OXFORD GEOGRAPHICAL AND
ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
Editors: Gordon Clark, Andrew Goudie, and Ceri Peach
WORLDS OF FOOD
Editorial Advisory Board
Professor Kay Anderson (Australia)
Professor Felix Driver (United Kingdom)
Professor Rita Gardner (United Kingdom)
Professor Avijit Gupta (United Kingdom)
Professor Christian Kesteloot (Belgium)
Professor David Thomas (United Kingdom)
Professor B. L. Turner II (USA)
Professor Michael Watts (USA)
Professor James Wescoat (USA)
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ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES SERIES
The Globalized City
Economic Restructuring and Social Polarization in European Cities
Edited by Frank Moulaert, Arantxa Rodriguez, and Erik Swyngedouw
Of States and Cities
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Edited by Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen
Globalization and Integrated Area Development in European Cities
Frank Moulaert
Globalization and Urban Change
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Kris Olds
Sustainable Livelihoods in Kalahari Environments

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ß Kevin Morgan, Terry Marsden, and Jonathan Murdoch 2006
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The Oxford Geog raphical and Environmental Studies series aims to reXect
this diversity and engagement. Our goal is to publish the best original
research in the two related Welds, and, in doing so, to demonstrate the sig-
niWcance of geographical and environmental perspectives for understanding
the contemporary world. As a consequence, our scope is deliberately inter-
national and ranges widely in terms of topics, approaches, and methodo lo-
gies. Authors are welcome from all corners of the globe. We hope the series
will help to redeWne the frontiers of knowledge and build bridges within the
Welds of geography and environmental studies. We hope also that it will
cement links with issues and approaches that have originated outside the
strict con Wnes of these disciplines. In doing so, our publications contribute to
the frontiers of research and knowledge while representing the fruits of
particular and diverse scholarly traditions.
Gordon L. Clark
Andrew Goudie
Ceri Peach
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To the memory of Jonathan Murdoch
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some books are more of a collective endeavour than others, and this is
emphatically one of them. From start to Wnish we have received a wide
array of support—intellectual, practical, and emotional. In the United States
we must thank Bill Friedland, Melanie DuPuis, David Goodman, Michael
Watts, Dick Walker, and Elizabeth Barham. In Italy we’d like to thank
Gianluca Brunori and Claudio Cecchi. In the United Kingdom we must
thank David Barling, Bill Goldsworthy, Duncan Green, Tim Lang, Bob
Lee, Peter Midmore, Louis Morgan, Robin Morgan, Sue Morgan, Rory
O’Sullivan, Pam Robinson, Andrew Sayer, and Neil Ward. Among our
colleagues in the School of City and Regional Planning we would like to

3.1b. ConAgra joint ventures and strategic alliances 57
3.2. Rural space as competitive space and the ‘battleground’
between the co nventional and alternative agri-food sectors 72
6.1. The structure of the Agri-Food Partnership in Wales 158
6.2. The Agri-Food Strat egy in outline 160
Box Figures
1. The Graig Farm network 78
2. An organigram of the Waddengroup Foundation 80
LIST OF TABLES
2.1. EU and US farm support systems in comparative perspective 37
2.2. Rival approaches to biotechnology regulation 45
3.1. Theorizing food quality—opening up the quality
food spectrum: the SFSC battlegroun d 73
5.1. California agri-food initiatives 137
7.1. The top ten food retailers in 2002 179
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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
AFI Alternative food initiative
AFN Alternative food network
ANT Actor–Network theory
AoA Agreement on Agriculture
AOC Appellation d’origine contro
ˆ
le
´
e
CAFOD Catholic Agency for Overseas Development
CAP Common Agricultural Policy
CCOF California CertiWed Organic Farmers
COFA California Organic Foods Act

