Reviews: Food Fears: From Industrial to Sustainable Food Systems, Worlds of Food: Place, Power, and Provenance in the Food Chain, Coping with Distances: Producing Nordic Atlantic Societies, Contentious Geographies: Environmental Knowledge, Meaning, Scale
Environment and Planning A, 2009
In much writing about agrifood networks, authors often seek to upset dualisms (production ^ consu... more In much writing about agrifood networks, authors often seek to upset dualisms (production ^ consumption, local ^ global, conventional ^ alternative) and resist associations between, for instance, global and powerful, local and sustainable, that some argue are evident in the agrifood literature. In this endeavor, these two books are partly successful. In covering similar geographic territoryöthe US, Canada, the UK, and Europeöboth texts offer a comprehensive overview of what links and separates the conventional and alternative food chains, recognizing that the boundary between them is porous. In each book the authors cover the adaptation of the conventional food system to the importance of provenance, and both studies unpack apprehensions about eating. The authors situate their accounts in regulation theory blended with political ecology, actor-network theory, and political sociology (Blay-Palmer) and political economy drawing from Andrew Sayer's new moral economy and Michael Storper's theory of productive worlds (Morgan, Marsden, and Murdoch). These texts are informative, providing evidence and explanation in sufficient measure, as well as offering important suggestions for change. Worlds of Food begins with an explanation of the difference between place and provenance arguing, unsurprisingly given its theoretical framework, that the creative destruction of capitalism makes place. The authors use case studies of California, Wales, and Tuscany, exploring governance practices and economic processes that produced these agrifood spaces. Chapter 2 concerns the geopolitics of agrifood regulation in the context of the Common Agricultural Policy, the Doha Round of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Food Standards Agency. An analysis of the deterritorializing force of conventional agrifood production, as well as the reterritorialization sought through local food efforts, is the subject of chapter 3. Given these emphases, the text would work well for an undergraduate or masters-level class that covers the geopolitics or the economic geography of food. Organized around consumers' alimentary ambivalences, Food Fears focuses on the potential of the alternative food movement and some of its weaknesses. Alison Blay-Palmer's premise is that the system is broken but can be fixed. The practices of the industrial food system have led to fears, and this is used to great advantage by alternative food networks. These alternative networks reduce fear through trust which the industrial food system then appropriates and exploits to great success. The author offers original research on alternative food retailers in Toronto (chapter 7), an understudied subject in the literature. In other chapters she investigates how health risks in the industrial sector have influenced the development of alternative food (chapter 5, `̀ Translating fear: mad cows, killer carrots and industrial food''; chapter 6, `̀ Eating organic in an age of insecurity''). The book provides extensive coverage of very recent literature, but it is largely a review of theory. The result is a series of unexamined claims and a faithfulness to the face value of the concepts the author uses as well as to alternative food advocates' ideas and programs. The two books vary significantly in the area of editing and writing. Worlds of Food is well organized, convincing, and clearly written, smoothly linking the literature into the structure of the book. Food Fears reads like a dissertation that may well deserve to be published, but would have been better served by more revisions and a tough editor. There are awkward sentences, stilted diction, strings of citations, and missing words. It almost seems as if the book was rushed to print. The respective authors want to bring nature into the discussion of food and in both cases this seems like an add-and-stir effort in which nature is secondary to the authors' primary interests. This is not a major criticism; the focus of these works was not, after all, questions of Reviews Environment and Planning A 2009, volume 41, pages 250 ^ 254
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