Revealing Materials: plastics in alternative food economies

ABSTRACT

This article draws upon recent geographical work on assemblage to reconsider how we understand alternative food economies. In particular it brings attention to the devices upon which these economies rely—specifically plastics. Since the mid-twentieth century, plastics have developed close and complex relations with our agrifood systems; they facilitate commodity valuation and product circulation worldwide but are also recognised as problematic due to their environmental and human health impacts. Despite this paradox and the attention plastics increasingly receive, we know little of their relations with alternative food initiatives (AFIs). How do plastics inhabit alternative food economies? What associations and circulations become performed? What do these markets look like from a device-oriented perspective? To address these questions, the paper draws on fieldwork undertaken in Brisbane (Australia) with two AFIs—a weekly organic market and an online box program/wholesaler. Using visualisation and an assemblage approach discloses the presences, flows, functions, and tensions of plastics in AFIs. In this way, plastics are revealed but also act to reveal alternative food economies. This analysis steps away from evaluations of AFIs’ (in)effective challenge to neoliberalisation to consider them as complex, processual, sometimes ambivalent efforts that not only distribute ‘good food’ but engage in important ways with things like plastics.

KEYWORDS:

• Alternative food economies
• plastics
• assemblage
• visualisation
• Australia

Acknowledgements

My gratitude to the generous people at Food Connect and Northey Street Organic Market for their time and thoughts, to John Gunders for assistance in auditing, and to J. Scott Amort for visualisation consultation. Thanks also to Chantel Carr, two anonymous reviewers, and the editor for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In contrast, in Europe 38 per cent of the 299 million tonnes of plastics consumed goes to landfill (PlasticsEurope 2015), and landfill bans have been instituted in several countries.

2. Fewer producers delivering from further away or through wholesale markets reused packaging materials circulating in FC – over half of those within 50 km took packaging for reuse compared with less than a quarter of those over 200 km away, and only 13 of the 46 producers using the central market reused FC materials (compared with almost half of direct deliverers).

3. Despite multiple visits supplemented by interviews, this visualisation omits some plastics at the market. Not all were visible or easily observed (e.g. bags under counters). In addition, plastics used by every booth to structure the market – such as tables and tarps – have been omitted for visual clarity.

Additional information

Funding

Funding was received from the Australian Research Council (DP130101249, awarded to Gay Hawkins).