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Introduction
When Guillermo Vargas from Costa Rica visited the British House of
Commons in 2002 to publicize Fairtrade For tnight, he delivered a stark
message. ‘When you buy Fairtrade’, he said, ‘you are supporting our dem-
ocracy’. It is hard to imagine a more powerful testament to the ripple eVect of
our food choices. Buying food may be a private matter, but the type of food
we buy, the shops or stalls from where we buy it, and the signiWcance we
attach to its provenance have enormous social consequences. Our food
choice has multiple implications—for our health and well-being, for eco-
nomic development at home and abroad, for the ecological integrity of the
global environment, for transport systems, for the relationship between
urban and rural areas and, as the Fairtrade story shows, for the very survival
of democracy in poor, commodity-producing countries.
Although food consumption habits show considerable diVerences between
countries, and between social classes within countries, a number of generic
trends have emerged in recent years, some of which have been attributed to
the globalization of style and taste. In the processed food cultures of the US
and the UK, for example, the key trends include the increasing popularity of
convenience foods, the decreasing amount of time devoted to preparing
meals, the falling share of money de voted to food in the household budget,
the primacy of price when buying food, and, more recently, burgeoning
concerns among all classes of consumer about the quality and safety of food.
Some of these trends appear to be contradictory, particularly the emphasis
on cheap food on the one hand and the growing demand for healthy food on
the other. Another example might be the growing interest in local food,
which is often equated with fresh and wholesome produce, and ‘global
sourcing’, which aims to transcend the constraints of locality and seasonality.
Conventional food retailers are acutely conscious of the need to accommo-
date these conXicting signals, as a trade body in the UK freely acknowledged

seasons. Agriculture, in this conception, is just another economic sector, part
of the consumer goods industry.
In recent years, however, a rival interpretation has emerged. This is based
not on the productivist metric of mass production, but on the ecological
metric of sustainable development, a metric that invites us to internalize the
costs that are externalized in the conventional food system. The externalized
costs of the conventional food system are perhaps most apparent in terms of
environmental and healthcare costs. The main environmental costs are re-
lated to the global production and distribution of food. On the production
side, the costs are mainly associated with the intensiWcation of agricultural
production, which has caused declining soil fertility, water pollution, animal
welfare problems, and the loss of valuable habitats and landscape features
(Pretty, 1998; 2002). On the distribution side, the environmental costs of food
miles have been well docu mented. Moreover, despite the fact that aviation is
the most damaging mode of transport, there is no tax on aviation fuel, a
glaring anomaly from the ecological standpoint (A. Jones, 2001).
Human health is another sphere where the externaliz ed costs of the con-
ventional food system are becoming ever more apparent. Among nutrition-
ists, the year 2000 was very signiWcant because for the Wrst time the number of
overweight people in the world matched the number of undernourished
people, with 1.1 billion people in each category (Nestle, 2002). The escalating
2 Introduction
Wnancial costs of diet-related disease are placing intolerable burdens on
healthcare systems, particularly in the US, where the consumption of foods
high in fat, sugar, and salt is associated with high levels of obesity throughout
the population. Recent scientiWc Wndings suggest that fast food creates an
addictive eVect not unlike that of tobacco, leading some authors to argue that
obesity may be less a problem of gluttony and fecklessness, and more a
problem of vulnerable human genes in a hostile food environment (E. R.
Shell, 2002). Whatever the precise cause, obesity presents the conventional

ever, we consider the ‘multiple layers of meaning’ an advantage, rather than a
problem. These multiple meanings range from ‘place’ as a jurisdictional
entity, such as a local authority district, to ‘place’ as a relat ional construct,
where social or political relations are the determining forces, rather than
formal administrative boundaries. Although the capitalist process of ‘cre-
ative destruction’ is ultimately what drives the making and breaking of
Introduction 3
places, this is a deeply mediated process, especially when state action is
invoked to temper or resist the logic of market forces. Some of the rural
places that we examine in later chapters are highly distinctive because, for
much of the post-war period, they were part of a state controlled agri-food
system, rather than a market regime. As this state system in Europe and the
US is gradually liberalized, these rural places have to invent new vocations
for themselves, for example by diversifying into quality products that play
upon their association with place and provenance. Adjusting to a more
spatially conscious world of producti on and consumption is much less of a
challenge for such countries as Italy and France, where a link between places
and products has been maintained, than for such countries as the US and the
UK, where regionally distinctive products long ago gave way to the anon-
ymity of manufactured products, the legacy of which is a ‘placeless food-
scape’ (Ilbery and Kneafsey, 2000: 319).
Although it is often conXated with place, provenance has a much wider
meaning. Its literal meaning—which is the place of origin or the earliest
known history of something—is an ambiguous amalgam of the spatial and
the social, of geography and history. With respect to food, we use the term in
the widest sense to embrace a spatial dimension (its place of origin), a social
dimension (its methods of production and distribution), and a cultural
dimension (its perceived qualities and reputation). The social dimension is
particularly important because it helps consumers to deal with the ethical
issues in globally dispersed food supply chains, including the employment

