‘Back to Nature’: Changing ‘Worlds of Production’ in the Food Sector

Abstract

 B' D the citizens of mediaeval Florence flee the city to escape the plague and, in one fell swoop, the city comes to be equated with disease, degradation and death. The countryside, on the other hand, facilitates a flight from human-made squalor and promises a reaffirmation of life in the face of urban horror. We find in Decameron, therefore, a reversal of the previously prevailing spatialized moral association, which upheld the city because it offered an escape from the misery and backwardness of rural life, as a locus of 'civilization.' Boccaccio, however, does more than simply reverse this association for he goes on to glorify nature; he extols it for its freedom from the corruption of social life. Nature, through reference to the plague, becomes a source of purity and truth.In his recent book, The social construction of nature (), Eder uses this short vignette to illustrate the emergence of what he calls "the double structure of the modern experience of nature" (p. ). When the citizens of Florence fled into the countryside, in the belief that they were embracing a realm free from the polluting interference of the social, they were, in effect, laying the foundations for a 'moralization' of nature. The mediaeval Florentines were asserting an untainted and unspoiled natural realm as the antidote to all that was thought wrong with the degraded and corrupt city. According to Eder, this conception of nature, established in mediaeval times, re-emerges in the modern era. Perhaps its most well-known proponents could be found in the Romantic movement for they also tended to see nature as "the binding and infallible system of reference beyond everything that is merely artificial" (Eder , p. ). The Romantic view was, however, not asserted in opposition to occurrences such as plague but rather against a dominant modern perspective which believed nature I

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