FOOD NETWORKS
In advocating for network based approaches, Arce and Marsden pointed to the deterministic character of approaching agro food through the lens of political economy. Pre 1990s debates, they argued, had been preeminently concerned with the application of economistic, industrial restructuring theories to agricultural geography. By the end of the 1990s, however, political economy had developed a wide repertoire of concepts for approaching agro foodstuffs; including agro food systems, food regimes, agro food complexes, agri business, and commodity chains. The ‘commodity chain’ approach (largely inspired by Freidland et al.’s 1984 seminal work on lettuce) was perhaps the most popular of these and had a tendency to focus analysis on relations between farm businesses and agrichemical suppliers and/or food processing industries. By contrast, the terminology of ‘food regimes’ signaled an analytical focus on the regulatory apparatus sustaining global agricultural markets and prices. What these approaches share in common is a central concern with in dustrial food production and an engagement with the corporation and/or the nation state as the principal units of analysis. Within agro food studies, and geography in particular, these approaches came to be heavily critiqued on a number of fronts. The limitations that political economy faced in thinking about (1) the materiality of foodstuffs and the question of ‘nature’, (2) social agency and the (un)making of so called ‘macro scale’ processes, (3) the spatiotemporal contingency of food production and consumption, and (4) the complex role of food consumption practices, are most relevant to the development of network based approaches.
‘Globalising food: Agrarian questions and global restructuring’, an influential collection of essays published in 1997, is a key reference that captures the early tensions between political economy and network approaches. The tensions between these approaches have often been distracting, but have sometimes been creative, and efforts to recognize and work through them mark one of the major contributions of geographers to the development of agro food studies. As the ‘Globalising food’ collection foreshadowed, the analytical disagreements and silences between political economy and network based approaches map onto a growing divergence between North American and European agro food research (and politics). These divergences are linked to distinctive theoretical influences, analytical foci, and policy engagement. As such, and also because of the locational bias of the case studies presented in most of the food networks literature, the following discussion is perhaps most salient in the European context.
The Specificities of a Network Approach to Food
This section outlines the distinctive features of a network approach to agro food. But first, it must be pointed out that the vocabulary of food networks is not confined to academic domains; food networks are conceived and discussed in activist and policy circles with equal vigor. Nor is this vocabulary deployed from a single philosophical position. The word ‘network’ is often used as spatial metaphor or visualization device without articulating the clear ontological or empirical stance that would follow from an engagement with actor network theory (ANT), (which is generally considered to be the most radical network approach). However, despite the variety of ways in which networks are conceptualized, there are four analytical commitments that are distinctive of a ‘food network’ approach: (1) relationality and co production, (2) embeddedness, (3) materiality and embodiment, and (4) topological spatialities.
Relationality and Co-Production
The network approach is a relational approach. In contrast to approaches that presume modernist divisions (between nature and society, for example), relational approaches understand these divisions as co produced and emergent. That is, instead of assuming autonomous and stable identities, relational approaches assume a radical indeterminacy and aim to avoid imposing a priori definitions and distinctions upon actors/entities. Actors or entities as such are mutually constituted through the relationships that (in)form networks. Importantly, net works, entities, and relations are understood not as simply being there, but as in a continual process of interaction and ‘becoming’.
Embeddedness
An important aspect of the food network approach is an attentiveness to embedded practices, experiences, and situations. Food networks destabilize notions of global and local, or macro and micro, by focusing on embedded interactions. The notion of embeddedness specifically locates the interactions that constitute a network. The concept of embeddedness captures the particularity and context of interconnections, giving consideration to the places and socionatures that inform (and are formed through) a food network. In one of the earliest studies articulating a network approach, Thorne and Whatmore argued that the relations between actors in a Fairtrade coffee network (including farmers, certificatory institutions, consumers, retailers, etc.) should be understood not as inevitable consequences of the systemic globalization of an agro food commodity, as is often portrayed, but as embedded performances that are highly contingent. By attending to the embeddedness of food practices and interactions, the network perspective ‘‘problematises global reach, conceiving of it as a laboured, uncertain, and above all, contested process of ‘acting at a distance’ (Whatmore and Thorne, 1997: 290).’’ In other words, looking at embedded practices enables a critical stance on totalizing discourses and metanarratives, such as globalization.
