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Geoforum 39 (2008) 10441057

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Mucky carrots and other proxies: Problematising the knowledge-x

for sustainable and ethical consumption
Sally Eden a,*, Christopher Bear a, Gordon Walker b
a
Department of Geography, University of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull HU6 7RX, United Kingdom
b
Department of Geography, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom

Received 14 February 2007; received in revised form 31 October 2007

Abstract

This paper uses evidence from focus groups in England to consider how consumers think about and, more importantly, distinguish
foods by both primary and secondary qualities, using both their own judgement but also advice produced by various organisations acting
as knowledge intermediaries, such as independent certication bodies. We thus consider the sorting out that consumers do with food,
particularly in developing typologies of goodness and badness, and the cues on which they base these judgements, from the material
immediacy of mucky carrots to the abstract remoteness of organic certication. In particular, we problematise the knowledge-x that
underlies attempts to provide knowledge to promote more sustainable and ethical consumption. This raises problems of how consumers
give assurance schemes meaning, how ethical and sustainable schemes are subject to re-fetishization and how consumers tend towards
increasing scepticism and distrust of such claims, thus making a politics of reconnection far from easy.
2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Consumers; Knowledge; Trust; Food; Sustainable and ethical consumption

1. Introduction importance of consumer choices to the agenda (Goodman,

Researchers and campaigners are increasingly con-
cerned about food consumption and production practices
in industrialised countries, because of their social and envi-
ronmental impacts across the world. This has now gener-
ated an agenda to promote quality, authenticity,
localness, sustainability, fairtrade, animal welfare and
other attributes of food production and sale that aim to
change these practices, especially by increasing traceability
for consumers. Whilst this aim is worthy, this agenda has
focused largely upon how food is produced, distributed
and sold, but very little upon how it is perceived, viewed
and consumed. The presumptions about how consumers
value localness, authenticity, traceability and quality have
therefore been little veried, ironically despite the supposed
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: s.e.eden@hull.ac.uk (S. Eden).
2003, p. 6).
This paper addresses this gap by taking a more
consumer-oriented approach to knowledge about food
production. Using evidence from focus groups with
consumers in England, we explore how consumers think
about and, more importantly, distinguish foods on the
basis of a range of qualities, both primary and
secondary, using both their own judgement and
information from various organisations acting as knowl-
edge intermediaries between food producers and
consumers.
We thus consider the sorting out (Bowker and Star,
1999) that consumers do with food, particularly in develop-
ing typologies of goodness and badness with reference to
the cues on which they base these judgements and the eth-
ical and political impact of those typologies. In particular,
we problematise the knowledge-x proposed to change
consumer practices, by showing how consumers use, trust
and distrust dierent proxies that provide knowledge in

0016-7185/$ - see front matter 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.11.001
 S. Eden et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 10441057
order to promote more sustainable and ethical
consumption.
2. The distance problem of consumption
The agenda which this paper addresses posits that the
distance (both cartographical and cognitive) between food
producers and consumers has increased in the developed
world in the 20th century, because fewer people are directly
employed in producing food, production chains are more
complex with more technological processes involved and
fewer people know how to grow their own food or how
food is produced. So, modern geographies of food are
argued to distance consumers from producers and hide
the very social relations and environmental impacts that
make food production possible (Duy et al., 2005; Princen,
1997; Hudson and Hudson, 2003). This disconnection
agenda is also endorsed by policy and user groups (e.g. Pol-
icy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food, 2002,
p. 96).
Distance and disconnection are presumed to occur in
both cartographic and cognitive space. First, food produc-
tion and processing spaces are assumed to be separated
from consumption spaces. Second, the activities in produc-
tion and processing spaces are assumed to be less part of
consumers everyday experiences and knowledge than they
used to be, so that even where people live adjacent to farms
or food factories or walk past them every day, they know
less (or nothing) about what happens inside. So, the com-
plex topologies of food production matter, rather than
solely its geographies, a point sometimes neglected in the
literature. Cognitive distanciation may be exacerbated
through new technologies of production, such as genetic
modication (Brom, 2000, p. 129), which are even further
from the everyday understandings of most consumers.
Hence, consumers may feel increasingly alienated from
the way their food is grown and processed (Duy et al.,
2005, pp. 1718).
It is further argued that this disconnection reduces con-
sumer trust in food and food providers, especially where, as
in the UK, food is overwhelming bought through large
chain stores, rather than small shops. Such distanciation
is also frequently either blamed on (or simply associated
with) globalised food production, through concepts like
commodity networks and food miles (Hughes and Reimer,
2004; Pretty et al., 2005). Whilst these usefully emphasise
the environmental externalities of transport, they obscure
the argument that consumer knowledge of food grown
even in the same country or the same county may still
be problematic. Again, the agenda often confuses or con-
ates geography with topology, rather than attending to
their dierences.
