organic foods do not provide details of their pesticide residues) (Lang,
1996). In sum, there are those who question the extent of consumer knowledge about the origins of foods.
Evidence can be found for both these positions. For example, while consumers do not, and perhaps cannot, know everything about the origins of the foods they consume, our findings suggest that what knowledge they do have can potentially be a significant factor in food choices. This may be because they are concerned with the actual production process of foods; for example, when choices are made in favour of Fairtrade-marked products, freerange eggs and poultry, or “animal-friendly” meat. But it can also reflect wider associations between places and food qualities, such that geographical names or imagery help to construct consumer perceptions of product quality (Hodgson and Bruhn, 1992; 1993), healthiness (think, for example, of Northern
European public health characterisations of a
“Mediterranean diet”) (Macbeth, 1997) and authenticity. Indeed, major growth categories of foods are, in more or less explicit ways, biographically and geographically defined, whether that be through the growing

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Mark Thorpe
Biographies and geographies: consumer understandings of the origins of foods

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British Food Journal
100/3 [1998] 162–167

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popularity of various foreign cuisines (Italian, Indian, Chinese, Thai, Tex-Mex, and so on) or of regional specialities from the UK
(James, 1996). Our research also suggests that far from being ignorant about the origins of foods, consumers actually have wide-ranging, if socially differentiated, knowledges. Childhood memories, experiences of travel, the booming media coverage of food issues, even geography lessons at school, were all knowledge resources that were dipped into in the accounts our interviewees constructed about the character of foods and cuisines. In consequence, to portray consumers as ignorant about the origins of the foods they eat – even keeping as an honourable exception small groups of super-knowledgeable ethical shoppers, vegetarians and health “freaks” – is grossly simplistic. The issue, then, is not just one of consumer ignorance about the origins of their foods; it also one of the form, source and effect of the multi-faceted knowledges that consumers do have.
On the other hand, one cannot just dismiss these issues of consumer ignorance.
For a start, the practical possibility of a complete knowledge of food provision systems has to be questioned. The distance food travels to get to our plates, and the sheer complexity of the food system, inevitably means that the biographies of the foods we eat are rather opaque to us. This does not mean that calls for a considered policy review in the areas of labelling regulations, the rules governing food advertising, and food education are illegitimate (Lang, 1995;
Lang et al., 1996; National Food Alliance,
1994). However, it does lead us to question an all-embracing principle of “transparency”, in which the end goal is to achieve the mythical all-knowing, and hence sovereign, consumer. Instead, the issue, we suggest, is more one of the institutions and sites in which consumers can place responsibility for knowledge of food provision. Our empirical research found that consumers managed the complexity of food provision by establishing “thresholds” in which they placed, if not trust, then reliance. For some, this involved an attempt to opt out of the distanciated geographies of mainstream food provision. One household, for example, sourced their fresh produce from an organic box scheme, and emphasised how the local nature of the supply networks and a personal knowledge of the scheme’s managers gave them confidence in the origins of these foods. More often, however, this

“re-localization” of food provision was less literal. It involved constructing some cognitive threshold within the complex provision system beyond which one did not routinely venture. Brand-named retailers, “known” local retailers, and figures or entities (such as a television series) in the media were all used in such a capacity. Intriguingly, state agencies rarely were.
Moreover, these thresholds had more than a practical significance. For example, when one of our interviewees argued that to know everything about the origins of your food would result in “your head exploding”, we would suggest they were expressing more than the cognitive impossibility of knowing these biographies. They were also, we would argue, giving expression to an impulse for food consumption to involve some autonomy from concerns with the public world of provision. This impulse manifested itself in a host of ways. For instance, we found a recurrent tendency to value an active “customization” of both foods and food instructions
(such as recipes) (see also Tomkinson, 1985).
Hence, while convenience of preparation was an important consideration in food planning and choice, it ran in parallel with concerns for transforming foods in some way. The reasons for this were multiple, but included: a desire to incorporate foods and food instructions into a household’s own way of doing things; a resistance to didactic food knowledges, at least in so far as they were received as instructions to be followed rather than skills to be developed; and a sense of duty felt by one or more household members to fulfil a role of food provider by actively transforming foods, whether through cooking practices, forms of presentation, or the combination of foods into one’s own culinary repertoire. Underlying these concerns is a more general point: the extent to which purchased foods were understood in terms of their
“future lives” within household relations of love and care. The registering, buying and preparation of favourite foods, the purchasing of treats, the availability of food choices within the home, all these were aspects of food that, confirming earlier studies, the households we researched were deeply concerned with. As an aside, it is interesting that they figured so much more strongly than individualised concerns with the sensual pleasures of eating. Of course, in emphasising this, one has to be careful of over-romanticising food consumption. At a

