Buying Local Food: Shopping Practices, Place, and Consumption Networks in Defining Food as “Local”

Abstract

Increasing awareness and concern with global climate change has led to a push to identify local food consumption as a way to reduce food miles and help preserve the environment. The journey from farm to fork is rarely a simple connection between farmer and consumer but involves a range of different actors and agents, located in different places and at different socioeconomic scales. The result is a confusing array of meanings that can be attached to food items considered to be local (e.g., local supplier, local producer, local commodity chain, local cultural product). This research explores the ways that retailers seek to sell local food, ways that this term is understood by consumers, and ways that consumers negotiate these differences. The research employs a case study methodology and draws on interviews with producers and white, middle-class consumers located in West Yorkshire in the United Kingdom. Shopping is a skilled activity and the local is revealed as a complex intersection of provisioning decisions and practices that household food buyers undertake in the context of food availability and the racialized and classed marketing strategies of retailers, which in turn makes problematic the food miles concept for political mobilization.

El creciente interés y preocupación por el cambio climático global ha llevado, entre otras cosas, a que se promueva el consumo de alimentos locales, para reducir el recorrido de los productos alimenticios y ayudar así a preservar el medio ambiente. El viaje desde la granja al tenedor raramente es una simple conexión entre el cultivador y el consumidor, sino que implica una interacción de diversos actores y agentes, localizados en diferentes lugares y en diferentes escalas socioeconómicas. El resultado es un confuso aparato de significados que pueden asignarse a ítems comestibles considerados como locales (por ejemplo, expendedor local, productor local, cadena local de productos, producto cultural local). Esta investigación explora el modo como los comerciantes al menudeo buscan vender alimentos locales, lo que este término puede significar para los consumidores, y las maneras como éstos asimilan tales diferencias. En la investigación se utilizó una metodología de estudio de caso, apoyándonos en entrevistas con productores y consumidores blancos de clase media de West Yorkshire, Reino Unido. Hacer compras es una actividad refinada y lo local se revela como una intersección compleja de decisiones de aprovisionamiento y prácticas que los compradores para consumo hogareño emprenden dentro del contexto de disponibilidad de productos, y las estrategias de mercadeo de los comerciantes al detal, influidas por raza y clase, lo que a su turno hace problemático utilizar el concepto de millas/alimentos para movilización política.

Key Words:

• consumption
• local food
• place
• retail
• United Kingdom

关键词:

• 消费
• 本地食品
• 地点
• 零售
• 英国

Palabras clave:

• consumo
• alimento local
• lugar
• menudeo
• Reino Unido

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust as is derived from the project titled “Feeding the Family: U.K. and Hungary,” which is part of the Changing Families/Changing Food research program. We wish to acknowledge the participation of the study participants who gave freely of their time; Peter Jackson and the anonymous peer reviewers for their careful and thoughtful comments on an earlier draft; and Audrey Kobayashi for her timeliness and guidance through the process of publishing this work.

Notes

1. Sustain, an alliance of more than one hundred food and farming advocacy groups in the United Kingdom, for example, proposes a definition of local food as food that is “produced, processed and traded, from sustainable production systems where the physical and economic activity is controlled within the locality (usually 30 miles) where it was produced, which delivers health, economic, environmental and social benefits to the people in those areas” (Sustain 2008, 16).

2. Hinrichs and Kremer (2002) made the argument that because those who belong to local food movements tend to be white, middle-class consumers, there is an exclusionary practice to local food systems that defines insiders and outsiders. Likewise, Winter (2003) illustrated the range of political agendas that are encapsulated within these movements. Although both of these points are important, in this article, we wish to move away from a notion of consumers as active and intentioned members of a particular movement toward a notion of consumers that views their consumption practices in terms of a socially shared understanding of ordinary. This focus on what consumers view as ordinary seeks to move away from a singular notion of an ordinary consumer. Indeed the consumers in our study do practice consumption heterogeneously when viewed from the researcher's perspective, but their accounts reveal that they understand their own performance of consumption as being ordinary and akin to what others do, as opposed to consumption that might be performed by a gourmet, for example. (See Lee 2006 for more discussion of the ordinary in economic life.)

3. It is notable that these food shopping studies in the United Kingdom have made no mention of the ethnicity of their participants. Jackson et al. (2006) referred to their participants as being representative of “middle England” and refer to Clarke et al.'s (2006) discussion, which discusses factors such as home ownership, joblessness, and car ownership as key characteristics. Portsmouth, where their study was conducted, has a diversity index of just .16, which is a 16 percent probability that two people selected at random would be from different ethnic groups. This represents a lower than national rate of ethnic diversity. Likewise, although Gregson, Crew, and Brooks (2002) focused on women as shoppers, they made no mention of the ethnic diversity in their study. As a result, although one can comfortably suggest that our discussion of food shopping is likely to be largely a white representation, we must also stipulate that at present relatively little is still known about the shopping behavior of those UK residents who are not white (see also Omar, Hirst, and Blankson 2004). We thank Professor Kobayashi and an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that we emphasize this point.

4. According to the Joint Industry Committee for Regional Press Research new readership data (2008) there were 11,080 households and approximately two thirds of the population is in social classes A, B, and C1. This British class categorization is based on six classifications. Categories A and B include upper managerial and professional occupations.

5. Since we did these interviews, this has closed and is now a Marks and Spencer food store.

6. According to the 2001 Census, in England the white population accounts for 90 percent of the total population. Using ward-level data, the percentage of the population that is non-mixed-race white was calculated for each Booths location. Just two of the twenty-six locations were in areas that were less than 97 percent white, and these two locations, both in Preston where Booths started out, are still above this national percentage at 91 percent and 93 percent.

7. The name of this retailer has been changed in accordance with UK ethical guidelines.