Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-m42fx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-16T14:39:25.988Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

23 - Eating Our Way to a Sustainable Future?

from Part VI - Food and Agriculture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2020

By
Josée Johnston  and
Anelyse M. Weiler
Edited by
Katharine Legun ,
Julie C. Keller ,
Michael Carolan  and
Michael M. Bell
Katharine Legun
Affiliation:
Wageningen University and Research, The Netherlands
Julie C. Keller
Affiliation:
University of Rhode Island
Michael Carolan
Affiliation:
Colorado State University
Michael M. Bell
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Get access

Summary

Our food choices have a tremendous impact on our minds, bodies, and the environment. Given this connection, many consumers are asking, how could we eat differently to ensure the integrity of the Earth’s natural systems? To address this question, the chapter first outlines how everyday food choices relate to the natural world, along with resource constraints in the food system. We then discuss the dominant ethical-eating discourse in Canada, the United States, and other Global North countries. After analyzing prominent themes in this consumer-centered ‘vote with your fork’ discourse, we consider the limitations of using market mechanisms to deliver goals like sustainability and social justice. This includes an acknowledgement of issues that often get overlooked within ethical consumer discourse, especially the minimal attention payed to low-wage, precarious workers on the front-lines of an unsustainable agricultural paradigm. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of food democracy, a concept that sheds light on fault lines in the current food system and offers principles for better meeting the needs of all forms of life.

Keywords

Foodconsumersethical eatingfood workersfood democracy
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology , pp. 390 - 410
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abas, N., Kalair, A., & Khan, N. (2015). Review of fossil fuels and future energy technologies. Futures, 69, 31–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alkon, A. H. (2012). Black, white, and green: Farmers markets, race, and the green economy, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Alkon, A. H. (2013). The socio-nature of local organic food. Antipode, 45(3), 663–680.Google Scholar
Alkon, A. H., & Guthman, J., eds. (2017). The new food activism: Opposition, cooperation, and collective action, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anomaly, J. (2015). What’s wrong with factory farming? Public Health Ethics, 8(3), 246–254.Google Scholar
Bacon, D. (2016, October 3). Why these farm workers went on strike – and why it matters. The Nation, www.thenation.com/article/why-these-farm-workers-went-on-strike-and-why-it-matters/Google Scholar
Bacon, D. (2017, June 26). A new farm worker union is born. The American Prospect, http://prospect.org/article/new-farm-worker-union-bornGoogle Scholar
Baumann, S., Engman, A., Huddart-Kennedy, E., & Johnston, J. (2017). Organic vs. local: Comparing individualist and collectivist motivations for “ethical” food consumption. Canadian Food Studies/La Revue Canadienne des Études sur l’Alimentation, 4(1), 68–86.Google Scholar
Baumann, S., Engman, A., & Johnston, J. (2015). Political consumption, conventional politics, and high cultural capital. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 39(5), 413–421.Google Scholar
Bellemare, M. F., Çakir, M., Peterson, H. H., Novak, L., & Rudi, J. (2017). On the measurement of food waste. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 99(5), 1148–1158.Google Scholar
Besky, S. (2014). The Darjeeling distinction: Labor and justice on fair-trade tea plantations in India, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Bittman, M. (2014). The true cost of a burger. New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2014/07/16/opinion/the-true-cost-of-a-burger.htmlGoogle Scholar
Bowen, S., Elliott, S., & Brenton, J. (2014). The joy of cooking? Contexts, 13(3), 20–25.Google Scholar
Brown, K. (2013). Buying into fair trade: Culture, morality and consumption, New York, NY: NYU Press.Google Scholar
Brown, S., & Getz, C. (2008). Privatizing farm worker justice: Regulating labor through voluntary certification and labeling. Geoforum, 39(3), 1184–1196.Google Scholar
