The political work of food delivery: consumer co-operative systems and women’s labor in “relationless” Japan

ABSTRACT

In recent history, the sudden visibility of food delivery services has alerted global publics to the labor asymmetries and the transformative potential of food transport in societies upended by change. Responding to these developments, this essay offers an ethnographic account of the gendered political economy of food distribution at the Green Coop Consumers Cooperative. A forerunner of the Japanese food movement, Green Coop and its delivery routes have become a platform for women workers to witness and respond to the societal effects of the country’s neoliberal restructuring. While similar organizations in other cultural contexts have struggled to move beyond exclusionary practices, women and mothers at this Fukuoka-based co-op foster social connection, accountability, and watchfulness in ways that surpass the capabilities of kin and state. Where scholarship has taken interest in the connective tissues between the spheres of production and consumption, this essay highlights and politicizes the node of distribution. Often cast as purely technical, the work of delivery is a prism through which to understand how demographic reforms bear on the food system, and how it has in turn become a site for citizens’ response.

KEYWORDS:

• Alternative food network
• consumer co-operative
• food delivery
• gender
• neoliberalism
• Japan

Acknowledgments

The author would like to sincerely thank the Green Coop Consumers Cooperative for its enduring enthusiasm and support for this research. Members of Green Coop Fukuoka’s Workers Collective welcomed me into their midst, and their dynamism inspired the analysis presented here. This paper benefited greatly from the incisive comments and suggestions of two anonymous reviewers, the editor, and colleagues at Yale University’s Department of Anthropology.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A is Monday morning, B is Monday afternoon, C is Tuesday morning, D is Tuesday afternoon, and so on.

2. En (縁) is a versatile word that can mean anything from a relationship, bond, or link, as in family ties and affinities, to a mysterious force that binds people together, as in “fate” or “destiny.” To have no en is thus to be relationless, irrelevant, or, in the Buddhist sense of the term, unable to be saved.

3. Consumer co-ops falling under this category include the Seikatsu Club, PAL System, Radish Boya, and Daichi o Mamoru Kai, all of which are headquartered in the metropolitan Tokyo area.

4. For the month of March, when I was volunteering on the routes, Green Coop’s 407,097 members collectively returned 101.4% of its milk bottles, 96.5% of its plastic mold packs, 72% of its reusable bottles, 44.7% of its plastic trays, and 11.1% of its plastic bags for recycling.

Additional information

Funding

This research was generous funded by the Japan Foundation, reference number 10102350; and the Council on East Asian Studies, MacMillan Center on International and Area Studies at Yale University;Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies [n/a];

Notes on contributors

Alyssa Paredes

Alyssa Paredes is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist with research interests in the human, environmental, and metabolic infrastructures of transnational food chains. Her long-term fieldwork commitments are in the Philippines and Japan, where she collaborates with civil society organizations invested in environmental issues and solidarity building in the Asia-Pacific region. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology with distinction from Yale University and was LSA Collegiate Fellow at the University of Michigan between 2020 and 2022.