Materiality and Embodiment
Networks always have physical dimensions; they are made of bodies that are always interactive and multiple. This is not incidental but integral. Playing with the analytic concerns of ANT, feminism, phenomenology, and environmentalism in various ways, food network approaches engage with the material embodiment of food relations, that is to say, with the metabolic relations between the eater and the eaten. Analytic concern is focused on how the process of eating connects different bodies – the stomach, the laborer, the foodstuff – and on how these connections are integral to the unfolding of the food network itself. For example, when thinking about ‘quality’ food networks, it is clear that the discursive ‘qualities’ of food are always bound up with material relations. This materialist aspect of the network approach contributes to posthumanist debates by considering food as a ‘fleshy vector’ through which heterogeneous entities interact and are incorporated into sociomaterial assemblages. This perspective argues that materiality ‘matters’ in the sense that it makes a difference or affects others, in other words that it has agential capacity. A valuable contribution to this debate is Emma Roe’s concept of ‘things becoming food’, in which she adopts a relational materialist approach to interrogate the process of how things become (conceived as) edible. In thinking about the specific material transformations undergone as ‘things become food’, she emphasizes the importance of taking materiality seriously and asks us to address the methodological challenges that are entailed.
Topological Spatialities
A key distinction of the network approach is the way in which space–times are mapped and imagined. In contrast to conventional understandings of space as a flat surface over which things move in a measurable way, networks articulate an alternative spatiality that is folded and nonlinear. The location of food production and consumption are not mapped in terms of the metric distance between them, but in terms of the density and diversity of connections that constitute them. Moreover, whereas a non network analysis of agro food relations might understand the space–time of these relations to be the consequence of a particular economic logic, a network approach interrogates this logic and disrupts the determinism of such analyses. Following the analytical commitments to relationality, embeddedness, and materiality, the topological spatialities, (or folded spaces), of a food network are conceptualized as emerging through the situated relation of bodies to other (multiple) bodies. In this way, space–time is considered as relational and dynamic rather than given and static.
Food Networks in Practice
What emerges from the food network approach is an overarching interest in connectivity, and from the more radical perspectives, an interest in new (anarchic) forms of connectivity. As discussed, the vocabulary of food networks is not confined to agro food studies or academia. In fact, food networks are an excellent example of the ways in which concepts and discourses are mediated through academics, policy makers, social activists, and retailers. This section will point to a few practical mobilizations of the food network approach and flesh out the analytical tropes discussed above.
Co-Producing Organic Foods
It can be argued that the principles of relationality and co production are well articulated by the discourses and practices of organic farming. Through examining the activities of organic box schemes or organic community supported agriculture, a practical articulation of relationality can be discerned. As opposed to traditional farmers’ unions and organizations, these schemes are performative modes of ordering that explicitly enroll multiple actors (including producers, processors, consumers, and distributors) into the food network, and in doing so form producer–consumer alliances that are necessarily interconnected and interdependent. In such schemes, for example, the Riverford Organic Vegbox Home Delivery operation in Devon, UK, the commitment of consumers to producers, and vice versa, anchors a strategic alliance that enables the network to be sustained. Through consumer commitment, flexibility, and support in the form of regular payment to Riverford for a seasonal and variable vegbox, producers have a dependable and direct market for their produce. Producers and consumers experience a material and discursive connectivity through the organic vegbox that is central to the constitution of the food network. Riverford’s website tells us of the ‘‘desire to grow something that was not dependent on subsidies but was actually wanted by customers (http://www.riverford.co.uk; accessed 15 April 2009).’’ Similarly, the popular philosophy articulated by the UK Soil Association regarding the production and consumption of organic foods entails a diffuse relational understanding of health and environment. That is, the Soil Association argues that organic food connects ecological health and human health: ‘‘Eating food grown without unnecessary chemicals is both good for you and the countryside (http://www.whyorganic.org; accessed 15 April 2009).’’ It is purported that ‘‘Organic farmers work with nature. Trees, hedges, and wide un farmed field edges are important on organic farms. These provide habitats for natural predators such as beetles, spiders and birds which control pests (http://www.whyorganic.org; accessed 15 April 2009).’’ These arguments demonstrate how the notion of relationality is expressed by organizations that suggest and perform a co production of natures, hedges, habitats, spiders, foods, and human well being in the making of their food networks.
