Cooking up Consumer Anxieties about “Provenance” and “Ethics”

Abstract

Provenance is fundamentally about foods' point of origin. It is thus, unsurprising that studies of food provenance typically focus on circumstances of production and the routes foods follow to get to situations of exchange and, to a lesser extent, final consumption. However, this dominant framing leads to an asymmetry of attention between production and consumption. By neglecting the situatedness of food purchase and use, much of what makes provenance meaningful and productive for consumers is missed. This paper draws upon qualitative and ethnographic data to explore why and how it sometimes matters where food comes from. What emerges is an expanded and problematized practical understanding of provenance, where concerns for the point of origin is generally inseparable from, and subsumed within, a broader range of ethical concerns about where food comes from.

Keywords:

• provenance
• consumer ethics
• practices
• shopping
• provisioning
• care

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Angela Meah

Angela Meah is a research fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield. Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Winter Street, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK ([email protected]).

Matt Watson

Matt Watson is a senior lecturer in social and cultural geography at the University of Sheffield. Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Winter Street, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK ([email protected]).