A background to food studies

Peter Atkins and Ian Bowler (2001) Food in society: economy, culture, geography London: Arnold ISBN 0 340 72003 4 (hbk); 0 340 72004 2 (pbk) http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780340720042/ PART I Hors d'oeuvre 1 A BACKGROUND TO FOOD STUDIES ‘Cooking is a moral process, transferring raw matter from “nature” to the state of “culture”, and thereby taming and domesticating it...Food is therefore “civilised” by cooking, not simply at the level of practice, but at the level of the imagination’ (Lupton 1996, 2). INTRODUCTION From the points of view of epistemology (theories of knowledge and method) and general zeitgeist (spirit of a particular time), there have been many influences over the years on the study of food. The following list is merely a sample of recent trends:  The political economy of food systems and the associated concepts of food filières, food régimes, food networks, and systems of provision. Marxist structuralist writers in particular focused on this in the 1980s and 1990s.  The ‘cultural turn’ in social science in the 1990s, which unleashed a new series of writings on food, some using the qualitative methodologies of ethnography, and many having a ‘postmodern’ flavour.  The French Annales school of history, especially in the 1960s and 1970s through the work of Fernand Braudel, who was interested in all aspects of ‘material life’ (Forster and Ranum 1979).  The surge of interest in food amongst the general public in the last twenty years. This has been driven to some extent by the recent increase in exotic foodstuffs available in supermarkets and the number of cooking programmes on the television and cookery books in the shops.  Recent worries about food safety, which have created a climate of fear and distrust surrounding the activities of commercial food companies and government food regulation. This has been balanced to some extent by the discovery of a number of ‘functional foods’ that are attributed with a health-giving property.  The connexions between food and the body touch on more than just health. A number of eating problems, such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia, are associated with the role of food in crises of bodily identity. 1  Awareness of hunger and malnutrition in poor countries, and the explanation of famine given by Nobel Prize-winning author Amartya Sen. This chapter seeks to demonstrate the rich variety of disciplinary and theoretical contexts in which food studies have flourished as a result of these and other intellectual currents. HISTORICAL APPROACHES Although some historical studies of food are either antiquarian or are intended to illuminate a time-specific setting, many scholars have used food as an evolutionary marker of change over long periods, with the aim of making generalizations about socio-economic behaviour. Burnett (1979) in particular has shown the central role of food in the study of social history, for instance as a major contributor to the changing cost of living. Paul Glennie (1995) prefers to investigate the changing nature of consumption by identifying the various stages in the evolution of the mass market. This must include material considerations of wealth and the technology of production, but studies of the culture of consumption are also important, as are supply-side factors such as the emergence of new retail forms (Lancaster 1995). Mennell, Murcott and van Otterloo (1992) identify a ‘developmentalist’ food literature. In their view this includes some of the writings of Marvin Harris (1986), Stephen Mennell himself, and others such as Sidney Mintz and Jack Goody. The orientation here is towards the explanation of socially and geographically varied patterns of food consumption in terms of their historical evolution in particular contexts of economy and the exercise of power. Thus food avoidances and preferences are not random and beyond rational explanation, but can be elicited from a series of historical events that have left their trace in present-day diets. Mennell’s influential book (1985) is discussed critically by Warde (1997), who sees it as an extension of Norbert Elias’s work on the civilizing process. Mennell’s implicit underpinning is the supply-side commodification of food within a structure of manufacturing and service-sector capitalism. Mintz (1985), on the other hand, works within the framework of World Systems theory, a materialist approach to the study of change initiated by Immanuel Wallerstein. Grew (1999) has edited a collection of papers with a similar, global outlook. Other historians have looked at the changing role of particular commodities over long periods of time. Salaman’s (1949) study of the potato is justly famous (see also McNeill 1999), along with Mintz (1985, 1999) on sugar. Others have concentrated on the evolution of national diets (Drummond and Wilbraham 1957; Levenstein 1988, 1993), the long-running Historians’ and Nutritionists’ Seminar being a particularly wide-ranging project in this regard (Yudkin and McKenzie 1964; Barker, McKenzie and Yudkin 1966; Barker, Oddy and Yudkin 1970; Barker and Yudkin 1971; Oddy and Miller 1976, 1985; Geissler and Oddy 1993; Burnett and Oddy 1993). A particularly encouraging recent development has been the emergence of international societies whose aim is the study of food in a comparative context. The International Commission for Research into European Food History (founded 1989) has been particularly active (Burnett and Oddy 1993; Hartog 1995; Schärer and Fenton 1998; Teuteberg 1992) and new the Association for the Study of Food and Society seeks to achieve the same on a global scale. 