ing itself up to moral economy, agri-food studies could also beneWt from
more critical engagement with theories of multilevel governance because, far
from being a local matter, food chain localization will need to draw support
from every tier of the multilevel polities that govern our lives today.
The twin perspectives of moral economy and multilevel governance help to
shape the analysis in the following chapters. Chapter 1 reviews some of the
theoretical literature that we consider to be most relevant to the task of
theorizing the ‘worlds of food’ that straddle the conventional and alternative
food systems. In particular, we focus on the contribution of three sets of
theories, namely political economy, actor–network, and conventions theory,
to examine what each has to oVer. Chapter 2 examines the protean regula-
tory world of agri-food at three diVerent levels of governance: the global
level, where we focus on WTO eVorts to liberalize world agriculture; the EU
and US levels, where we show that the farm support systems are being
reregulated rather than deregulated; and the UK level, where we examine
the advent of a dedicated Food Standards Agency to champion the neglected
consumer voice in a food system hitherto dominated by producer interests.
Chapter 3 extends the thematic focu s by examining the changing geographies
of agri-food, contrasting the deterritorializing thrust of the conventional
food system with the reterritorializi ng logic of the alternative food system.
Following the three opening thematic chapters, we turn to consider three
regional worlds of food in Tuscany, California, and Wales. We selected
Tuscany because it is one of the pioneering regions in Europe for what we
call ‘localized quality’ production, a system that aims to oV er an alternative
to the productivist philosophy of the conventional food system. If Tuscany is
a European pioneer, then California is certainly an American pioneer, and
perhaps even a global pioneer, because it is deemed by some geographers to
be the world’s most advanced agricultural zone (Walker, 2004). As the
world’s sixth largest economy, and with a state population of 34 million
people, California is more akin to a European country than a European

account for the growing complexity of contemporary agri-food geography.
Growing concerns about food safety and nutrition are leading many con-
sumers in advanced capitalist countries to demand quality products that are
embedded in regional ecologies and cultures. This is creating an alternative
geography of food, based on ecological food chains and on a new attention to
places and natures, that, as we will see in Ch. 3, reveals a very diVerent
mosaic of productivity—one that contrasts in important respects with the
dominant distribution of productive activities so apparent in the global food
sector (Gilg and Battershill, 1998; Ilbery and Kneafsey, 1998).
Our aim is to develop an analytical approach that can aid our understand-
ing of this new agri-food geography and can introduce a greater appreciation
of the complexity of the contemporary food sector. To this end, we begin by
considering work on the globalization of the food sector and by showing that
recent analyses have usefully uncovered some of the key motive forces
driving this process—most notably the desire by industrial capitals both to
‘outXank’ the biological systems and to disembed food from a traditional
regional cultural context of production and consumption. After considering
the recent assertion of regionalized quality (which can be seen as a response
to the outXanking manœuvres inherent in industrialization), we examine
approaches such as political economy, actor–network theory, and conven-
tions theory that have made signiWcant in-road s into agri-food studies and
have revealed diVering aspects of the modern food system. In doing so, we
highlight what we consider the main limitation of these approaches: i.e. their
tendency to conceptualize the contemporary agri-food geography in terms of
binary oppositions—such as, for example, conventional v. alternative, and
global v. local.
In order to begin to overcome such binary thinking, in the last part of the
chapter we analyse and expand Storper’s theory of productive worlds. We
feel this theory helps to engage with the varied outcomes that now exist in the
contemporary food sector and can therefore highlight the implications of

In other words, food chains never fully escape ecology and culture. Thus, in
order to understand the development of the agri-food sector it is necessary to
consider how forces promoting globalization interact with natures and cul-
tures that are spatially ‘Wxed’ in some way. In the following pages we consider
8 Networks, Conventions, and Regions