Geographers have recently approached this disconnec-
tion agenda using frameworks from rural development,
agro-food chains and political economy (e.g. Goodman,
2000; Guthman, 2003; Watts et al., 2005). The result has
been a production-oriented focus that emphasises how
1045
food is produced (Goodman, 2003, p. 1), how labour and
technology are involved, how geography is co-constituted
through production and how products are dierentiated
by their geographies, particularly their origins (e.g. Ilbery
et al., 2005; Parrott et al., 2002). In terms of political econ-
omy, this has emphasised how the consumer is alienated
from the conditions of production, particularly from the
exploitation of labour remote from consumption, an
exploitation that is then obscured by the marketing of lux-
ury (e.g. Hartwick, 1998). Such researchers argue that we
should reverse commodity fetishism and its clouding of
the conditions of production (e.g. Jackson, 1999; Hartwick,
2000; Hudson and Hudson, 2003) to reveal the unappetis-
ing underbelly of production, whether this be the treatment
of chickens or of sweatshop workers (e.g. Watts, 2004;
Jackson, 2002; Schlosser, 2002), and reect the ethical
turn in geography that has challenged the postmodernist
approach to consumption that dominated the 1980s and
1990s (e.g. Hartwick, 2000, p. 1179).
3. The solution of reconnection
To correct this, approaches from political economy and
rural geography have urged the more deliberate, even
pedagogical (Hudson and Hudson, 2003, p. 427), re-edu-
cation of consumers into better consumer practices. We
also see this knowledge agenda strongly reected in popu-
lar best-sellers which seek to raise consumer awareness of
food production and green and ethical consumerism (e.g.
Elkington and Hailes, 1988; Klein, 2000; Schlosser, 2002;
Lawrence, 2004). Hartwick (1998, p. 433) calls this the
politics of reconnection and it is urged by both academ-
ics and policy groups (e.g. Jackson et al., 2006, p. 133; Pol-
icy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food,
2002). Reconnection arguments can be both geographical,
in linking the global North and South through fairtrade
consumption (Goodman, 2004, p. 906), and topological,
thickening the connections between consumers and pro-
ducers and thus countering the inaccuracies in consum-
ers views (Crang, 1996, p. 56).
Solutions to the problem of reconnection are often
described as alternative food networks. . . that redistribute
value through the network against the logic of bulk com-
modity production; that reconvene trust between food
producers and consumers; and that articulate new forms
of political association and market governance (What-
more et al., 2003, p. 289). But the concept of alternative
food systems is problematic, rstly because it is often
loosely dened, secondly because it is not always obvious
what such forms are alternative to and thirdly because it
tends to idealise and promote certain forms of production
and consumption uncritically (Goodman, 2003, p. 5), so
that alternative comes to mean (often implicitly) food
chains that do not work through corporate or mass pro-
duction and retailing (Whatmore and Thorne, 1997; Ray-
nolds, 2000). Hence, many supporters of alternative
food networks become suspicious when those networks
1046 S. Eden et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 10441057
succeed and grow (e.g. Goodman, 2000; Guthman, 2003;
Manseld, 2004; Raynolds, 2000). The expansion (and thus
success) of organic agriculture is a particular target,
because some (especially Guthman, 2003, 2004) do not
consider that mass production can match the same (envi-
ronmental and social) standards as alternative produc-
tion. It complicates the dichotomy of good organic food
and bad fast food, when the alternative begins to become
what it opposes.
Another form of reconnection is through consumers
buying locally produced food which thus denes alterna-
tive as close in physical and topological space through
shorter supply chains (e.g. Watts et al., 2005). Direct farm-
gate sales and farmers markets are argued to avoid the
joint evils of technological processing and corporate pro-
teering, thus improving food traceability and reducing the
scope for commodity fetishism (Watts et al., 2005, p. 33).
However, local is a highly elastic concept and can be used
to support agendas of defensive localism, rather than
more ethically or environmentally sustainable production,
so that an easy association of local with quality or authen-
ticity is highly suspect (Winter, 2003; Ilbery and Maye,
2006).
There are two other problems with such solutions. First,
the literature on alternative food is often production-ori-
ented (Goodman, 2003, p. 1), originating as it does in agri-
cultural studies and rural development. But even where
such work ostensibly studies consumption, it has tended
to address this agenda without investigating consumers,
especially by analysing the signs and imaginaries of mar-
keting and advertising (e.g. Jackson et al., 2006; Barnett
et al., 2005; Bryant and Goodman, 2004; Goodman,
2004; Hartwick, 1998). Advertising may contribute to the
cultural resources available to consumers in making sense
of food, but analysing how products are sold is not the
same as analysing how they are bought or eaten. Authors
frequently comment that more work needs to be done to
correct the serious neglect of consumers (Goodman,
2003, p. 6; Winter, 2003; Ilbery and Maye, 2006), but little
has yet been produced. In this paper, we do this by taking a
horizontal view across myriad commodities that consumers
encounter, contrasting with the verticality in studies of
commodity chains and agro-food networks.1 In this con-
sumers eye view, dierent products and knowledges jostle
for consumer attention in the same spaces and times. Our
approach is therefore to provide less detail on individual
commodities, but to provide more detail on the compara-
tive and general processes applied by consumers to make
sense of and judge them.
