research :: results
‘Results’ might be the wrong title for a project like this, since it aimed to explore the use of an idea (localism), rather than laying out a ’scientific’ experiment with clearly interpreted outcomes. But here is what I found…
How are the participants involved in alternative food politics?
When defining alternative food projects at the start of the project, I worked with a definition presented by Lucy Jarosz in this journal article, which I have summarized in the first diagram below (Fig. 1). You can click each image to see a larger version. After the interviews, I reproduced this diagram, using the space in the centre to locate the priorities of each group of participants. This is presented by Fig. 2 below.
Figure 1: Defining characterstics of AFNs (after Jarosz, 2008: 232)
Figure 2: Defining the priorities of Fife AFNs (after Jarosz, 2008: 232)
So while Fife Diet participants expressed a committment to all four defining characteristics, other participant groups were more committed to particular elements. This diagram helps express the diversity within alternative food networks, and demonstrates the range of motivations which bring individuals and groups to become involved in alternative food politics.
It became clear during the interviews that there are a wide range of motivations leading people and organizations to get involved with alternative food network activities. For example, for many producers who attend farmers’ markets or run farm shops the primary motivation for selling their produce locally is economic – an alternative route to wholesale retail to supermarkets. For others, such as many participants in the Fife Diet, the primary motivations are concerns about the environmental sustainability of our food system. This range of agendas are presented by Fig. 3 divided by economic, social and environmental. Again, click to enlarge.
Figure 3: Motivations for participation in 'local' alternative food activities
So what does ‘local’ mean in Fife alternative food networks?
As described above, this research worked with the approach that scale is socially constructed. So how is the ‘local’ scale constructed by research participants? I have argued that when the participants were talking about the ‘local’ area with reference to a ‘local food system’, the ‘local area’ was a place in which the agendas detailed above could be enacted successfully.
For example, when purchasing food through the global scale food system represented by supermarkets it is not always possible to buy food which is produced and distributed in a sustainable way, by engaging in a local food system, these agendas relating to sustainability can be enacted successfully.
This doesn’t mean, however, that the ‘local’ area has strict boundaries. While the Fife Diet might be an experiment in eating only food produced within Fife, it seems that this is more of a rhetorical device than a rigorous demarcation of the local. Many Fife Diet participants bought food according to a loose hierarchy: Fife first, then perhaps Angus and the Lothians, then Scotland, then UK. When Fife-based producers couldn’t be found for a certain product at the Fife Farmers’ Markets, producers from Perthshire or Angus were invited in to fill the gap. This suggests that ‘local’ labels – Fife-this or Fife-that – are useful in referring to a set of assumptions about a ‘local’ place, but don’t intend to define the local area with strict geographical boundaries.
How is this ‘local’ space constructed?
I have argued that the ‘local’ space described above is constructed through two processes: the practices of the local food system, and representations of the local food system. Therefore the ‘local’ space (in which the agendas detailed above can be enacted successfully) is constructed by doing local foods and by talking about local foods (in a certain way). An example of the former: going to a farmers’ market and buying direct from the producer rather than going to supermarket. An example of the latter: setting up the Fife Diet website to represent ‘local’ food systems in a certain way. Both of these activities reinforce the ‘local’ space as one in which a food system can be more equitable and more sustainable. These processes are detailed in Fig. 4. Click to enlarge.
Figure 4: The construction of the 'local' through alternative food activities in Fife
When viewed in this way, it is clear that when participants referred to the ‘local’ in the context of alternative food systems in Fife it did not refer to one coherent idea. Rather, the connotations of ‘local’ food are varied, and at times, contradictory. For example, for many Fife Diet participants, constructing an alternative food system is all about rejecting the power of the globalized food system – represented by supermarkets – and about building a local food system. In describing their motivations, some Fife Diet participants talked about rejecting a capitalist food system, associating capitalism with systems that are ‘global’ in scale, and suggesting the the ‘local’ could be a space for an alternative to capitalism. These hopes for the ‘local’ are in stark contrast to some of the motivations expressed in the farming community where the move into direct marketing of their produce, for many producers, is about finding a way to remain economically viable and to sell to new markets. Amongst these participants, there was no desire for the ‘local’ to be a space in which a food system alternative to capitalism could be built. The ‘local’ was just another way of differentiating food products, and a different way of structuring the production, distribution and retail of food.
What is the value of these constructions of the ‘local’ in alternative food politics?
This might sound like an argument for abandoning enthusiasm for ‘local’ food systems, if the local is so messy conceptually and doesn’t have a stable meaning shared by its users. But this is not what I’m arguing.
Adam Moore’s recent article contributing to debates around the politics of scale has helped me to clarify my thinking around this issue. Moore looks in detail at the way we think about scale, and the way we use scalar concepts for political purposes. Part of his argument is that while scalar concepts like the ‘local’ might not have a fixed meaning, by sharing in their construction, these concepts can enable certain “ways of seeing, thinking and acting”. Moore writes:
Recognition that scales are not substantial categories of analysis, but categories of practice,
directs our attention to the ways in which scalar narratives, classifications and cognitive schemas constrain or enable certain ways of seeing, thinking and acting. It opens up to investigation an array of questions about how scale operates as epistemology, shaping what we ‘know’ about the world. (2008, 214)
So in the context of ‘local’ foods in Fife: if we think about this ‘local’ that everyone talks about not as a fixed category but as a way of ‘doing’ individual or group food politics, this might help us think about how “narratives, classifications and cognitive schemas” enable the successful enactment of certain agendas – think here social and environmental concerns for a more sustainable food system, the need to maintain economic viability on small family-owned farms. By constructing this category of the ‘local’, giving it these characteristics of a ‘known place’, a place where trustworthy relationships between producers and consumers can be built, does this actually allow and encourage these practices to take place?
I have argued that by sharing in these constructions of the ‘local’ in alternative food politics in Fife, a diverse group of people and organizations are coming together for the first time to start working together to build a more equitable food system – in social, economic and environmental terms. Around the time that I finished the research, the organizers of the Fife Farmers’ Markets, a food-related business association, the Fife Diet and Food for Fife were meeting together for the first time, bringing together the social, economic and environmental concerns of each group, to explore how they might be able to work together. Would this sort of collaboration have been possible without the shared vision of the possibilities presented in a ‘local’ food system?