Bucklaschuk, J. (2016). A temporary program for permanent gains? Considering the workplace experiences of temporary foreign workers in Manitoba’s hog-processing industry. In McDonald, S. A. & Barnetson, B, eds., Farm workers in Western Canada: Injustices and activism. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press, pp. 101–119.Google Scholar
Burch, D., & Lawrence, G. (2007). Supermarkets and agri-food supply chains: transformations in the production and consumption of foods, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.Google Scholar
Cairns, K. & Johnston, J. (2015). Food and femininity, New York. Bloomsbury Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cairns, K., Johnston, J., & MacKendrick, N. (2013). Feeding the ‘organic child’: Mothering through ethical consumption. Journal of Consumer Culture, 13(2), 97–118.Google Scholar
Caldwell, M. (2014). The rise of the gourmet hamburger. Contexts, 13(3), 72–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Capper, J. L. (2012). Is the grass always greener? Comparing the environmental impact of conventional, natural and grass-fed beef production systems. Animals, 2(2), 127–143.Google Scholar
Carolan, M. (2012). Sociology of food and agriculture, New York: Earthscan Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carfagna, L. B., Dubois, E. A., Fitzmaurice, C., et al. (2014). An emerging eco-habitus: The reconfiguration of high cultural capital practices among ethical consumers. Journal of Consumer Culture, 14(2), 158–178.Google Scholar
Cross, P., Edwards, R. T., Opondo, M., Nyeko, P., & Edwards-Jones, G. (2009). Does farm worker health vary between localised and globalised food supply systems? Environment International, 35(7), 1004–1014.Google Scholar
Clapp, J. (2016). Food, 2nd ed., Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Clapp, J., & Fuchs, D. A. (eds.) (2009). Corporate power in global agrifood governance, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Cole, N. L., & Brown, K. (2014). The problem with fair trade coffee. Contexts, 13(1), 50–55.Google Scholar
Consumer Reports (2014). Where GMOs hide in your food. Consumer Reports: www.consumerreports.org/cro/2014/10/where-gmos-hide-in-your-food/index.htmGoogle Scholar
Coulthard, G. S. (2014). Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dumont, A. M., & Baret, P. V. (2017). Why working conditions are a key issue of sustainability in agriculture? A comparison between agroecological, organic and conventional vegetable systems. Journal of Rural Studies, 56, 53–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duncan, C. A. M. (1996). The centrality of agriculture: Between humankind and the rest of nature, Buffalo, NY: McGill-Queen’s University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Easterbrook, G. (1997, January). Forgotten benefactor of humanity. The Atlantic: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/01/forgotten-benefactor-of-humanity/306101/Google Scholar
Evans, D. (2011). Blaming the consumer–once again: the social and material contexts of everyday food waste practices in some English households. Critical Public Health, 21(4), 429–440.Google Scholar
FAO. (2017). The state of food security and nutrition in the world 2017. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: www.fao.org/3/a-i7695e.pdfGoogle Scholar
Fischer, J., Abson, D. J., Butsic, V., et al. (2014). Land sparing versus land sharing: Moving forward. Conservation Letters, 7(3), 149–157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foley, J. A., Ramankutty, N., Brauman, K. A., et al. (2011). Solutions for a cultivated planet. Nature, 478, 337–342.Google Scholar
Ferry, B., & Benjamin, M. (2016). Don’t wait, be ready! New antibiotic rules for 2017. http://msue.anr.msu.edu/news/dont_wait_be_ready_new_antibiotic_rules_for_2017Google Scholar
Foster, J. B. (1999). Marx’s theory of metabolic rift: Classical foundations for environmental sociology. American Journal of Sociology, 105(2), 366–405.Google Scholar
Fraser, E., Legwegoh, A., Krishna, K. C., et al. (2016). Biotechnology or organic? Extensive or intensive? Global or local? A critical review of potential pathways to resolve the global food crisis. Trends in Food Science & Technology, 48, 78–87.Google Scholar
Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ) (2017, June 17). Historic union contract signed by FUJ and Sakuma Bros. Berry Farm: http://familiasunidasjusticia.org/en/2017/06/17/historic-union-contract-ratified-by-members-of-familias-unidas-por-la-justicia/Google Scholar
Gassmann, A. J., Petzold-Maxwell, J. L., Clifton, E. H., et al. (2014). Field-evolved resistance by western corn rootworm to multiple Bacillus thuringiensis toxins in transgenic maize. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(14), 5141–5146.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Getz, C., Brown, S., & Shreck, A. (2008). Class politics and agricultural exceptionalism in California’s organic agriculture movement. Politics and Society, 36(4), 478–507.Google Scholar
Gliessman, S. R. (2015). Agroecology: The ecology of sustainable food systems, 3rd ed., Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.Google Scholar
Godfray, H. C. J., Beddington, J. R., Crute, I. R., et al. (2010). Food security: The challenge of feeding 9 billion people. Science, 327(5967), 812–818.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gray, M. (2014). Labor and the locavore: The making of a comprehensive food ethic, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Guthman, J. (2014). Agrarian dreams: The paradox of organic farming in California, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Guthman, J., & Brown, S. (2016). Whose life counts: biopolitics and the “bright line” of chloropicrin mitigation in California’s strawberry industry. Science, Technology & Human Values, 41(3), 461–482.Google Scholar
Guthman, J., & DuPuis, M. (2006). Embodying neoliberalism: Economy, culture, and the politics of fat. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24(3), 427–448.Google Scholar
Haedicke, M. (2016). Organizing organic: Conflict and compromise in an emerging market, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Haenfler, R., Johnson, B., & Jones, E. (2012). Lifestyle movements: Exploring the intersection of lifestyle and social movements. Social Movement Studies, 11(1), 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harriss, J., & Stewart, D. (2015). Science, Politics, and the Framing of Modern Agricultural Technologies. In Herring, R. J., ed., The Oxford Handbook of Food, Politics, and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 43–64.Google Scholar
Hassanein, N. (2003). Practicing food democracy: A pragmatic politics of transformation. Journal of Rural Studies, 19(1), 77–86.Google Scholar
Hall, K. D., Guo, J., Dore, M., & Chow, C. C. (2009). The progressive increase of food waste in America and its environmental impact. PLoS ONE, 4(11), e7940–6.Google Scholar
Harrison, J. L., & Getz, C. (2014). Farm size and job quality: Mixed-methods studies of hired farm work in California and Wisconsin. Agriculture and Human Values, 32(4), 617–634.Google Scholar
Heller, M. C., & Keoleian, G. A. (2003). Assessing the sustainability of the US food system: a life cycle perspective. Agricultural Systems, 76(3), 1007–1041.Google Scholar
Hess, D. J. (2007). Alternative pathways in science and industry: Activism, innovation, and the environment in an era of globalization, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Holmes, S. (2013). Fresh fruit, broken bodies: Migrant farmworkers in the United States, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Holt-Giménez, E., & Shattuck, A. (2011). Food crises, food regimes and food movements: rumblings of reform or tides of transformation? The Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(1), 109–144.Google Scholar
Howard, P. H. (2016). Concentration and power in the food system: Who controls what we eat? London, UK and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.Google Scholar
Huddart Kennedy, E. H., Parkins, J. R., & Johnston, J. (2016). Food activists, consumer strategies, and the democratic imagination: Insights from eat-local movements. Journal of Consumer Culture, 18(1), 149–168.Google Scholar
Huseman, J., & Short, D. (2012). “A slow industrial genocide”: Tar sands and the indigenous peoples of northern Alberta. The International Journal of Human Rights, 16(1), 216–237.Google Scholar