Second, consumers and producers do not easily divide
into alternatives and their opposite, because, like prod-
ucts, producers and systems jostle alongside each other in
the same spaces and times. For example, the vast majority
1
Fine (2002, pp. 8485) uses horizontal quite dierently, to indicate
horizontal generalising and theorising, e.g. regarding gender or a
(sub)disciplinary approach.
of organic food in the UK is bought in the mass market
through multiple grocery chains (Soil Association, 2006;
Padel and Foster, 2005), not in alternative spaces. Even
in clearly separate spaces, like farmers markets, farm
shops and car boot sales, consumers are likely to be having
fun and buying luxury or supplementary items (e.g. Crewe
and Gregson, 1998), rather than doing their main, func-
tional shopping, and many products may still be sourced
from conventional producers in other countries (Ilbery
and Maye, 2006), so that these spaces still work within tra-
ditional capitalist logics (Holloway and Kneafsey, 2000).
Moreover, neither consumers nor producers, in our experi-
ence, use the term alternative rather, local foods are
expected to accord with normal shopping habits, retail out-
lets and end-product formats (Weatherell et al., 2003, p.
241) making this academic dichotomy problematic when
discussing what consumers actually do and think. Further-
more, urging consumers to Buy British may connect to
quite dierent but still locally imagined geographies, rather
than urging them towards alternative foods, emphasising
that production geographies themselves are open to multi-
ple constructions (also Holloway and Kneafsey, 2000, pp.
295296).
We thus avoid the term alternative because of these
problems. More generally, we also seek to avoid the kind
of geographical fetishism which conceives of distance as
the problem and of local reconnection as the solution
(e.g. Ilbery and Kneafsey, 1999; cf. Barnett et al., 2005;
Princen, 1997; Holloway and Kneafsey, 2000; Massey,
2004). Instead, we consider dierent topological reconnec-
tions that represent the conditions of production at the
point of consumption through dierent ways of presenting
the two alternative solutions critiqued above: buy locally
and buy ethically.
4. The knowledge-x and its problems
We call this a knowledge-x to the distancing of con-
sumption from production, because such topological
reconnections explicitly go beyond a spatial x or geo-
graphical reconnection by including diverse topologies of
knowledge gathering, evaluating and contesting, topologies
which depend not upon physical relationships or proximity
but upon more precarious and complex links of trust. Buy-
ing locally may rely on location being self-evident assur-
ance because a farm shop is on a farm and consumers
can see its operations and talk to the growers about pro-
duction. But buying fairtrade coee in England, where it
is not grown, must rely on other forms of assurance. As
distanciation removes consumers from person-to-person
knowledge, new systems develop to provide knowledge
through impersonal assurance and disembedded informa-
tion (Giddens, 1990). Food assurance schemes are exam-
ples of such systems (e.g. Watts et al., 2005; Morris and
Young, 2004; Ilbery and Kneafsey, 1999). Although con-
sumers can detect and test many qualities of products for
themselves at rst hand like price, perishability, avour,
 S. Eden et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 10441057
appearance, texture and even nutrition they cannot nec-
essarily detect how much the producers were paid or what
pesticides were used in production, for instance. Food
assurance schemes act as knowledge intermediaries to pro-
vide this information.
But knowledge provision is problematic. Consider how
the decit model of providing information to the public
has been debunked in recent years in the public understand-
ing of science literature (e.g. Wynne, 1995; Irwin and
Michael, 2003; Miller, 2001). This model assumes that if
information about a risk or problem is provided, this will
increase public understanding and thus trust in policy or reg-
ulation about it and that information is a one-way ow: from
those who know (usually the scientists or policy-makers) to
those who do not know (usually the public). The compari-
sons with the knowledge-x model in consumption are obvi-
ous: information ows in one direction from producers the
good ones, anyway, because the bad ones are deliberating
withholding or disguising information about their nasty
practices to the ignorant (alienated) consumer in order to
generate and maintain trust in the producers.
Like the decit model, we can debunk the knowledge-x
in consumption. First, information is not a one-way ow to
a passive recipient: information about food can be re-inter-
preted, validated, received, resisted and outright ignored.