Embedding Food
The concept of embeddedness, which is central to the network approach, is clearly articulated through agro food movements that seek to localize production – consumption relations. The notion of local food is not the same everywhere – the idea of the ‘local’ is usually full of contradictions and tensions spurred by ethical debates and the politics of scale. Here, a brief discussion of an alternative food movement – FoodShare in Toronto, Canada – will serve to convey what embeddedness can come to look like in practice. FoodShare was founded in 1985 around a concern for the growth of hunger in the city of Toronto following economic recession. FoodShare was originally mandated to coordinate emergency food services, but soon began to explore more restorative methods for addressing issues of food poverty, health, and community well being. As FoodShare’s website states, ‘‘FoodShare tries to take a multifaceted, innovative and long term approach to hunger and food issues. This means that we’re involved in diverse actions: grassroots program delivery, advocacy for social assistance reform, job creation and training, nutrition education, farmland preservation and campaigns for comprehensive food labelling are just a few examples of the areas we work in (http://www.food share.net; accessed 15 April 2009).’’ By promoting policies around social and environmental sustainability through community based outreach projects and education, FoodShare explicitly articulate a concern with ‘embeddedness’. That is, they seek to ‘make food a priority at all levels of society’ by addressing the particular issues faced in their area, embedding more just and health giving food practices in the everyday lives of situated individuals and communities in Toronto.
Materializing Animal Welfare
As discussed above, some network approaches – particularly those influenced by feminist scholarship – take a special interest in embodiment and the shifting materialities of agro food networks. An engagement with the bodily currency of food networks explicitly connects the health of people, animals, plants, and ecologies at large. In ‘quality food’ campaigns, for instance, the materiality of food is explicitly acknowledged in arguments around food quality and safety. Furthermore, the bodily relation of consumer health, producer health, and environmental health is pivotal to their thought and practice. The UK Soil Association implies these connections when making the argument that ‘‘Organic food is good for your health. No food scares have ever included organic food (http://www.whyorganic.org; accessed 15 April 2009).’’ Another acknowledgment of the importance of materiality can be seen in the marketing campaign of ‘Rachel’s Organic’ in Wales, who imply that it is the food itself that physically conveys ‘quality’ through how it tastes. Rachel’s Organic explicitly connect tastiness to the conditions of production: ‘‘We believe that caring for our land and animals in a sensitive way results in far better tasting products, which are good for our customers and their families (http://www.rachelsorganic.co.uk; accessed 15 April 2009).’’ Similarly, the Soil Association claims that ‘‘The welfare of animals is not only important for their happiness but also to produce quality food (http://www.whyorganic.org; accessed 15 April 2009).’’
