Abstract
Is the increased mainstream visibility of the practices and discourses typically associated with ‘alternative’ food movements’ evidence of greater accessibility of real alternatives for consumers? Or is it merely confirmation of a more sophisticated reframing of political concerns by dominant food retailers and manufacturers – so-called ‘Big Food’?
This collection brings together the work of authors of wide-ranging disciplinary approaches in an attempt to understand the increasingly mainstream visibility of alternative food politics and the role of media in shaping relationships between key players in the contemporary media/food landscape. It places media at the centre of political issues, creating an understanding of the increasing power it has in the discourse surrounding food systems. It seeks to uncover what media and cultural texts ‘do’ to food politics – the questions, struggles and possibilities they bring about. It contends that thinking with media as a force in itself (rather than thinking about media’s relationship to food politics) may be central to advancing the possibilities of alternative food politics in unexpected ways.
In the introduction, the editors suggest that the book explores the complex ways in which media is contributing to the growing visibility of ‘alternative’ food, making possible new forms of political engagement and expression, generating new cultural meanings and potentialities, and providing opportunities for reworking and redefinition by large-scale media and food businesses.
The Australian editors compile a collection encompassing a range of locations prominent in alternative food politics including Scandinavia, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union and Australia. It is organised around four themes: Limits and Paradoxes, New Political Platforms, Personal Food Politics and Entanglements, and Reframing Production and Consumption.
This collection makes a tremendous contribution to the fields of media and culture by offering a new way of approaching alternative food practices and activism, which have previously been considered the purview of specific activist movements such as animal rights groups and environmental groups. The potent role of media – and especially digital media in shaping and driving discourses around food – has been apparent for some time now, and this collection offers a ground-breaking exploration of its impacts.
Part 1: Limits and Paradoxes is concerned with the limits of consumer choice and the ongoing cultural and economic barriers to achieving structural transformation within the food system. The chapters highlight the consequences of relying on market forces to affect change. In the case of Denmark, this takes the form of New Nordic Cuisine’s attempts to transfer its success in the restaurant scale to the food-production scale. Just as there are assertions of elitism bound up in the Danish example, so too does Abigail Wincott consider heritage vegetables a mechanism for reinforcing class boundaries in chapter 3, ‘When Carrots Become Posh’. The paradox explored in chapter 1 is that despite the mainstreaming of organic food in the United States in recent years, the country’s organic farming sector continues to cater to the privileged few who can afford to pay a premium price for safer, healthier food.
Part 2: New Political Platforms explores the challenges and opportunities arising from the mainstreaming of alternative food politics, with a focus on various forms of activism. In chapter 4, Tanja Schneider situates Swiss agtech and foodtech start-ups as entrepreneurial activists with the potential to contribute to shaping and framing ideas of how to achieve sustainable food futures. In chapter 5, an analysis of the online media posts promoting hospitality activism social enterprise ‘The Welcome Dinner Project’ finds that written texts may serve to reproduce racialised stereotypes and tropes about food and migrants, despite the organisation’s aim to do just the opposite. In chapter 6, Alana Mann illustrates how digital platforms facilitate activism around issues of food sovereignty in Europe, Canada and Australia – engaging both advocacy organisations and ordinary citizens in new forms of political communication in response to ‘a broken food system’.
Part 3: Personal Food Politics and Entanglements considers how and why the discourses surrounding Veganism and animal ethics have shifted significantly in recent years in chapters 7 and 9. In chapter 8, Deborah Lupton draws on feminist materialism to identify and analyse digital representations of food production and consumption practices, which she considers political insofar as they privilege some meanings over others, and have the potential for othering some social groups. The exploration of selfies, GIFs, memes and amateur videos on social media platforms as artefacts of body/food politics reveals the potential for reactionary as well as progressive political standpoints but can equally allow such standpoints to be countered or undermined.
Part 4: Reframing Production and Consumption offers not only a criticism of the mainstream media and food industries’ appropriation of activist practices and projects, but also an optimism about their capacity to shape future food politics discourses. Chapter 10 details so-called ‘welfare washing’ supermarkets engage in via their higher-welfare labelling of eggs and meat which may imply attainment of a good standard of animal welfare rather than the small improvement to a very low baseline.
In chapter 11, scrutiny of MasterChef Australia’s representation of food and wastage is linked to questions of sustainable production, ethical consumption and food security and found wanting. The final chapter highlights the increasingly sophisticated brand strategies employed by Australian supermarkets in using the cultural and political capital of celebrity chefs to reframe activist discourses designed to challenge their control over food systems.
At first glance, the wide-ranging disciplinary influences (including media and communication geography, sociology, cultural studies, animal studies, law, business and management) may seem a somewhat scattergun assortment. However, provision of a theoretical framework in the introduction successfully anchors and unites chapters around themes of media affordances, intermediaries, and macro- and micro-political capacities.
This approach also indicates a broad audience that may appreciate or benefit from the book. This includes both an academic readership within the above fields and a general audience of readers with an interest in issues of food politics.