Second, a knowledge-x overplays cognitive and rational
approaches to consumption, at the expense of aesthetic,
emotional or playful approaches (Crang, 1996; Barnett
et al., 2005). Third, information can have negative eects,
as show in studies of the GM debate and similar citizen sci-
ence experiments (e.g. Poortinga and Pidgeon, 2004; Schol-
derer and Frewer, 2003). Fourth, empowering consumers
through information assumes consumer sovereignty where
consumers can act on choice (e.g. National Consumer
Council, 2003; Food Standards Agency, 2005), rather than
assuming that their choices are constrained by income,
knowledge, personal circumstances, systems of provision
and social norms. Indeed, the ideology of consumer choice
tends to be naturalised in current debates about food, with
the problematic eect of seeming to shift responsibility from
other powerful players, such as governments, food manu-
facturers and retailers, to individual consumers.
5. Methodology
We turn now to our empirical study, for which we
recruited six focus groups in the city of York in northern
England in late 2005. The rst four groups were of local
consumers, from both genders and varied socioeconomic
backgrounds, who were recruited by a professional recrui-
ter. They had to meet two conditions: they had to be
involved in shopping for food for their household on a reg-
ular basis and they had to be either regularly buying or at
least interested in one of several product categories, includ-
ing organic food and functional food, to ensure sucient
interest in discussing these topics. This is now a large pro-
portion of the UK public: A 2005 survey by the Food Stan-
1047
dards Agency (2006, p. 26) reported that 30% of shoppers
surveyed said that they regularly or occasionally bought
organic food and the Soil Association (2006) reported that
in the same year 65.4% of shoppers surveyed said that they
had knowingly bought organic food, with 41% doing so at
least once a month.
Having completed these four groups and found surpris-
ingly few dierences across them, we decided to target
more specialised consumers, to seek diversity. For the fth
group, we asked a local allotment association to recruit
allotment holders who mainly grew their own fruit and veg-
etables. For the nal group, we used a local wholefood
shop, a vegan group and contacts in the Soil Association
(a UK NGO that researches and promotes organic farming
and related environmental activities) to recruit consumers
who bought primarily wholefood and organic food.
In all, 45 people participated and each group met twice,
with a weeks interval during which participants were given
information about food assurance schemes to take home
and look at. All the groups were audio-recorded using dig-
ital equipment and fully transcribed. They were analysed
using grounded theory, namely systematic coding to satu-
ration, and standard word-processing software. All partic-
ipants have been given pseudonyms in this paper.
These groups are not intended to be representative nor
to measure market share or awareness, but to explore
how consumers think about food production and evaluate
information promoting products as sustainable and ethical.
Our ndings are necessarily speculative, given that they are
based upon 45 people in one UK city. However, our
research does have the merit of being horizontal, in looking
simultaneously and in some detail at how a range of com-
modities and knowledges are encountered by a small but
diverse set of consumers.
Having deliberately recruited the last two groups in dif-
ferent ways, we were surprised that, although participants
in the vegan/organic group were particularly aware of many
nutritional and environmental debates, there was not a
great deal of dierence in the way in which all six groups dis-
cussed condence and trust in information. The National
Consumer Council (2001, p. 7) likewise found a marked
consistency across all socio-economic and age groups of
key consumer concerns about food and farming, suggest-
ing that consumer concerns, other than price, are not sub-
ject to strong cleavages of opinion. For example, even
members of the Soil Association in our groups were unsure
and often misinformed about how the Soil Association cer-
ties organic produce. Hence, in what follows, although we
will occasionally draw out comparisons between groups, the
dierences were much less marked than we had expected,
which is itself interesting.
6. Detecting and classifying good and bad food through
encounter
We began the rst meetings of our focus groups by ask-
ing simply about how participants shopped for food. With-
1048 S. Eden et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 10441057
out prompting, our participants immediately framed this
within a dualistic typology of good and bad foods, where
the bad foods were referred to as crap, rubbish, fast
food and junk and the good foods were raw and
home-made.
Matthew: Ive always believed in fresh fruit and veg. I
dont mind them [his daughters] trying crap so long
as theyre also eating fresh fruit and veg. (group 1)
Our consumers thus put into operation a vernacular sort-
ing out (Bowker and Star, 1999)2 of bad and good, a moral
ordering for a whole series of other judgements. For exam-
ple, bad food was distinguished by type as processed,
pre-packed, packaged, ready meals, frozen (the oppo-
site of fresh and unadulterated), or by its content or cook-
ing methods, such as fried food, chips, sausages, baked
beans, pizza, burgers (the opposite of fruit and vegeta-
bles) or by the outlet it was bought from, such as take-
aways and McDonalds (the opposite of home-made).
