Transparency in a local food market

• In Event: 3547 - Regulating Consumption, Regulating Consumers

Abstract

Transparency is an important concept at the intersection of food movement activism and food marketing. The central idea is that if we knew what went into industrial food production (animal cruelty, environmental costs, human costs, etc.) that we would not eat industrial food. A common corollary suggests that other types of transparency can provoke satisfaction or pleasure instead of disgust or pity. The idea here is that knowing our food and where it comes from has distinct pleasures that are worth the cost in terms of additional time, effort, and money. In this study, I draw on about one year of fieldwork in a specialty grocery store that attempted to enact this kind of transparency -- and in so doing, change how its customers thought about their food, their relationships to both the environment and the labor that produced it, and their own place in the food chain. I argue that this kind of effort faces two main obstacles. The first is the way that transparency articulates with food safety discourse that emphasizes individual health and provokes a desire for purity and sterility. The second is the way that transparency articulates with neoliberal ethical consumption discourse that emphasizes individual responsibility and equates doing good with responsible consumption. Both interfere with the goal of actually changing how people relate to food -- and in particular, of provoking a deeper recognition of the connections and relationships that make up contemporary food chains.

Author

• Sang-hyoun Pahk, University of Hawaii at Manoa