Food provisioning—from supermarket to producer: understanding the articulation of different suppliers

Abstract

This special issue of the Review of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Studies sets out to describe the social logics that enable consumers to manage their restrictions and resources, leading them to multimodal provisioning practices. Although it has become common to make use of multiple suppliers for food provisioning, these places of commodification differ depending on each person’s restrictions. The five articles in this issue make important contributions on this point. In the first section of this introduction, we examine the way in which consumers mobilise these different suppliers, integrating different practices to authenticate foods. In the second section, we look at the complementarity of the disciplines and methods of this issue’s authors, who share the same comprehensive approach. They pay special attention not only to the meaning consumers give to their provisioning but also to its material aspects, which we analyse in the third section. Lastly, we return to the way in which all these studies incorporate politics, economics and social aspects when analysing the commodification and decommodification occurring in today’s food provisioning.