Abstract
Abstract. Recent debate in human geography has challenged the problematic "alternative"/"conventional" duality that characterises contemporary food provision. Within this binary, alternative food networks and initiatives (AFIs and AFNs) are positioned in opposition to more conventional, agri-capitalist modes of food production and distribution. Framing food around materially, discursively and spatially distinct, albeit relational, geographies not only reinforces this binary but also reaffirms the hegemony of agri-capitalism that alternative provision seeks to undo. Focusing on examples of artisanal and industrial bread production in the UK and the USA, this paper challenges such ontological framings. Drawing from conceptual insights into diverse economies and alternative economic spaces (e.g. Gibson-Graham, 1996:2004; Lee and Leyshon, 2003) and adopting an integrative approach to practice (Shove and Pantzar, 2005; Hand and Shove, 2007), this paper examines the practices that constitute artisanal and industrial baking. Specifically, it focuses on the ways in which embodied practices constitute the spaces of production for such foods. While acknowledging the considerable distances between the geographies that circumscribe these alternative and conventional foods, this paper argues that practices of food production narrow these distances, thereby destabilising the alternative/conventional binary. The geographies of food may mobilise an array of places, materials and ideologies, which are suggestive of two opposing systems of food provision, but practices of food production reveal an array of marginal spaces that challenge this. By reorienting critical attention onto these marginal spaces, the differences between artisanal and conventional food become blurred – and the affinities produced through normalised discourses and materialities of food are contested, resisted and disrupted. I argue these spaces are insurgent and that they come together through affinitive practices, which result in the potential for radical change within food provision.
Highlights
The ruins of the Milling and Baking Research Association (FMBRA) – some concrete foundations and miscellaneous debris – are located in a field in Chorleywood, a village in commuter belt London
With a particular attention to the contradictory practices that blur the boundaries between the Chorleywood bread process (CBP) and artisanal baking and a specific focus on the corporeal practices within the CBP that seem to confound agri-capitalism’s logic of disembodiment, the third slice traces out the affinitive practices that join together CBP and artisan baking
By suggesting the notion of affinitive practices and signalling their capacity to generate radical political spaces, I have sketched out a progressive approach to perspectives on practice
Summary
The ruins of the Milling and Baking Research Association (FMBRA) – some concrete foundations and miscellaneous debris – are located in a field in Chorleywood, a village in commuter belt London. I use this approach to explore the differences between alternative and conventional foods and the affinities and possibilities that arise through the interplay of their bodies and materials Deploying this approach to the shared and parallel corporeal practices that comprise artisanal and CBP bread-making, I argue that these affinitive practices reproduce radical and insurgent (food) spaces, which are fundamental to contesting a largely disembodied agri-capitalism and thereby to remaking food provision. As a form of emancipatory resistance (Heynan, 2008), alternative foods explicitly reject the spatial and temporal strategies of agri-capitalism by reclaiming food provision and refashioning it in the opposite image to that of agri-capitalism (Raynolds et al, 2007; Kneafsey et al, 2008) This imagination for food provision is articulated by an array of material semiotics, such as organic, fair, local or artisanal (Goodman, 2004), and mobilised through practices that seek to reconnect disconnected relations, as well as re-place and repopulate the foodscape (author 2011). Such a move shifts the emancipatory project of alternative foods away from the perceived hegemony of agri-capitalism and instead portrays it through its entities, objects, artifacts, places and practices as they assemble into the insurgent spaces that confound agricapitalism’s organising logic
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