Bad food was not fresh because it was old, out-of-date
or had been stored too long, because shops used preserva-
tives or other unnatural processing and storage practices
to keep their food edible (to a degree). We heard a lot of
this kind of discussion, but will not report it in detail,
not least because it will be familiar from recent debates
about the problems of diet in developed countries and
the well-worn dichotomy set up between bad (fast, industri-
ally produced) food and good (fresh, organic, slow, home-
made) food (e.g. Guthman, 2003, p. 46). Instead, we want
to think about how consumers make these judgements
about good and bad food and what this suggests that
they know about food production.
The criteria used by our participants in the rst instance
were ones they could judge for themselves, that were
detectable. So, fresh or un-processed food was more
trusted because it was seen raw there was nothing hidden
about how it had been processed.
Mark: If it looks as it should do when it grew, you
tend to trust it. Certainly I do. (group 1)
Hence, rsthand information was the most powerful way in
which consumers classied food as good or bad, some-
times referred to as primary qualities in consumer studies
(Grunert, 2002). For example, unnaturally stored or pre-
served bananas dont turn yellow, they go from green to
brown (Mark in group 1), so they can be seen to be
wrong. Participants cited the evidence of their own senses,
their bodily connection with food, the processes of prepar-
ing it, cooking it and eating it:
Laura: Every time I buy a pre-packed salad from a
supermarket, which isnt that often really, it always
2
Bowker and Star (1999, p. 219) mainly deal with more formalised
systems of classication in their work, but even in this more informal case,
classication still does important political and ethical work.
says washed and ready-to-eat, and I open it and put
a little bit in my mouth and they always taste funny.
Im always worried and think, you know, Im going
to wash that. It doesnt taste like its washed but
thats what it says. (group 1)
More emphatically, our participants used dirt on vegeta-
bles as evidence of their local and authentic production,
thus linking together the two reconnection agendas above:
the visibly local and the assuredly ethical:
George: we use the [farm shop] for all the fruit and
veg and home-cured. . . everything meat. . . And we
nd that brilliant, because its all recently been picked
all the leaves and salad stu, tomatoes, mucky car-
rots, everything, so you do know that its organically
grown. (group 1)
We later visited the farm shop that George mentioned and
found that it stocks many products that are not organic.
We return to the problem of outlets below, but the point
here is that Georges mucky carrots and the bits of
sand on them that he mentioned later are visible, physical
evidence of closeness to the soil, of authenticity, of reality.
Claiming to resist the aestheticisation of the most mundane
products, participants in all six of our focus groups used
visible and tasteable imperfections as assurances of good
(raw) food.
Lorna: Weve got a friend whos got an allotment
and he keeps dropping carrier bags o at our house.
Its broad beans at the moment and then his new
potatoes and theyre all just black soil, and you just
have to wash them o and everything. Were actu-
ally growing tomatoes at home. When you go to
pick a tomato o its vine, the smell on your hand
and everything, its dierent, its beautiful.
(group 2)
By comparison, food that is too clean, vegetables that do
not have dirt clinging to them, carrots that are not mucky
all these were cited by participants as suspicious evidence
of overzealous intervention with powerful cleaners and
other technologies, such as chilling, during industrial pro-
cessing. Barbara (in group 3) made this also a historical
point: you used to buy a sack of potatoes from the farmer,
theyd have soil on and youd rub the soil o, but no long-
er. The food suers, and its very hyper-reality, its extreme
cleanliness, is another signal that it is not natural but a re-
sult of overprocessing and mass, industrialised food pro-
duction and thus bad:
Mabel: your supermarkets and like weve said,
theyre all washed piles and piles of carrots, say.
But then at the moment I think theyre looking quite
sad, are the carrots. Usually theyre looking quite
bright and shiny and all washed but these are looking
dull as though theyve had them there a week or so.
 S. Eden et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 10441057
Sally: Theyre not the right colour though sometimes
when you get them in the supermarket. Theyre too
orange. (group 4)
For the vegan/organic group, even produce labelled as or-
ganic in supermarkets (and thus guaranteed to have been
certied as organic) failed to seem organic because the
supermarkets quality criteria made it again hyper-real:
too big and perfect to be organic and too regular. This
is not solely a visual judgement, but also uses touch and
taste, where the texture of food becomes an indicator of,
for example, how a chicken has lived, how much room it
has had to move about (to build up muscles and bones)
and thus how well it has been treated:
Gabrielle: I stopped buying organic chickens from
supermarkets because Im sure theres something
really weird about them.
Laura: The ones from the farm shop, which are not
organic, they have more the texture of the ones from
the village, a much rougher texture. (vegan/organic
group)
This vernacular typology emphasises the kinds of highly
contingent knowledges that matter for consumers. The
way that our participants talked about food, especially
its authenticity, often emphasised their intimate bodily
connection with it but also naturalised food production
as earthy, rather than mechanised, again reecting the
academic dichotomy above between mass industrial
production and homely, trustworthy, real local
production.
