Modes Of Food Production Research Articles

Sustainability of food purchases according to sociodemographic factors

Abstract While the nutritional quality and environmental impact of diets are widely assessed, different production modes (organic vs. conventional) remain understudied as for sustainability. The present study examines the associations between different dimensions of sustainability of food purchases and sociodemographic factors. Households (n = 462) were included in this cross-sectional study using quota sampling in Montpellier Metropolitan Area. Food items acquired over one month were registered in a food supply diary, and the expenditure share of each food group (including organic food) was estimated. Validated indexes estimated scores reflecting the nutritional quality and the environmental impact of food purchases according to these expenditure shares. Associations were tested for each sustainability dimension using linear and multinomial logistic regression models adjusted for sociodemographic factors (e.g. age, education, living area). The age of the household's reference person was consistently related to the sustainability dimensions of food purchases, albeit in different ways. While older age was associated with better nutritional quality (estimate for age >50 years vs. age between 30-50 [95%CI]=0.91[0.29;1.54]), it was associated with a higher environmental impact (estimate for age >50 years vs. age between 30-50 [95%CI]=1.84[0.95;2.73]). Households with a highly educated reference person (OR master's degree vs. lower education levels [95%CI]=1.59 [1.02;2.47] had a larger share of organic foods and those living around the city of Montpellier (OR vs. living in the city centre [95%CI]=0.44[0.24;0.81]) had a smaller share. Our findings highlight that sociodemographic factors relate to sustainability dimensions in different ways. In addition, we address organic food purchases, which provide insights into different aspects of sustainability. Taken together, the findings suggest that there are various levers for promoting healthy and sustainable diets at the consumer level. Key messages • Sustainability of food purchases relates to sociodemographic factors (i.e. age, education, and living location); different dimensions may be addressed. • Mode of food production (i.e., organic) may provide insights in the context of sustainable diets.

Romania's agricultural workers. Return mobilities and modes of food production

AbstractThis article examines the dynamics of Romanian seasonal migration and its effects on farming and rural areas. We connect labour migration to changes in modes of food production in Western and Eastern Europe. Based on the fieldwork in seven Romanian localities with 40 semi‐structured interviews, we interrogate how seasonal work is shaped by regimes of mobility and economic and social inequalities. Studying the case of Romania's large rural population raises critical questions regarding migration, development and change in rural areas. Answering such questions requires disentangling different categories of seasonal migrants and their return prospects. Looking at how agricultural labour is structured, we examine labour experiences and analyse how migrants' agency operates in precarious contexts. Observing the consequences of seasonal migration and return, we discovered diverging processes of agricultural diversification through entrepreneurialism and a radical change in peasant farming resulting in an increased concentration of farmland.

Follow the Ferments

Fermented foods/drinks are one of many traditional food preservation practices known to ameliorate flavor and nutritional value and extend shelf life. They are also an essential element in creating a regenerative food system, one that seeks to create conditions that enhance already existing systems rather than just sustaining them. However, many gastronomic, traditional, and heritage foods such as noncommercial fermented products are not eligible to be sold at local or global markets and are considered hazardous and unfitting of food safety standards. Subsequently, these foods are often produced in homes, or as cottage industry products sold at farmers markets. In the United States, many of these products are made by marginal communities, Latin, Middle Easterners, Southeast Asians, and Indigenous communities. These foods carry meanings of value, identity, and sacredness and have created a trans-local food ecosystem. This paper explores how Arizona, with its large and growing population of marginal communities, governs such modes of food production. Using an ethnographic multisite methodology of “follow the thing,” the authors follow two fermented foods—gundruk, and yoghurt/soft cheese—observing how they are produced, consumed, and valorized in Arizona. We explore how the production of these foods unravels microbiopolitical entanglements, described through personal narratives and contextualized within the history of a larger regulatory structure. Like fermentation itself, these narratives reveal that we should welcome the unseen actors for a more diverse and inclusive food governance atmosphere while redefining what a local and place-based food system should look like.