2 Popular enthusiasm for the history of cooking has encouraged extensive publication in this area, along with public events such as the annual Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, which has been organized every year since 1981. CULTURAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES During the twentieth century many sociologists and anthropologists took an interest in food, from the functionalists to the structuralists. Among the functionalists, in their first flowering, were empiricists who described food habits in terms of the kind of customary and ritualised behaviour that underpins the reproduction of a stable society (Lupton 1996). They identified certain values and norms in eating patterns that are symbolic of broader structures in society as a whole, and argued that what to outsiders may appear to be strange food customs may in fact have a function that helps to bind society together (Goody 1982). Functionalism emphasizes the utilitarian nature of food and gives primacy to its physical qualities. This whole approach has been criticised for analysing patterns and processes within a static framework, and allowing little room for the explanation or even recognition of the importance of origins, change and conflict. It has also been attacked for the claim that we can identify the functional needs of a social system from its customs and institutional structures without entering into a circular argument (Beardsworth and Keil 1997). Much of the early food-related functionalist work was undertaken by social anthropologists, amongst whom the most prominent were writers such as Audrey Richards and Margaret Mead. By comparison, structuralism seeks broader and deeper causes and meanings of food habits, especially how ‘taste is culturally shaped and socially controlled’ (Mennell, Murcott and van Otterloo 1992). Flavour, texture, nutritional qualities and other biological properties are underplayed in favour of social context. One approach has involved scholars in applying Saussure’s linguistic analysis to an understanding of food culture. In particular, Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908) analysed the universality of oppositional meanings of food such as raw, cooked and rotten (his ‘culinary triangle’). He thought that certain attitudes to food are ‘hard wired’ into the human mind and therefore generate universal structures of thought and of action. But LéviStrauss has been criticised for making ‘fanciful’ assumptions and generalizations from the myths of tribal peoples, and for failing satisfactorily to elucidate the foodways of advanced societies (Bearsdworth and Keil 1997). Roland Barthes (1915-80) was one of the most entertaining and insightful of the structuralists. He brought his semiotic eye to bear in interpreting popular food preferences and food in media such as advertising. He saw foods as a system of signs (Barthes 1967, 28). Like any language, diet has rules of exclusion, signifying opposites (such as savoury/sweet), rules of association for how individual dishes and menus should be assembled, and rituals of use. Again, Saussure’s linguistic structuralism was an influence but, unlike Lévi-Strauss, Barthes discusses concepts such as capitalism and imperialism, and his analysis therefore has greater immediacy for western readers. One of Barthes’ lasting contributions was his identification and interpretation of certain ‘mythologies’ that he drew from everyday life in France itself. He analysed soap powder, the Eiffel Tower, the world of wrestling, and many others. A central theme was food and drink, with commentaries on ornamental cookery, steak and chips, and margarine. He wrote of wine as his country’s totem-drink, corresponding to milk for the Dutch or tea for the British, and 3 therefore standing as a national symbol (Barthes 1972). For Barthes, food was central to various aspects of life touching the body and the mind, all of which are susceptible to a unified method of enquiry, a psychosociology (Barthes 1975). Like Lévi-Strauss and Barthes, Mary Douglas (1975, 1982, 1984, 1998) deciphers the ‘grammar’ of meals, as if they were coded texts to be dismantled into their significant components but she prefers a ‘thick’ description based upon participant observation. She has been called a structural-functionalist