Ian Cook, Philip Crang and
Mark Thorpe
Biographies and geographies: consumer understandings of the origins of foods

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British Food Journal
100/3 [1998] 162–167

personal level, food is not always a source of pleasure. At a household level, it is not only something that brings people together but is also a matter of authority, in terms of who controls the household diet, and confrontation. What is more, the domestic lives of foods involve divisions of household work that are often unequal, in terms of both time spent on food-related tasks and the character of tasks undertaken. Bearing these caveats in mind, however, it is still important to note that food consumption involves a set of activities which are not just imposed on us consumers by food providers – as they
“tell” us what to buy and how to cook and present it – but rather enable us to use external provision sources for our own purposes.
Indeed, this autonomy is a quality that consumers actively strive for and value. In consequence, it is hardly surprising that our research suggests some active bracketing off of provision concerns by consumers. For it is only through this bracketing off that notions of domestic autonomy can be realised. The structuring of consumer knowledge
We now move to draw out two main elements of the structuring of consumer knowledges about food provision, based on the discussion above. First, we have identified what we might term a “structural ambivalence” at the heart of consumers’ engagements with systems of food provision. This stems from the combination of a desire to use food to construct a domestic realm with some autonomy from the public sphere, and the reliance upon public systems of provision to realise that desire. It involves, then, the combination of an impulse to forget and a need to know. This ambivalence is particularly apparent when the thresholds that consumers establish for their knowledges of food provision are ruptured through an acute understanding of their reliance upon wider systems of provision. We found a number of reasons for such ruptures in our empirical work, but perhaps the most keenly felt among our respondents was the troubling of domestic projects of care for others, and pleasure for the self, by concerns about the health implications of particular foods or overall diets. Given the media coverage in
Britain of the BSE crisis at the time of our research, the presence of such concerns is hardly surprising. But our analysis does go some way, we tentatively suggest, to explaining the two-sided reaction to such concerns,

even within individuals, as on the one hand reliance on systems of provision prompts calls for more information and knowledge, and on the other the logics of consumption as an autonomy-producing practice also lead to an impulse to forget, to act without the burdens of responsibility, to be left alone to do what one wants.
A second feature that emerges from our preceding discussion is that it is necessary to go beyond viewing consumer knowledge of food provision in quantitative terms, that is with reference to how much or how little we know about the earlier lives of our food.
We would suggest that of greater importance is the character of consumer knowledge; its form, its source and its use. At this stage, our research has highlighted three aspects of the character of this knowledge.
First, the connections that are established through food consumption between the domestic and public, and the local and the global, are especially keenly felt when the wider world is seen to jar with domestic concerns. Recognitions of the connections that operate in the opposite direction, through the implications of consumers’ actions for the others – both human and non-human – to whom they are connected through the food chain, seem to have less resonance. As an aside, one might also note that this is potentially something that could be mirrored institutionally in the UK, through a Food Standards Agency that is remitted to oversee and regulate the foods travelling from farm to fork, but less so the reverse flows or feedback loops from fork to farm and beyond (as well as through the emphasis on “traceability” and “due diligence” in the UK’s 1990 Food Safety Act and the European Union’s 1995 Food Safety
(General Hygiene Regulations). We would not want to go so far as some commentators, who have asserted that there is a profound and systemic amorality at the heart of contemporary consumer cultures due to consumers’ ignorance of their connections to producers (Sack, 1993). And we certainly would not want to frame any explanation in terms of innate selfishness. Rather, we would emphasise the predominance of understandings of consumption which position consumers at the end point of a chain, using up and ingesting provided products, and offer in its stead a conception of consumption as a “circuit” made up of two-way relations between producers and consumers
(see also Jackson and Thrift, 1995). Both as

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Ian Cook, Philip Crang and
Mark Thorpe
Biographies and geographies: consumer understandings of the origins of foods
British Food Journal
100/3 [1998] 162–167

individuals, and institutionally, a recognition of these two-way relations is a pressing need if consumers are to take responsibility for the power vested in them (or least the virtual figure of “The Consumer”) (Marsden and Wrigley, 1996; Miller, 1995).