But these easy detections became problematic as our dis-
cussions developed. Constant reexive monitoring of
changing conditions and their relationship to the individual
makes trust dynamically unstable and contingent (Giddens,
1990). Whilst rsthand sensory experience was cited as
powerful in connecting consumers to the quality of food,
it was also fallible. Our participants suspected that their
senses were being fooled, because food could have been
sprayed and thus polluted or contaminated by invisible
agents, while still looking fresh. Here, people suspected
the mass industrialisation hidden in products, again shar-
ing the general agenda described above, if not detailed
knowledge of food production processes.
Jenny: even when you sort of buy bags of salads its
actually sprayed with preservatives to try and main-
tain freshness. So you think youre actually getting
a fresh product thats preservative-free and it actually
isnt. All sorts of hidden things. (group 2)
When we move on to food qualities that are not identiable
by the consumers senses, such as ethical or organic pro-
duction, the typology between good and bad food be-
comes much more precarious. Where people are absent
and systems of production are invisible, consumers need
to develop trust in other ways (Giddens, 1990), so consum-
ers grappled for cues (Scholderer and Frewer, 2003) to
1049
identify (or verify) qualities that they could not themselves
experience through their senses. Such cues represent sec-
ondhand knowledge about foods credence qualities
(Grunert, 2002; Einsiedel, 2002), so-called precisely be-
cause they require belief in the intermediary providing
the knowledge. Such credence qualities rely on dierent
proxies stand-ins for the consumers own senses which
are dierently interpreted and trusted. We next consider
two proxies: spaces and labels.
7. Secondhand information by spatial proxies
The simplest proxy used by our consumers was the trust-
worthy space of a specic retail outlet. The most positively
regarded was the farm shop, because its produce was
thought to be fresh and recently picked, so the food supply
chain was seen as shorter in both space and time. This
reects the geographical agenda outlined above (especially
Watts et al., 2005; Policy Commission on the Future of
Farming and Food, 2002), whereby shortening the geo-
graphical chain also shortened the topological chain,
reducing the number of middle-men that people had to
trust, and generated condence in the connection. You
just assume that because its from a farm shop that its
going to be OK (Alison, group 3). The example of farm-
ers markets is similar, wherein consumers make assump-
tions about the quality and freshness of the products
simply because of the consumption context (Holloway
and Kneafsey, 2000, p. 292). The supply chain is con-
structed to be closer, simpler and, therefore, safer:
Facilitator: So those kind of things that you might
buy at the farmers market or farmers stall, do you
feel that theyre going to be better? [There is a general
yes in response.] Why?
Sarah: Because theyre straight out of the eld. One
day I had to wait while they went to pick more car-
rots out of the eld at the farmers market. Hed gone
to get some. . . I saw these things of sprouts and
mucky carrots and said oh, Ill come back and get
some of them Ill just go take this turkey to the
car. When I got back shed sold out and said, Dont
worry, hes gone to the eld to get some more. And
he brought them, just picked them out of the eld,
they were dripping wet. (group 4)
The allotment and vegan/organic groups particularly de-
plored the food miles implicit in supermarkets, as trans-
porting food can be bad both for the food itself (making
it stale) and for the environment due to fossil fuel use.
All six groups thus clearly echoed the agenda above, in that
their talk favoured the farm shop, the farmers market and
the local butcher as most likely to provide visibility, trace-
ability and condence about production. These three attri-
butes of food can overlap, but they do not have to.
Visibility relates to how consumers see the food or the loca-
tion of food production and/or sale and often, but not al-
ways, relies on geographical proximity, as we explore
1050 S. Eden et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 10441057
below. By comparison, traceability can be produced
through more remote production and/or more depersona-
lised and disembedded modes of production and sale,
exemplied by the product labels of assurance schemes
appearing on supermarket shelves. Consumer condence
may require both, one or neither of these and, in some
cases, visibility can substitute for traceability and vice ver-
sa, emphasising again the contingent complexities of dier-
ent proxies for consumer trust.