because she draws upon elements of both approaches. Her ‘meaning of the meal’ is derived from its role as a structured social event. The linguistic flavour of much of the early structuralism was later leavened by the political economy project of the Marxist structuralists, who, following influential thinkers such as Louis Althusser, were especially important in the philosophical climate of the 1970s and 1980s. They tended to privilege theoretical over empirical insights and were particularly absorbed with the need to uncover the complex structures and processes of capital accumulation. As one example of this approach, Chapter 3 investigates the concept of food régimes. Pierre Bourdieu (1984) has proved to be one of the most significant theorists of relevance to food studies. Like many other writers, he recognised the need to move away from a reliance upon the production-orientated explanations of society, which had for so long dominated materialism, towards a framework that can accommodate considerations of consumption and lifestyle. However, Bourdieu does still see class as important, and interprets taste and the nature of consumption behaviour as both expressions of class identity and as means of reproducing the class distinctions in society. For him food habits represent a naturalization of ideology (Miller 1995). Bourdieu has one foot in structural marxism and the other in cultural studies. There are scholars who would prefer to move further, to privilege the latter at the expense of the former. They do so because they believe that individuals in many societies increasingly have freedom of choice over their own consumption decisions, in ways that are not fundamentally constrained either by the production and marketing decisions of food corporations or by loyalty to a class norm. In this view, consumption is becoming more individualised and informal, and less disciplined (Baumann 1988; but see Warde 1994). Since the 1970s, feminism has added a dimension to food studies that previously was sorely lacking. Feminist writers have analysed the role of women within the household, and especially the fundamental part played by their food preparation tasks in the reproduction of the family (Chapter 23). But they have also addressed the relationship between food and body shape in the construction of female identity within a framework of patriarchal expectations. One wing of feminism even sees dietary items themselves as significant, arguing that killing animals and eating meat are patriarchally-inspired activities (Adams 1990). The cultural turn in social science has affected various aspects of food studies in the 1990s. Bell and Valentine (1997) illustrate the various themes well in their book, concentrating mainly on the relationship between food geographies and consumption. They adopt a scale-focused approach and use sites of analysis starting with the body, then moving to the home, the community, the city, the region, the nation and, ultimately, the globe. Their subtitle is ‘we are where we eat’, a geographical modification of the German dictum ‘man ist was man ißt - you are what you eat’. For most social scientists with an interest in food, this cultural shift has meant the adoption of ethnographic methodologies of data collection. 4 POST-MODERN AND POST-STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES TO FOOD The cultural turn, postmodernism, and poststructuralism are all terms that have been used to summarise recent methodological and theoretical developments in the social sciences. The variety of publications has been exciting and stimulating, with a number of key themes emerging:  Understanding the nature of food-related knowledge through its social construction rather than relying upon ‘objective’ scientific or descriptive historical accounts alone.  A critical approach to food practices which acknowledges their socially, culturally, economically and politically embedded nature, and which seeks out the competing interests that drive change.  Discourses: studying patterns of language and practices in the production of meaning about food.  An interest in diverse sites of activity: popular culture, texts, individuals’ accounts.  The privileging of the body as a crucial site of significance in understanding health and identity issues.  The analysis of identity and subjectivity through the medium of food studies.  