A response to my critics

Abstract

Variously described as opaque, extremely and a little dubious, bizarre, insulting, unclear, loose and vague, weakly developed, deceptively innocuous, a little puzzling, rather banal, lacking in novelty and revelation, subject to the deterministic heresy, prone to unsupported claims, eclectic, confusing, arbitrary, and having my contingency cake and eating it, it is worth emphasizing how much I am indebted to the literature to which many of my critics have contributed and continue to contribute so invaluably. Consequently, we have much in common, and this should not be overshadowed by the substantive differences, and lapses in clarity and interpretation, that might seem to divide us. In this response, I wish both to acknowledge and rebut the criticisms aimed at 'Towards a political economy of food'. Specifically, a food system approach is perceived as invaluable, if not beyond reproach, certainly as against the orthodox approaches based upon more or less formal models of supply and demand; it includes an emphasis on structures, tendencies and historical and social contingency; food is distinguished but not determined by its unique organic, biological or natural significance (the human species is a conscious, purposeful animal); the reproduction and transformation of the food system potentially occurs integrally along the range of its activities, as analytically addressed, for example, by the notions of appropriationism and substitutionism; the global, the cultural and the state are crucial. Murdoch and Watts appear to take our systems of provision approach to consumption, and to food in particular, as excluding cultural determinants and effects from the food system. This is wrong. In this context, it is important to recognize that our work has been driven by the wish to identify and explain socioeconomic patterns of food consumption (for Great Britain from data taken from the National Food Survey, and to which an office full of computer printouts testifies). Consequently, along with consumer food activists,' we have analytically followed the journey through the food system in the opposite direction from most of my critics, who have traced a path out of the political economy of agriculture, emerging with a blink into the dazzling and unaccustomed glare of consumption.2