Let us illustrate this. The shortest supply chain for our
mainstream consumers was pick your own, again because
of the visibility and geographical proximity of production
to the consumer: as Lorna said about carrots (in group 2,
held in August), you can go and pick them out of the
ground at the moment. For the allotment group, the chain
was even shorter because food was home-grown. This
avoided the problem of secondhand information, because
they were in control of how their food was produced they
could choose what to spray (or not), whether to be organic
(or not), what seeds to plant and when to harvest (to follow
the seasons). There are no intermediaries in this chain
(unless the seed or seedlings are bought in) and traceability
was guaranteed through their own eorts.3
Tom: You know that its not infested with pesticides
or herbicides. You know that its good for the envi-
ronment because it hasnt come half way round the
world. (allotment group)
For those who did not grow their own food, the next best
thing was the proxy of the farm shop. This presents visible
evidence seemingly without intermediaries, because the
elds and the crops therein surround the consumer and
you can see it growing (George, group 1). But, as men-
tioned above, the farm shop near York that they were
referring to also imported much of its fresh produce, espe-
cially from the Netherlands, and stocked a wide range of
processed foods from the UK and other countries, from
avoured olive oils to ice cream and cakes (also Ilbery
and Maye, 2006). Our participants were thus deploying a
similar localism as in some of the academic literature (see
Ilbery and Kneafsey, 1999; Barrett et al., 2002; for a cri-
tique, see Parrott et al., 2002; Winter, 2003), allowing loca-
tion to stand for good, regardless of other attributes or
verication. Trust was not based on production qualities,
but outlet qualities and the (perceived) shortening of the
supply chain, although in practice this proximity was par-
tial and product-specic.
Other outlets were similarly trusted as proxies, because
of familiarity and one-to-one relationships that had been
established over time. This represents the face work (Gid-
dens, 1990, p. 86) necessary to re-embed faceless systems,
such as food production, and anchor trust. For example,
3 4
Similar arguments were raised when participants discussed cooking
with fresh ingredients, instead of buying processed foods with hidden
content.
the vegan/organic group trusted their local wholefood shop
as an outlet and named it continually throughout.
Brenda: I trust them. They say this food has been
grown by Ann and its all organic and I would trust
that.
Facilitator: How do they know?
Brenda: Because the woman, Ann, works in the shop
and shes the one who grows it in her own garden and
brings it in. I would trust that, because I think I trust
individual people more than
Chantal: [interrupting] Because you see the people
there, dont you? Its not some big organisation that
youve never seen and has all kinds of middle men.
Brenda: [interrupting disparagingly] Managers.
(vegan/organic group)
Groups 14 and the allotment group spoke similarly about
the local butchers and, in both cases, the shop space rather
than the product itself demarcated trust and the face work
(Giddens, 1990) of the employees, themselves seen as
knowledgeable about food, supported this trust. Here,
the retailer, rather than the site of production, is visible
and can generate consumer condence. Similarly, our par-
ticipants still perceived a strong immediacy of the meat
supply chain, despite the butcher being an intermediary,
because the links between the retailer and the producer
were identiable and close.4 Here are two examples of,
respectively, visibility and traceability for a local butcher:
Paul: I get free-range from the butchers round the
corner from me. It hasnt got free-range on but its
got a sell-by date and everything like.
Facilitator: How do you know its free-range?
Paul: Because Ive seen the bloke delivering them
from the farm. (group 3)
Tom: if you go to the local butcher or the farmers
market, youre actually talking to people who are
serving you or running it or whatever and the same
when Hudsons [a local butcher] was open. You went
in and talked to people, talked to the other customers
and talked to the butcher.
Steve: Yeah. And as Mike said, he could tell you
where he got his beasts from. He could tell you whose
beast it was. He knew whose meat it was that he was
selling not just anybodys meat. He knew he
didnt buy it at a trade place or anything. He bought
it from farms, from dealers. (allotment group)
Hence, what producers are selling to consumers at farm-
ers markets is, in part, the aura of personal relations and
social connection (Hinrichs, 2000, p. 299), rather than
simply the materiality of their foods. The idealisation of
By comparison, the Food Standards Agencys (2006, p. 22) annual
survey of UK shoppers reported that local butchers shops and market
stalls are less trusted than other outlets for meat, on hygiene grounds.
 S. Eden et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 10441057
personal service in the past ironically becomes novel by
comparison to the far more common impersonal and self-
service approach in supermarkets which dominate food
sales today.5 So, beyond the power of rsthand informa-
tion about food, trusted intermediaries provide second-
hand information, especially where the food topology is
short and simple that is, traceable. But both these means
of knowledge are precarious a legacy of distrust can
encourage reection and destabilise trust. For example,
our participants debated whether food that was produced
properly or organically could be detected by their senses
and whether they could trust the farm shop, the local
butcher and other immediate intermediaries to provide
trustworthy food.
Mabel: Well, you can [get old-fashioned vegetables]
from these farmers carts and farmers markets and
so on.
Sarah: Yeah, but you dont know they havent got
any chemicals on, do you?
Mabel: True enough. (mainstream group 4)
Steve: I think like when we shop at a farm shop, I
would tend to believe them. Whether I can fully
believe them I think I can believe them, so thats
why were tending to buy there now rather than the
supermarkets. (allotment group)
Another, but weaker and smaller, version of the outlet proxy
is the supermarkets organic shelf or section. This was
mentioned in groups 14 as separate, identiable and trusted
as providing better organic food. For them, it is not the
information on products that matters, but the space that is
demarcated either explicitly by displays or implicitly by
association as organic. The space is the proxy and makes
life easier because everything therein can be quickly picked
up without further analysis. Rather than a politics of recon-
nection, this is a politics of demarcation, between commod-
ities and between (or within) consumption spaces. Even
where more information about organic standards and certi-
cation is provided within this demarcated space, consumers
like Steve (in group 2) do not read them for information: I
dont look at the sign. I just go because its organic.