Modes of Food Production in Arctic Yakutia (the Case of Allaikhovskii Ulus)

Using assemblage theory, this article, based on field work conducted in the Allaikhovskii Ulus (district) of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in 2019, describes how the activities of local residents in food production change depending on different spatial conditions: in the village, at the “tundra dacha,” and in the fishing area. It investigates specific forms of “dwelling perspective assemblages” in different spatial contexts deploying theoretical tools developed by Tim Ingold and Manuel DeLanda. Food production is considered not as an isolated practice but as a result of a set of actions, material and social conditions in which the population of the Allaikhovskii Ulus lives. The processes of food production employ different modalities of the environment and include many components: from wood and metal to spirits and ritual actions. The question of the connection between different assemblages turned out to be significant. Empirical material shows that the isolation of assemblages is not always possible, and complete isolation is most likely impossible. The fewer resources, people, “delegates” to whom tasks are passed on, the less structured assemblages fill the space. Depending on the change in spatial conditions, such characteristics as “inflating the assemblage,” “shifting the center of the assemblage,” and “overlapping assemblages (intensification)” were identified. They reflect different strategies of food production. “Dwelling perspective assemblage” to some extent deprives a person of subjectivity; however, the actor does not disappear but expands and redefines themself. The actor stops being a figure separated from the processes taking place around them; subjectivity expands beyond the boundaries of the biological body and fixed objects. It fills and structures the space of relations that arise in the process of activity. Food is not only an act of consumption but is a complex of relationships in the environment; it is a metaobject, within which subjectivity/objectivity is in an elusive unity of intertwined processes. Article in Russian

Halving food-related greenhouse gas emissions can be achieved by redistributing meat consumption: Progressive optimization results of the NutriNet-Santé cohort

BackgroundDiet-related greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe) mainly comes from animal-sourced foods. As progressive changes are more acceptable for a sustainable food transition, we aimed to identify nutritionally adequate and culturally acceptable optimized diets ensuring a gradual reduction in GHGe, using observed diet from a large sample of French adults, while considering the mode of food production (organic vs conventional farming) and the co-production link between milk and beef. Material and methodBased on the consumption of 257 organic and conventional foods among 29,413 participants (75% women, age: 53.5 ± 14.0y) of the NutriNet-Santé study, we modelled optimal diets according to GHGe reduction scenarios in 5% steps, from 0 to 50% with nutritional, acceptability, and coproduct constraints, for men, premenopausal and menopausal women separately. ResultsGradual GHGe decrease under these constraints led to optimal diets with an overall decrease in animal foods, with marked reductions in dairy products (up to −83%), together with a stable but largely redistributed meat consumption in favor of poultry (up to +182%) and pork (up to +46%) and at the expense of ruminant meat (down to −92%). Amounts of legumes increases dramatically (up to +238%). The greater the reduction in diet-related GHGe, the lower the cumulative energy demand (about −25%) and land use (about −43%). The proportion of organic food increased from ~30% in the observed diets to ~70% in the optimized diets. ConclusionOur results suggest that meeting both nutrient reference value and environmental objectives of up to 50% GHGe reduction requires the reduction of animal foods together with important substitutions between animal food groups, which result in drastic reductions in beef and dairy products. Further research is required to explore alignment with long-term health value and conflict with acceptability, in particular for even greater GHGe reductions.

The Doctrine of Double Effect and Killing Animals for Food

Producing food on a large scale without killing any animals seems currently impossible. This poses a challenge for deontological positions that involve a prohibition against killing sentient creatures: it seems that according to these positions omnivorous, vegetarian and vegan diets all rely on food produced in impermissible ways. In order to meet this challenge, deontologists might introduce consequentialist considerations into their theories, for example some principles that effectively require to kill as few animals as possible. This is the kind of strategy Tom Regan has pursued. However, we argue that the challenge for deontological positions on the ethics of food production can also be met by invoking a prominent deontological principle. The doctrine of double effect (DDE), with its distinction between bringing about harm intentionally and bringing about harm as a merely foreseen consequence of one’s action, enables us to see a morally significant difference between the various ways to produce food other than the number of animals killed. In this paper we will review some of these ways using Warren S. Quinn’s version of the DDE and show that a more thoroughgoing deontological ethics of food production than Regan’s classic theory is possible. We thereby present a novel way of evaluating modes of food production.