Stress upon the fragmentation of food consumption patterns rather than their coherence in economic or cultural terms. Niche markets have been established for slimmers, vegetarians, consumers of organic foods, and so on, but food choice has also become a means of resistance against broader trends in society. Along these lines, Warde (1997, 14-18 and 30-41) has produced a succinct and helpful summary of the competing explanations of recent food consumption trends. He identifies four themes, the first of which deals with a tendency towards arbitrary individual diversity. The argument here is that in recent times the formerly strong social bonds on lifestyles have been loosened and the diversity of consumption behaviour has therefore greatly increased (Beck 1992). The agency of consumers is emphasised over both the social and economic structures in which they find themselves, and this is a crucial means of establishing an individual’s identity (Giddens 1991). The disintegration of constraints (dearth, seasonality, ritual, taboo, cultural foodways) has led to what Fischler (1980) calls `gastroanomy’ (see Chapter 22). This may cause anxiety, for instance about the paradox of plentiful food supplies set against worries about what to choose because of health considerations and body self-consciousness. The second theme addresses what Warde calls post-Fordist food. Here the emphasis is upon the formation of new groups in society, who share types of lifestyle rather than social class. Generational differences and also fashion play their part and, because people may now choose their own package of consumption habits, it is likely that variety within groups of the like-minded will decrease. There is an argument here as to whether niche consumption is voluntarist or the result of trends in capitalism towards more flexible production (Harvey 1989), which would imply that the initiative still lies with the industrialist rather than the consumer. Third, there is the much-discussed phenomenon of mass consumption in a mass society. Ritzer (1993), in particular, identifies a process of ‘McDonaldization’ in which corporations cater to the ‘lowest common denominator’ of mass consumer 5 culture and therefore sell bland, unchallenging products that transcend class and taste boundaries by their broad acceptability. Considerations of mass consumption also include government health campaigns and the construction of public taste through the media. Finally, we must not ignore the persistence of social differentiation. There are increasing income divides between the ‘West’ and the less developed countries, and even in Britain the disparities widened in the 1980s and 1990s. Consumption patterns for the poor remain largely unchanged: they are excluded from the possibilities of quality and variety. According to this perspective, class is still an important aspect of diet (Bourdieu 1984). FOOD SYSTEMS The idea of a ‘food system’ is a convenient means of conceptualising the relationship between the different forces acting upon the commodity flows from producer to consumer. The idea is not new. There is a sizeable literature stretching back one hundred and fifty years, in which writers have described the features of particular food chains. George Dodd’s (1853) book, for instance, was a pioneering attempt to reconstruct the food supply of a particular city across a range of products. Raison’s (1933) two-volume work is an excellent example of the single industry genre, in which his contributors covered every aspect of the British dairy industry from milk production to delivery. More recently, it has been possible to reconstruct food system structures through the complex analysis of industrial input-output matrices (Figure 1.1), and scholars have begun to theorise food system dynamics (Malassis 1973, 1975, 1986). The most recent popular account of ‘the food system’ is by Tansey and Worsley (1995). 6 7 Fine et al. (1996) have commented that food studies hitherto have been highly fragmented, according to the approaches traditionally adopted by individual disciplines, and that they have also been lacking in theoretical coherence. They argue that the time has come for greater cross-fertilization between geography, sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology and the other social sciences that have found some common interest in food. The commodity chain in its various manifestations provides one convenient locus for such cross-fertilization, both conceptually and empirically. It encompasses both production and consumption, and it provides clear links with the spatial conceptions of society. Leslie and Reimer (1999) provide helpful critiques of the commodity chain literature (see also Jackson and Thrift 1995, 212-17; Hartwick 1998; Doel 1999). They identify, first of all, a tradition that derives its inspiration from the world systems theory of writers such as Wallerstein. The agenda here is the tracing of commodity flows at a global scale, in order to uncover the usually biased and exploitative relationship between the raw material provider and the site of consumption. Leslie and Reimer argue that the scale of this analysis leads to the neglect of particular nodes in the chain. Such superficial analyses at the level of the system are reductionist and ignore the role of human agency. Second, Leslie and Reimer unpack the notions of commodity circuits and arenas of consumption. Here the physical commodity is not followed through from plough to plate as it were, but is seen as symbolic of the interactions in society, which are variable in time