Through these practical expressions of materialist modes of thought, health is understood as a material condition that is co produced through bodily relations of the soil–cow–milk–human. As ‘Rachel’ states: ‘‘I strongly believe that the cultivation of healthy soil leads to production of wholesome food which in turn promotes the health and well being of those who eat it (http://www.rachelsorganic.co.uk; accessed 15 April 2009).’’ That ecological degradation and animal cruelty lead to the transmission of ill health through a network of relations is a well versed notion in the discourses of alternative food networks. For further examples of the ways in which embodied connectivity is evoked by alternative food movements, see the activist film ‘The Meatrix’ and the Rachel’s Organics promotional film ‘Dancing Cows’
The Topological Spatiality of Fairtrade
Fairtrade is a coded practice and a brand that focuses specifically on the relationship between producers and consumers. There are over 2000 Fairtrade certified products in the UK, which generally come from developing countries in the global South, such as the coffee farmer cooperative, Coopeldos, in Costa Rica. Producer organizations that supply Fairtrade products are inspected and certified by the Fairtrade Labelling Organisations International. The label should ensure that producers receive a minimum price covering the cost of ‘sustainable production’ and premium for support of social or economic development projects. In discussing Fairtrade coffee, Whatmore and Thorne argued that strengthening and embedding certain points of connection, such as farmers’ cooperative institutions, agricultural practices, and consumer knowledge, is important to maintaining flows and connectivities throughout the network. These points of connection are encoded in technologies and legislation – in particular, through labeling and certification practices – which are imperative to the ‘success’ or durability of the Fairtrade coffee network. Traceability and certification practices work by territorializing, or stabilizing, particular social and technical arrangements in order to facilitate the movement of products and strengthen the reliability of the ethical claims that they embody. The Fairtrade label thus makes certain forms of relation durable. In this process, actors are brought into specific material and ethical relations that remap the coffee network.What is important is that the spatiality of Fairtrade coffee is not understood in terms of the metric distance traversed by the coffee as it travels from the locality of the (globally sourced) producer to the locality of the (globalized) consumer. Rather, different actors are connected through specific material and ethical relations, and it is the form that this connectivity takes that is important to us, and to the producers/consumers. The binary concepts of ‘local’ and ‘global’ then seem senseless to the spatiality of this coffee network: through the ethical and material connectivity articulated by the Fairtrade label, the spaces of the global and the local are enfolded.
Conclusion
At this point it is important to remember the diversity of network based approaches that are employed by food geographers. However, it will by now be clear that the network approach to studying and engaging with the geographies of agro food has lent itself to, and been pioneered by, movements and critiques that consider themselves to be alternative or radical. What is it about the network approach that makes it so amenable to a politics of ‘alternativeness’? Although the network approach is entirely applicable to studying any set of food relations, and does indeed de stabilize the alternative versus conventional distinction that we might crudely imply, there is a particular kind of ethics that is articulated through the idea of food networks. It is these ethical implications that make it useful to alternative food movements and radical scholarship. In particular, thinking about relations brings the co production and complexity of materiality to the fore and in doing so, calls for a more than human relational ethics. Not only does this approach challenge exploitative relations, it also gives credence to the active participation of ‘nonhumans’ in food networks This relational approach to ethics swells the company of others to whom our responsibilities extend. As an analytical approach to agro food relations, the network approach facilitates an empirical understanding of the material ways in which human and nonhuman health become intimately connected through the interbodily relations that bind us all together.
Although the more radical approaches to agro food have been seen as interrogative of the geometry of power in networks (by showing how struggles build and maintain particular asymmetrical relationships), it is impor tant to note the critique to which it has been subject. Some are troubled by ANT’s abandonment of the social categories associated with inequality – such as gender, race, and class – without which, they believe, no analytically or politically adequate means of addressing questions of power is possible. Others are more troubled by the opening up of politics to more than human others which is seen as consequence of a loss of privilege attributed to human intentions through ANT’s ‘symmetrical’ approach to agency. These critiques reveal the deep seated and often unexamined humanist commit ments of orthodox social science approaches. Readers should consider the different ways in which power and agency are understood and situated from the perspective of ANT and recognize the challenging and, perhaps unfamiliar, philosophical resources on which it draws to adequately assess these critiques.
By P. Richardson and S.J. Whatmore in "International Encyclopedia of Human Geography", edited by Bob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift, Elsevier Ltd, Oxford, UK, 2009, excerpts vol. 4 pp. 202-207. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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