Biographies and geographies: consumer understandings of the origins of foods

Cook, Ian J.; Crang, Philip; Thorpe, Mark

doi:10.1108/00070709810207522

Cited by 62 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…One important overlapping framework was provenance. Cook et al (1998) have argued that the 'biographies and geographies' of food are important to consumers, who both need to know and need to discount the origins of food in order to construct a 'domestic realm' of food preparation. In this study, these biographies and geographies were also important elements, and across all the focus groups participants referred to local and known provenance as both an intrinsic positive attribute and an indicator of safety.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Short cuts to safety: Risk and 'rules of thumb' in accounts of food choice

Green

Draper

Dowler

2003

Health, Risk & Society

159

130

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A number of 'food scares' over the past decade in Europe have generated considerable debate about public understandings of food risk, and the extent to which such understandings impact on decision making. This paper reports on a focus group study of how UK consumers discuss choosing safe food. Strategies for making food choices were, in general, characterised by confidence rather than anxiety. Although concerned in an abstract way with the safety of food and how it was monitored, 'risk' and 'safety' were rarely the primary discursive framework used for justifying food choices. Other discourses, such as health, naturalness, economy and convenience, competed with, overlapped with or were legitimated by that of 'risk'. However, everyday decision making was presented as a routine endeavour, aided by a number of 'short cuts' or rules of thumb for establishing food choices as routine and unremarkable. These short cuts divided safe from risky categories of food, but also divided preferred from despised foodstuffs in relation to other food discourses. Rules of thumb provided useful rhetorical devices for routinising accounts of food choice. In practice, however, rules of thumb are reported as being utilised in complex and contingent ways. They thus provide a sophisticated bulwark against the uncertainties of food risks when events (such as the media concern over BSE) threaten everyday trust in routine decisions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Short cuts to safety: Risk and 'rules of thumb' in accounts of food choice

Green

Draper

Dowler

2003

Health, Risk & Society

159

130

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Morris and Young, 2004). 2 Both seek to build consumer trust and confidence in food and thus to change consumer behaviour in favour of smaller scale, less damaging production systems, and also to foster a wider 'ethics of care' (Barnett et al, 2005;Holloway and Kneafsey, 2000;Cook et al, 1998). Campaigning groups share this academic agenda and have used reconnection arguments to market produce, for example, through the Countryside Commission's 'Eat the View' and Sustain's 'Sustainable Food Chains' (analysed by Jackson et al, 2006).…”

Section: Fixing the Problem Of Consumer Knowledge About Food Productionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Understanding and (dis)trusting food assurance schemes: Consumer confidence and the ‘knowledge fix’

Eden

Bear

Walker

2008

Journal of Rural Studies

104

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This paper uses evidence from focus groups with consumers in England to consider how consumers understand and evaluate a range of proxies or intermediary organisations that offer assurance about food and consumer products, particularly voluntary certification schemes. This addresses the current concern in developed economies about providing information in order to reconnect consumers with food producers and to support moves towards more local, fairly traded and sustainable production. However, we show that such a 'knowledge fix' approach of providing information may not reconnect consumers so easily. Participants found it particularly difficult to work out what certification involved and what kinds of organisations were providing assurance. They built vernacular typologies and comparative judgements that did not necessarily identify or prioritise 'independent' third-party certification as the gold standard, not least because of the practical difficulties of monitoring complex supply chains, and expressed confusion and scepticism about how well food assurance schemes could work in practice. Our results therefore problematise the knowledge fix urged in the literature and emphasise instead the need to better understand how consumers make sense of assurance information in different contexts. r

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“…Thus, food business cannot be disentangled from farming and agriculture. Research also needs to address the growing disconnection between the points of production and consumption which has been held responsible for consumer detachment from where food originates, how to prepare it safely and how to avoid waste (Cook et al 1998). …”

Section: Environmental and Socio-economic Benefitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An agenda for integrated system-wide interdisciplinary agri-food research

et al. 2017

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This paper outlines the development of an integrated interdisciplinary approach to agri-food research, designed to address the 'grand challenge' of global food security. Rather than meeting this challenge by working in separate domains or via single-disciplinary perspectives, we chart the development of a system-wide approach to the food supply chain. In this approach, social and environmental questions are simultaneously addressed. Firstly, we provide a holistic model of the agri-food system, which depicts the processes involved, the principal inputs and outputs, the actors and the external influences, emphasising the system's interactions, feedbacks and complexities. Secondly, we show how this model necessitates a research programme that includes the study of land-use, crop production and protection, food processing, storage and distribution, retailing and consumption, nutrition and public health. Acknowledging the methodological and epistemological challenges involved in developing this approach, we propose two specific ways forward. Firstly, we propose a method for analysing and modelling agri-food systems in their totality, which enables the complexity to be reduced to essential components of the whole system to allow tractable quantitative analysis using LCA and related methods. This initial analysis allows for more detailed quantification of total system resource efficiency, environmental impact and waste. Secondly, we propose a method to analyse the ethical, legal and political tensions that characterise such systems via the use of deliberative fora. We conclude by proposing an agenda for agri-food research which combines these two approaches into a rational programme for identifying, testing and implementing the new agri-technologies and agri-food policies, advocating the critical application of nexus thinking to meet the global food security challenge.

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Biographies and geographies: consumer understandings of the origins of foods

Cited by 62 publications

References 8 publications

Short cuts to safety: Risk and 'rules of thumb' in accounts of food choice

Short cuts to safety: Risk and 'rules of thumb' in accounts of food choice

Understanding and (dis)trusting food assurance schemes: Consumer confidence and the ‘knowledge fix’

An agenda for integrated system-wide interdisciplinary agri-food research

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