and space according to contingent articulations. This approach emanates from cultural geographers (see Bell and Valentine 1997, 199-200), but there are possibilities of theoretical hybridities with political economy (Crang 1996; Cook and Crang 1996). It is argued that 'biographies' of foods need to take account of their social constructions as commodities, which will inevitably mean some mutually reflexive interactions between these 'objects' and the hands through which they are passing (Cook et al. 1998). As an example, Cook et al. (1999) discuss the identity politics of ethnic foods and restaurants and their role in the gradual establishment of a multicultural Britishness. Third, we must highlight the 'food networks' literature (Chapter 4). There is overlap here, particularly with the political economy of food, but there is an important input from the methodologically innovative Actor Network Theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour and fellow travellers. Latour provides a means for understanding the links between actors: humans, objects and hybrids of the two. These links are comprised of influences and interactions of various kinds, with agency (human or non-human) more transparent than would be the case in a structuralist or functionalist analysis (Lockie and Kitto 2000). ANT has been adopted by a number of writers on food systems (Murdoch 1994, 1995, 1997; Marsden and Arce 1995). Goodman (1999) has recently presented it as a means of overcoming the inability of agro-food studies to give simultaneous priority to both nature and society (but see Marsden 2000). Fourth, there are the systems of provision (SoP) used by Fine et al. (1996) to describe a preferred focus upon ‘vertical’ rather than ‘horizontal’ commodity themes. Horizontal approaches stress consumption factors that may be identified across the whole of society, such as the social class or gender of consumers, and they also take a broad view of food system activities like production and retailing. An example is the attention given recently to food systems by political economists, many of who have focused upon the expanding role of capital. They have described the economic power of manufacturing food corporations and have identified tendencies towards the 8 industrialization of agriculture. This approach stresses the driving and unifying force of industry in food systems, an underlying assumption being that this will eventually lead to a greater homogeneity in food production, processing and consumption practices. Vertical approaches, on the other hand, treat commodities or groups of commodities separately because their characteristics remain significantly different from each other (see also Galizzi and Venturini 1999). Thus, a perishable dairy food, such as milk, will require a production, processing and marketing regime that is dissimilar from that of, say, wheat. Fine’s rejection of horizontal food system analysis also leads him to question the value of much recent work on consumption. Surprisingly, in view of his relentless critique of positivist classical economics, he seems to be wary of much of the qualitative literature that is emerging with various perspectives on food. The reason given by Fine et al. (1996) is that the post-modernist literature slavishly addresses horizontal issues, such as the construction of meanings and identity through food, to the exclusion of other matters. But one suspects that their unease is also derived from the non-materialist stance of many of the writers under their microscope. In our view, there is much to be learned from the post-modernist and post-structuralist literature, not least the transcending of the commodity focus. Glennie and Thrift (1992, 1993, 1996) agree that SoPs have a place in studies of consumption but they reject Fine’s criticism of horizontal studies. The two are not mutually exclusive. Reconstructing SoPs for individual commodities runs the risk of neglecting the links between systems and the ‘new effects that cannot be traced to a single system’. Rather than adopting Fine’s commodity focus, Glennie and Thrift prefer to anchor their work in the repetitive and intuitive aspects of consumption. Consumers are an important object of study, especially the practical and embodied aspects of their knowledge rather than an intellectualised understanding of them as individualistic subjects. For the pre-1900 period at least, Glennie and Thrift avoid analyses of consumption at the abstract level, such as the semiotics of advertising for instance, and instead devote their energies to recovering the chronologies of consumption history. Glennie (1998) opposes reductionist consumption theory and engages with a detailed historical study of retailing that includes comments on food shopping. Fine is a political economist but he does not subscribe to the consensus of his colleagues on food systems that has emerged over the last twenty years or so. The latter has been driven by the observation that food