The regional dispersion of income inequality in nineteenth-century Norway

This paper documents, for the first time, municipality- and occupation-level estimates of income inequality between individuals in a European country in the nineteenth century, using a combination of several detailed data sets for Norway in the late 1860s. Urban incomes were on average 4.5 times as high as rural incomes, and the average city Gini coefficient was twice the average rural municipality Gini. All high- or medium-income occupation groups exhibited substantial within-occupation income inequality. Across municipalities, income inequality is higher in high-income municipalities, and lower in muncipalities with high levels of fisheries and pastoral agriculture. While manufacturing activity is positively correlated with income inequality, the association is not apparent when other economic factors such as the mode of food production is accounted for. The income Gini for Norway as a whole is found to have been 0.546, slightly higher than estimates for the UK and US in the same period.

Typology of eaters based on conventional and organic food consumption: results from the NutriNet-Santé cohort study.

Limited information is available on large-scale populations regarding the socio-demographic and nutrient profiles and eating behaviour of consumers, taking into account both organic and conventional foods. The aims of this study were to draw up a typology of consumers according to their eating habits, based both on their dietary patterns and the mode of food production, and to outline their socio-demographic, behavioural and nutritional characteristics. Data were collected from 28 245 participants of the NutriNet-Santé study. Dietary information was obtained using a 264-item, semi-quantitative, organic FFQ. To identify clusters of consumers, principal component analysis was applied on sixteen conventional and sixteen organic food groups followed by a clustering procedure. The following five clusters of consumers were identified: (1) a cluster characterised by low energy intake, low consumption of organic food and high prevalence of inadequate nutrient intakes; (2) a cluster of big eaters of conventional foods with high intakes of SFA and cholesterol; (3) a cluster with high consumption of organic food and relatively adequate nutritional diet quality; (4) a group with a high percentage of organic food consumers, 14 % of which were either vegetarians or vegans, who exhibited a high nutritional diet quality and a low prevalence of inadequate intakes of most vitamins except B12; and (5) a group of moderate organic food consumers with a particularly high intake of proteins and alcohol and a poor nutritional diet quality. These findings may have implications for future aetiological studies investigating the potential impact of organic food consumption.

Gary Kleppel: The emergent agriculture: farming, sustainability, and the return of the local economy

Emergent Agriculture: Farming, Sustainability, and the Return of the Local Economy is about a transitioning paradigm in agriculture and the shift from large-scale, conventional agricultural and other agribusiness practices to small-scale, local production of food. A professor of biology and ecology at the State University of New York at Albany and a practicing ‘‘steward of the land’’ at his home on Longfield Farm, 15 miles to the west, Kleppel draws from personal stories and anecdotes as the foundation of his book. From there, he supplements these narratives using scientific inquiry and the large body of literature on agriculture to show that current agricultural practices in the United States are harmful environmentally, economically, and socially. He further argues for the transition to localbased food production in order to ensure a more sustainable, healthy future of both the planet and humankind. The book consists of 14 essays broken up into four sections. These sections are ‘‘Farming: an Emergent Paradigm’’, ‘‘Sustainability’’, The Local Economy’’ and ‘‘Conclusion: the Emergent Agriculture’’. Chapters 1–3 provide a concise history of the system of industrial agricultural in the United States as well as pioneering views on the transition and emergence of a new way of farming for sustenance that focuses on small-scale farms and community-oriented food production. In today’s agricultural system, there is no easy way for consumers to distinguish or interpret information about meat and produce with regards to the location grown, the farmer who produced it, the meaning of labels, and the process of production. Kleppel argues that there is a paradox of agriculture in which the romanticized images of farms and farmers do not correspond to the jaded reality of what the agricultural system of production has actually become: Toxic, inhumane, and non-sustainable. Chapters 4–8 focus on concepts of sustainability, including the importance of economic and biological diversity, the abrasive relationship between climate change and fossil fuels (the nation’s largest source of energy), and the propensity of humankind to adapt and adjust to pressures of climate change in order to produce food to survive. Kleppel argues that an important way for a farmer to ensure the capacity to produce food in a manner that is healthy and ethical for both people and the environment is to be a ‘‘steward of the land’’. A steward of the land must maintain an understanding of the natural world, ecologically and biologically, and its relationship with the systems of agriculture. A steward of the land must also espouse transparency with the public, most notably consumers, to preserve an ethical foundation for agriculture. Chapters 9–13 highlight the economy and emphasize the important role consumers play in the transition from industrial methods of agriculture to the emergent, more socially and ethically just methods of agriculture. When considering what food to purchase, there is a growing awareness among consumers in favor of sustainable modes of production, ethical animal husbandry, avoidable degradation of land and water, and the overall safety of food. Kleppel argues that a key component of the new, emerging agriculture is the ability to provide and verify information about farming and food to customers. He also places emphasis on the importance of community-oriented food markets like community supported agriculture (CSAs). Chapter 14 concludes that change for a more sustainable and diverse mode of food production is already underway. & Andrea Raygor adraygor@iastate.edu