Jaffee, D. (2007). Brewing Justice: Fair trade coffee, sustainability and survival, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaffee, D., & Howard, P. H. (2010). Corporate cooptation of organic and Fair Trade standards. Agriculture and Human Values, 27(4), 387–399.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jayaraman, S. (2016). Forked: A new standard for American dining, New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Johnston, J. (2008). The citizen-consumer hybrid: Ideological tensions and the case of Whole Foods Market. Theory and Society, 37(3), 229–270.Google Scholar
Johnston, J., & Baumann, S. (2015). Foodies: Democracy and distinction in the gourmet foodscape, 2nd ed., New York: RoutledgeGoogle Scholar
Johnston, J. & Cairns, C. (2012). Eating for change. In Banet-Wiser, S & Mukherji, R, eds., Commodity activism: Cultural resistance in neoliberal times. New York: New York University Press, pp. 219–239.Google Scholar
Johnston, J., & Goodman, M. K. (2015). Spectacular foodscapes: Food celebrities and the politics of lifestyle mediation in an age of inequality. Food, Culture & Society, 18(2), 205–222.Google Scholar
Johnston, J., Biro, A., & MacKendrick, N. (2009). Lost in the supermarket: The corporate‐organic foodscape and the struggle for food democracy. Antipode, 41(3), 509–532.Google Scholar
Jones, E. (2015). Socially Responsible Marketing (SRM). In Cook, D.T. & Ryan, J. M., eds., The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 523–524.Google Scholar
Laestadius, L. I., Neff, R. A., Barry, C. L., & Frattaroli, S. (2013). Meat consumption and climate change: The role of non-governmental organizations. Climatic Change, 120(1–2), 25–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Landrigan, P. J., Fuller, R., Acosta, N. J., et al. (2017). The Lancet Commission on pollution and health. The Lancet, Online.Google Scholar
Lepofsky, D., & Caldwell, M. (2013). Indigenous marine resource management on the Northwest Coast of North America. Ecological Processes, 2(12), 1–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lukacs, M. (2017, July 17). Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals. The Guardian: www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2017/jul/17/neoliberalism-has-conned-us-into-fighting-climate-change-as-individualsGoogle Scholar
Lynas, M., & Evanega, S. D. (2015). The dialectic of pro-poor papaya. In Herring, R. J., ed., The Oxford Handbook of Food, Politics, and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 755–771.Google Scholar
MacKendrick, N. A. (2010). Media framing of body burdens: Precautionary consumption and the individualization of risk. Sociological Inquiry, 80(1), 126–149.Google Scholar
MacKendrick, N. (2018). Better safe than sorry: How consumers navigate exposure to everyday toxics, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
McHughen, A. (2015). Fighting mother nature with biotechnology. In Herring, R, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Food, Politics, and Society. New York, NY: Oxford, pp. 431–452.Google Scholar
Miller, L. (2017). Building nature’s market: The business and politics of natural foods, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Minkoff-Zern, L.-A. (2014). Hunger amidst plenty: Farmworker food insecurity and coping strategies in California. Local Environment, 19(2), 204–219.Google Scholar
Minkoff-Zern, L. A. (2017). Farmworker-led food movements then and now. In Alkon, A. H. & Guthman, J, eds., The new food activism: Opposition, cooperation, and collective action. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, pp. 157–178.Google Scholar
Moore, J. W. (2000). Environmental crises and the metabolic rift in world-historical perspective. Organization & Environment, 13(2), 123–157.Google Scholar
Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the web of life: Ecology and the accumulation of capital, London and Brooklyn: Verso.Google Scholar
Murphy, S. (2008). Globalization and corporate concentration in the food and agriculture sector. Development, 51(4), 527–533.Google Scholar
Neff, R. A., & Parker, C. L. (2011). Peak oil, food systems, and public health. American Journal of Public Health, 101(9), 1587–1597.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nestle, M. (2002). Food Politics, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Obach, B. (2015). Organic struggle: The movement for sustainable agriculture in the United States, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Parfitt, J., Barthel, M., & Macnaughton, S. (2010). Food waste within food supply chains: Quantification and potential for change to 2050. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 365(1554), 3065–3081.Google Scholar