Conclusions

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By way of conclusion, let us briefly reassert two premisses that have run through this article and the ongoing empirical research on which it is based. The first of these is that foods have biographies and geographies, and that these biographies and geographies matter. Indeed, we have suggested that one of the most compelling characteristics of food – that being the way in which it connects the wide worlds of an increasingly internationalised food system into the intimate spaces of the home and the body – is highlighted by such an approach. Second, and more specifically, we have identified questions of consumer knowledge about the origins of foods as an analytical entry point. There are many aspects of these knowledges that we have not addressed here; for example, the ways in which they do not simply record geographical facts about foods but rather play a role in the construction of consumers’ understandings of the world’s geographies. These are themes we have, and will continue, to take up elsewhere
(Cook and Crang, 1996; Cook et al., in press).
Instead we have focused on the ways in which consumer knowledges are both structured by and help to create relations with food provision. We have suggested that there is a need to escape the blunt dichotomy between either a knowledgeable, and hence powerful, or ignorant, and hence manipulated, consumer. We have tried to suggest a greater subtlety, sophistication even, of consumers’ relations to systems of food provision than is sometimes found in current debates. In particular, we have identified an ambivalence at the heart of these relations, one we have sought to capture through suggesting the co-existence in consumers of a need to know and an impulse to forget the origins of the foods we consume. References
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[ 166 ]

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Ian Cook, Philip Crang and
Mark Thorpe
Biographies and geographies: consumer understandings of the origins of foods
British Food Journal
100/3 [1998] 162–167

Nicholson-Lord, D. (1997), “A fair exchange”,
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Appendix. The “eating places” project
This has involved in-depth interviews and quasi-participant observation over an extended period with 12 households from five

neighbouring streets in an area of inner north London. Based on information derived from a short questionnaire survey of these streets, households were selected to provide variations in household composition, ethnicity and biography, income, and forms of household food provisioning. Other components of the project not reported on here are designed to research “back down” the systems of provision supplying these households, through interviews with retailers, retailers’ buyers and home economists, specialist agencies of food knowledge, and through desk and archive research on both the trade press and botanical histories.

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References: Appadurai, A. (Ed.) (1986), The Social Lives of Things, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Cook, I. and Crang, P. (1996), “The world on a plate: culinary culture, displacement and Fine, B. and Leopold, E. (1993), The World of Consumption, Routledge, London. Hodgson, A.S. and Bruhn, C.M. (1992), “Geographical names on product labels: consumer attitudes toward their use”, Food Technology, Vol Hodgson, A.S. and Bruhn, C.M. (1993), “Consumer attitudes towards the use of geographical Jackson, P. and Thrift, N. (1995), “Geographies of consumption”, in Miller, D James, A. (1996), “Cooking the books: global or local identities in contemporary British food Jhally, S. (1990), The Codes of Advertising, Routledge, London. Kahn, B.E. and McAllister, L. (1997), Grocery Revolution Lang, T. (1995), “The contradictions of UK food labelling policy”, Information Design Journal, Lang, T. (1996), “Power to the people”, BBC Good Food Vegetarian, April, pp (1996), Modernising UK Food Policy: The Case for Reforming the Ministry of Agriculture, Macbeth, H. (1997), “Time to eat our words?”, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 25 July, Marsden, T. and Wrigley, N. (1996), “Retailing, the food system and the regulatory state”, in Miller, D. (1995), “Consumption as the vanguard of history”, in Miller, D Narayan, U. (1995), “Eating cultures: incorporation, identity and Indian food”, Social Identities, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 63-86. London, 1994. Sack, R. (1993), Place, Modernity and the Consumer’s World, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Tomlinson, G. (1985), “Thought for food: a study of written instructions”, Symbolic Interaction, Willis, S. (1991), “Learning from the banana”, in A Primer for Daily Life, Routledge, London,