is increasingly commoditized and that the agrarian economy in general is being drawn into and subsumed within the broader structures of capitalism, to such an extent that industrial conditions of production now prevail in some agricultural sectors. The role of finance capital, the deployment of labour and technology, and modes of capital accumulation are other aspects of these agro-industrial relations that invite styles of analyses also familiar in studies of the restructuring of Fordist and post-Fordist industry. At the global scale, this group of political economists identify what they call ‘food régimes’ (Chapter 3). These are shifts in the patterns of international trade that have evolved from mercantile and colonial structures to an increasing domination by the purchasing and organizational power of Transnational Corporations and by the regulatory systems of the World Trade Organization. Fine and his co-workers recognise the importance of this work by political economists, many of them economic geographers, but they disagree with some of the assumptions. Their most important departure is in arguing that food as a commodity 9 is so different from other products that it deserves separate treatment. They assert that food has ‘organic’ properties that set it apart from the manufacture of cars or textiles (Fine 1993). The food system is squeezed into the fault line between environment and society, and as such is conditioned by natural phenomena. Human control is increasing but food systems are still largely dependent, first, upon production conditions that are influenced by soil, sun and water, and, second, upon the perishability of foods, which means that they must be handled with great care at every stage from the field to the table. These considerations impose organizational and technological constraints that are of a different order from those of other industrial sectors. Fine et al. (1998) also stress the biological needs of the human consumers at the end of the food chain. This is highly significant because of the frequency of food consumption, coupled with food being literally a matter of life or death for us all. A second essential consideration is that there is an upper physical limit to food consumption of a kind that applies to no other goods. There is only so much we can eat or drink at a sitting, or for that matter in a lifetime, and this is different from our insatiable demand for other items. The present authors agree with Fine and his co-writers that a holistic analysis of food systems (SoPs in their terms) is productive. Tracing the chain from production through to consumption helps us to grasp the contingent combinations of factors that bear in: economic, social, cultural, political, technological, and so on. We would go further and argue that patterns of evolution are absolutely fundamental to these contingencies, with the result that historical geographies of food systems must not be neglected. However, this argument is not developed further here as we wish to develop other approaches to the study of food. FOOD STUDIES AS AN INTER/MULTI-DISCIPLINARY PROJECT There is no doubting that in developed countries the general public’s interest in food is growing. In Britain the television schedules are sprinkled with cookery programmes and the best-seller lists are regularly topped by cookery books written by celebrity chefs such as Delia Smith. The regular links now made between food and health, coupled with the appearance of food issues on the political agenda in the 1990s, have made us all care and worry about our diet. This popular upsurge of food awareness has no doubt encouraged the parallel expansion of academic research. Particularly important was the Economic and Social Research Council’s research programme, ‘The Nation’s Diet’, which ran from 1992 to 1998. Anne Murcott (1998a) has given a full account of its objectives and results, but in sum it funded a multidisciplinary agenda of work that sought to answer the question ‘why do we eat what we do?’ (Table 1.1). There was involvement by practitioners of economics, geography, psychology, social administration, anthropology, sociology, education, marketing and media studies. According to Murcott (1998a, 9-13), this plurality of disciplines demonstrated the strength of diversity in the social sciences, and she warned against any raised expectations that this programme might represent a statement of integration. Table 1.1 The main themes of the Nation’s Diet research programme 10  The formation and impact on food choice of individual attitudes, beliefs and knowledge.  Cultural definitions and the symbolic use of food.  Social processes and food choice.  