Manipulating the physical: water's body and soul

The Japanese dry garden apart, water has been an essential ingredient in all garden-making. From its sources in agricultural and other modes of food production, water has been used to irrigate and maintain a host of necessary functions, some of which, like the water wheel in Mediterranean cultures [1], have been (and still are) crucial elements of agricultural cultivation.But the other crucial feature of water, unless it is manipulated in some way by human agency, is its capacity to seek the path of least resistance. It may wear away rocks and soils, but essentially it seeks to find the easier and least resistant path through the local elements. The manipulation of water, then, in designed landscapes is a cultural mode of soliciting from water its best features, drawing out its performative aspects. But the features deemed ‘best’ are the result of a whole range of objectives that transcend physical properties to communicate and exploit specific and very local cultural capabilities.

On the Early Holocene: Foraging to Early Agriculture

We consider a world in which the mode of food production, foraging or agriculture, is endogenous, and in which technology grows exogenously. Within a model of coalition formation, we allow individuals to form co-operative communities (bands) of foragers or farmers rationally. At the lowest levels of technology, equilibrium entails the grand coalition of foragers, a co-operative structure which avoids over-exploitation of the environment. But at a critical state of technology, the co-operative structure breaks down through an individually rational splintering of the band. At this stage, there can be an increase in work and through the over-exploitation of the environment, a food crisis. In the end, technological growth may lead to a one-way transition from foraging to agriculture.

Widening the horizons of ‘evidence’: Nutrition and disease in ecological perspective

Nutrition science draws on human, animal and tissue studies. Nutritional epidemiology faces four basic methodological difficulties: (i) the diet is a complex exposure; (ii) dietary intake is difficult to estimate; (iii) the biological impact of diet is often age / stage-dependent (affecting choice of study design and duration); and (iv) reductionist assumptions are often inappropriate - whole diets may be more important than specific nutrients in determining health risk. Beyond these research challenges lies a penumbra of other questions. For example: What health risks result from intensified methods of food production? What are the global and local environmental consequences, and resultant health risks, of the escalating demand for food (driven by population size and changing consumer preference)? Arising from the above are questions about the range and quality of evidence that is appropriate within the broad field of 'nutrition science'. Those issues include consideration of: 1. The health consequences of integrated whole-diets (Mediterranean, 'PolyMeal', low GI diet, etc.) versus seeking classic, atomistic, evidence of risks / benefits from specific nutrients or foods. 2. Life-course dietary data versus short-term controlled-trial dietary interventions. The former provide low-quality but high-relevance data; the latter provide high-quality but often low-relevance (short duration, age / stage-specific) data. 3. Palaeo-anthropological and historical data on the types of diet that have prevailed during long, formative, periods of human biological evolution - e.g. palaeolithic diet v. modern industrial diet. What profile of nutrient intake are we humans best equipped to consume? 4. Evidence of collateral human health risks from modern modes of food production, distribution and availability. For example: extravagant use of antibiotics in commercial high-volume livestock production, resulting in antibiotic-resistant bacteria chemical contamination of factory-farmed foods: pesticides, heavy metals, hormones intensified methods of livestock production, leading to health risks such as human variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (due to 'mad cow' disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy), Nipah virus disease and avian influenza diversion of grain as livestock feed, versus availability as food for Third-World populations: a source of food deprivation, malnutrition and its health consequences contribution of forest clearance and livestock production to greenhouse gas emissions, climate change and its adverse health impacts (now and, more so, in the future) adverse health impacts of loss of small-farmer livelihoods as food-producing conglomerates and supermarket chains consolidate 'production units'. (This applies in both high- and low-income countries.) Items 1 and 2 suggest that we can gain useful, integrated, information from a synthesising analysis of whole diets as the determinant of health risks / benefits. Item 3 helps us understand how we have deviated from the nutrient profile of the human ancestral diet. Item 4 underscores the other ecological and socioeconomic risks that we take when we intensify food production and treat food primarily as a (profit-making or foreign exchange-generating) commodity rather than as a life-sustaining dividend from the natural world and its food-producing (and often human-managed) ecosystems.