Parker, C. (2013). Voting with your fork? Industrial free-range eggs and the regulatory construction of consumer choice. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 649(1), 52–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patel, R. (2011). The value of nothing: How to reshape market society and redefine democracy, New York: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Pimentel, D., & Burgess, M. (2015). Biofuels: Competition for cropland, water and energy resources. In Herring, R, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Food, Politics, and Society. New York: Oxford, pp. 181–201.Google Scholar
Pimentel, D., & Giampietro, M. (1994). Food, land, population and the U.S. economy. Dieoff, www.dieoff.com/page40.htmGoogle Scholar
Plumer, B. (2016, September 15). Why Bayer’s massive deal to buy Monsanto is so worrisome. Vox, www.vox.com/2016/9/14/12916344/monsanto-bayer-mergerGoogle Scholar
Polanco, G. (2016). Consent behind the counter: Aspiring citizens and labour control under precarious (im)migration schemes. Third World Quarterly, 37(8), 1332–1350.Google Scholar
Rodney, A., Cappeliez, S., Oleschuk, M., & Johnston, J. (2017). The online domestic goddess: An analysis of food blog femininities. Food, Culture & Society, 20(4), 685–707.Google Scholar
Sage, C. (2011). Environment and Food, London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Sassatelli, R., & Davolio, F. (2010). Consumption, pleasure and politics: Slow Food and the politico-aesthetic problematization of food. Journal of Consumer Culture, 10(2), 202–232.Google Scholar
Schleifer, D and DeSoucey, M. (2015). What your consumer wants: Business-to-business advertising as a mechanism of market change. Journal of Cultural Economy, 8(2), 218–34.Google Scholar
Seufert, V., & Ramankutty, N. (2017). Many shades of gray – The context-dependent performance of organic agriculture. Science Advances, 3(3), e1602638.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Seufert, V., Ramankutty, N., & Mayerhofer, T. (2017). What is this thing called organic?–How organic farming is codified in regulations. Food Policy, 68, 10–20.Google Scholar
Smith, A., & MacKinnon, J. B. (2007). The 100-mile diet: A year of local eating, Toronto: Vintage Canada.Google Scholar
Soma, T. (2017). Gifting, ridding and the “everyday mundane”: The role of class and privilege in food waste generation in Indonesia. Local Environment, 22(12), 1444–1460.Google Scholar
Spiker, M. L., Hiza, H. A. B., Siddiqi, S. M., & Neff, R. A. (2017). Wasted food, wasted nutrients: Nutrient loss from wasted food in the United States and comparison to gaps in dietary intake. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 117(7), 1031–1040.Google Scholar
Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockstrom, J., et al. (2015). Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347(6223), 1259855-1–1259855-10.Google Scholar
Szasz, A. (2007). Shopping our way to safety: How we changed from protecting the environment to protecting ourselves, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Turner, N. (2014). Ancient pathways, ancestral knowledge: Ethnobotany and ecological wisdom of Indigenous peoples of Northwestern North America, Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.Google Scholar
Vermeulen, S. J., Campbell, B. M., & Ingram, J. S. I. (2012). Climate change and food systems. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 37(1),195–222.Google Scholar
Weiler, A. M., McLaughlin, J., & Cole, D. C. (2017). Food security at whose expense? A critique of the Canadian temporary farm labour migration regime and proposals for change. International Migration, 55(4), 48–63.Google Scholar
Weiler, A. M., Otero, G., & Wittman, H. (2016). Rock stars and bad apples: Moral economies of alternative food networks and precarious farm work regimes. Antipode, 48(4), 1–23.Google Scholar
Weis, T. (2013). The meat of the global food crisis. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 40(1), 65–85.Google Scholar
Willis, M. M., & Schor, J. B. (2012). Does changing a light bulb lead to changing the world? Political action and the conscious consumer. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 644(1), 160–190.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×