Micro-economic influences on food choice. Source: Murcott (1998a, 10). We do not share Murcott’s pessimism and prefer to argue that intellectual barriers have been exaggerated and that, if anything, there has been a recent convergence of the social scientific and cultural theories of relevance to food studies. Indeed, our own research experience suggests tremendous opportunities for crossfertilization between disciplines. Practical issues, mainly constraints of time and funding, continue to exist but they are not insurmountable. The fostering of interdisciplinary ‘food studies’ centres would be a start, along with the academic superstructure of learned journals and societies. Several already exist and more are likely to follow. FURTHER READING AND REFERENCES A number of recent textbooks explore the general issues of food studies in greater detail than we have time for here. In particular the reader is referred to Beardsworth & Keil; Bell and Valentine; Caplan; Fine, Heasman and Wright (1996); Tansey and Worsley; and Warde (1997). Adams, C. 1990: The sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory. New York: Continuum Publishing. Atkins, P.J. and Raw, M. 1995: Agriculture and food. London: Collins Educational. Barthes, R. 1967 Elements of semiology. London: Cape. Barthes, R. 1972: Wine and milk. In Idem., Mythologies. London: Cape, 5861. Barthes, R. 1975: Toward a psychosociology of contemporary food consumption. In Forster, E. and Forster, R. (eds): European diet from pre-industrial to modern times. New York: Harper & Row, 47-59. Bauman, Z. 1988: Freedom. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Beardsworth, A. and Keil, T. 1997: Sociology on the menu: an invitation to the study of food and society. London: Routledge. Beck, U. 1992: Risk society. London: Sage. Bell, D. and Valentine, G. 1997: Consuming geographies: we are where we eat. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. 1984: Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Burnett, J. 1979: Plenty and want: a social history of diet in England from 1815 to the present day. revised ed. London: Scolar Press. Caplan, P. (ed.) 1997: Food, health and identity. London: Routledge. Cook, I. and Crang, P. 1996: The world on a plate: culinary culture, displacement and geographical knowledges. Journal of Material Culture 1, 131-54. 11 Cook, I., Crang, P. and Thorpe, M. 1998: Biographies and geographies: consumer understandings of the origins of foods. British Food Journal 100, 162-67. Cook, I., Crang, P. and Thorpe, M. 1999: Eating into Britishness: multicultural imaginaries and the identity politics of food. In Roseneil, S. and Seymour, J. (eds) Practising identities: power and resistance. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 223-48. Crang, P. 1996: Displacement, consumption and identity. Environment and Planning A 28, 47-67. Dodd, G. 1856: The food of London. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman. Doel, C. 1999: Towards a supply-chain community? Insights from governance processes in the food industry. Environment and Planning A 31, 69-85. Douglas, M. 1975: Deciphering a meal. Daedalus 101, 61-81. Douglas, M. 1982: Food as a system of communication. In Idem: In the active voice. London: Routledge, 81-118. Douglas, M. (ed.) 1984: Food in the social order: studies of food and festivities in three American communities. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Douglas, M. 1998: Coded messages. In Griffiths, S. and Wallace, J. (eds): Consuming passions: food in the age of anxiety. Manchester: Mandolin, 103-10. Drummond, J.C. and Wilbraham, A. 1957: The Englishman’s food. Revised ed., London: Cape. Fenton, A. and Kisban, E. (Eds) 1986: Food in change. Eating habits from the Middle Ages to the present day. Edinburgh: John Donald. Fine, B. 1993: Resolving the diet paradox. Social Science Information 32, 669-87. Fine, B., Heasman, M. and Wright, J. 1996: Consumption in the age of affluence: the world of food. London: Routledge. Fine, B., Heasman, M. and Wright, J. 1998: What we eat and why: social norms and systems of provision. In Murcott, A. (ed.) ‘The Nation’s Diet’: the social science of food choice. London: Longman, 95-111. Fine, B, and Leopold, E. 1993: The world of consumption. London: Routledge. Fischler, C. 1980: Food habits, social change and the nature/culture dilemma. Social Science Information 19, 937-953. Forster, R. and Ranum, O. (eds) 1979: Food and drink in history: selections from the Annales E-S-C. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Galizzi, G. and Venturini, L. (eds) 1999: Vertical relationships and coordination in the food system. New York: Physica Verlag. Giddens, A. 1991: Modernity and self-identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Glennie, P. 1995: Consumption within historical studies. In Miller, D. (ed.) Acknowledging consumption. London: Routledge, 164-203. Glennie, P. 1998: Consumption, consumerism and urban form: historical perspectives. Urban Studies 35, 927-52. Glennie, P.D. and Thrift, N.J. 1992: Modernity, urbanism, and modern consumption. Society & Space 10, 423-43. Glennie, P.D. and Thrift, N.J. 1993: Modern consumption: theorising commodities and consumers. Society & Space 11, 603-06. 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