On the Early Holocene: Foraging to Early Agriculture

We consider a world in which the mode of food production, foraging or agriculture, is endogenous, and in which technology grows exogenously. Within a model of coalition formation, we allow individuals to rationally form cooperative communities (bands) of foragers or farmers. At the lowest levels of technology, equilibrium entails the grand coalition of foragers, a cooperative structure which avoids over-exploitation of the environment. But at a critical state of technology, the cooperative structure breaks down through an individually rational splintering of the band. At this stage, there can be an increase in work and through the over-exploitation of the environment, a food crisis. In the end, technological growth may lead to a one-way transition from foraging to agriculture.

Arguments surrounding organic and genetically modified food labelling: a few comparisons

This paper compares reasoning surrounding organic food labelling with arguments concerning mandatory GM labelling. Focus is placed on argumentative cross-overs, defined as cases where actors or organizations use a certain type of argumentation for one issue (for example, modes of food production), and shift into using their opponent's type of argumentation for a closely related issue (for example, food labelling). The paper is a textual analysis of the arguments across non-governmental organizations, scientists, policy-makers and corporations. Argumentative cross-overs are not only of theoretical interest. They run the risk of, for instance, making consumers assume that all struggles for ‘stricter food labelling’ will lead to more reliable labelling information and to a higher level of consumer empowerment. It is important to call for more nuanced descriptions of food labelling, and to make the public aware of the cross-overs, which often involve vast exaggerations of what food labelling can, or cannot, tell us. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Nilotic Contribution to Bantu Africa

It is argued that the Nilotic contribution to Bantu Africa consisted essentially in the infiltration of Early Iron Age communities practising a mainly agricultural economy in certain specially favourable environments by a new mode of food production in which cattle-keeping played an important part. This new way of life made possible the food-producing occupation of the drier parts of Bantu Africa, and the interaction between the new and old kinds of food-producers was the essential feature of the Later Iron Age. Wherever the new elements were present, settlement patterns became more dispersed, iron-working and pottery became the occupations of specialists, systems of inheritance changed from matrilineal to patrilineal forms, and political systems tended to become more centralized through the domination of settled cultivators by more mobile and warlike pastoral elites. Although chronological data for the Later Iron Age is as yet greatly inferior to that for the Early Iron Age, it seems likely that the process of Nilotic infiltration began during the last two or three centuries of the first millennium a.d., and spread southward through the centre of the subcontinent, so as to reach the western parts of Zambia and Zimbabwe by the tenth century. The subsequent interaction between the two kinds of food-production came about more gradually over two or three further centuries, and involved many varieties of local evolution in different areas. In southern Zaire, Zambia and Zimbabwe the local development of metallurgical techniques during this period was as significant as the introduction of pastoralism. But, overall, the Nilotic contribution provided the most essential features of the Later Iron Age.

The African Cultivator: A Geographic Overview

Focusing attention on subsistence cultivators is one of the logical starting points for examining rural Africa from a geographical perspective. Such farmers, functioning within a physical setting that provides both opportunities and constraints, must depend for survival on a familiarity with environmental qualities and contend with extreme conditions. Within this situation an agricultural system must be designed to provide for current food consumption plus a surplus that will vary with local circumstances. Both agricultural practices and environmental characteristics impinge, in turn, on systems of settlement and mobility. Neither the individual nor the farm family is static, but circulates within a defined area and may eventually relocate when circumstances require. When land is actually allocated, not only subsistence needs are taken into account, but also social regulations such as those concerning the distribution of homesteads relative to the distribution of fields. Thus, this overview of the rural African will be concerned with a sequence of four interrelated factors: (1) the dominant mode of food production, (2) the environmental setting, (3) a scheme for organizing terrestrial space at a local scale, and (4) a systematic approach to migration. Within the context of these spatial and environmental factors, the process of change can be superimposed; operating gradually at first and then accelerating, especially during the last hundred years. As population density has increased, as land has become more scarce, and as the commercialization of agriculture has spread, the basic relationship of environment, production, settlement structure, and mobility have been modified. Simultaneously, the cultivator has been evolving into a peasant.