‘Placing’ Sustainable Food Practices by Geographical Knowledge? Insights from the German Dairy Industry

Abstract

Drawing on the literature on Commodity Cultures, this paper analyses the deployment of geographical knowledge by German dairy firms in the promotion of (what they regard as) sustainable dairy production. The analysis is based on a content analysis including various materials (e.g. annual reports, sustainability reports, newsletters, advertisements) of 26 companies, covering around 75-80 per cent of the German dairy market. The empirical findings show that specific forms of geographical knowledge, that is, knowledge about regions of origin, production methods and/or cultural settings, are used to primarily emphasise four sustainability issues: protection of natural/cultural landscapes; climate protection; family, community and local heritage; reciprocity of human-animal-nature relations. However, as the promotion of these issues is favoured, among others, by the ambiguity of the term 'sustainability', German dairy firms may capitalise on a variety of constructed narratives and pictures having the power to 'embellish' different dairy practices that are presumed to be sustainable.

Animal geographies II: Killing and caring (in times of crisis)

“…The second domain of care for animals is in the production and consumption of food. Concepts of 'conviviality' (Donati, 2019) and 'reciprocity' (Klein, 2019) are enrolled to think through human-animal relations on farms, as means of promoting multispecies ethics and sustainability. For Donati (2019), conviviality involves care beyond the human, for animals and landscape.…”

“…This call is being answered. Recent work explicitly engages the political, through gender (Doubleday and Adams, 2019; Must and Hovorka, 2019; Patchin, 2020), justice (Brown et al, 2019; Pitas and Shcheglovitova, 2019), capital (Barua, 2019; Klein, 2019; Satizábal and Dressler, 2019), biopolitics (Margulies, 2019a; Wakefield, 2019; Wrigley, 2018) and the ongoing consequences of colonialism (Bluwstein, 2018; Isaacs and Otruba, 2019; Margulies, 2019a; Pratt, 2019; Wilson, 2019). Second, as in other fields of geography, relational approaches are being widely applied in animal geographies.…”