At the same time, this demarcation was problematised.
The organicness of supermarket food was disputed because
of the incongruity between what organic stands for and
what mass industrial food production and retailing stand
for. This is epitomised by Tesco, currently the UKs biggest
retailer, which sells more than one-quarter of UK food. In
a 2005 survey in England (Food Standards Agency, 2006),
92% of shoppers said that they bought most of their house-
hold food through supermarkets, 4% at local shops and
2% at markets, emphasising that consumers are still over-
whelmingly conventional rather than alternative (Win-
5
This paper does not have space to address the importance of nostalgia
in such arguments, other than to note that time is as important as space in
theorising these reconnections, yet is largely ignored in the literature.
1051
ter, 2003). Moreover, 76% of organic sales in the UK are
through multiple retailers (Soil Association, 2006, p. 48)
and Tesco again has the biggest single share of the organic
food market (Soil Association, 2006, p. 20). This empha-
sises the tension within this typology between trust and
use, because people use Tesco and buy organic there, but
trust it less than the outlets that they use less. Only the
vegan/organic group did not t this pattern, not least
because several of them used a local, wholefood retail
cooperative for their main food shopping, rather than
supermarkets like Tesco.
Laura: And its the fact that its Tescos. To me it just
knocks on the head anything. The organisations too
big for our country, for our environment.
Chantal: And its [organic food in supermarkets] also
highly packaged, which is quite strange. Its not even
in biodegradable packaging. Some Sainsburys
organic products have started to come in biodegrad-
able packaging, which just about makes sense, but its
still far too much packaging.
Laura: It should be illegal really. Its got so many
airmiles [meaning food miles]. (vegan/organic
group)
In particular, participants were worried about being de-
luded by their own condence into assuming that food
was indeed produced to organic standards, so they ex-
pressed much doubt and confusion about what the term
organic meant and how it is regulated. We were surprised
to nd that group discussion tended towards scepticism
rather than condence; that is, although participants would
start out with positive assertions about organically, locally
or healthily produced foods, this would soon be under-
mined by others pointing out aws in their knowledge or
information, ways in which this could be suspect, especially
drawing on the legacy of livestock diseases like foot and
mouth and BSE in the UK. Once the group collectively
articulated the issue, participants began to ponder the
uncertainties and diculties of successfully resolving it,
thus challenging the condence that existed before their de-
bate began. Similarly, Burgess (2003) noted that providing
more information about sustainable consumption to
households does not necessarily change their behaviour
or attitudes, although it may promote much more discus-
sion of consumption practices. So, knowledge provided is
not simply accepted nor does it necessarily cause behav-
ioural change, but it can prompt vehement debate.
Moreover, lack of knowledge can itself be a choice.
Wynne (1995) argued that not just public understanding
but also public ignorance is socially constructed as a con-
tingent response to a lack of agency, in the case of workers
at the Sellaeld nuclear power plant.
Ignorance was not a cognitive vacuum, or a decit
by default of knowledge, but an active construct,
and one with cognitive content, about the social
dimensions of science. It was part and parcel of the
1052 S. Eden et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 10441057
dynamic construction of social identity (Wynne,
1995, p. 380).
He argued that, if workers chose to understand the science
involved in their jobs, they would have had to confront
unpleasant risks, so technical ignorance was a positive part
of the workers social intelligence (Wynne, 1995, p. 380).
To put it another way, if the workers looked too closely at
what they did, their social relationships and daily routines
might become inoperable, so a level of ignorance enabled
those very relationships to continue and thus needed to be
deliberately maintained. Trust thus may be a tacit accep-
tance of circumstances in which other alternatives are lar-
gely foreclosed (Giddens, 1990, p. 90). We can compare
this to consumers who shop in a supermarket everyday,
who similarly may not consider the production and trans-
port of most of the things they are buying, or they may
consider it but not act upon it, because doing so would fun-
damentally challenge their shopping practices. In such
cases, we may block things out to make life easier. Chang-
ing this by making people think is the purpose of this pol-
itics of reconnection, but providing information will not
easily x this problem of normalised ignorance.
8. Second hand information by label proxies
After space, a second proxy is labelling and other forms
of assurance information. As mentioned, we gave our par-
ticipants some cards about fteen food assurance organisa-
tions operating in the UK to read between the two group
meetings. The organisations included the Soil Association
and Organic Farmers & Growers, which are the main cer-
tiers of organic food in the UK, the Marine Stewardship
Council, which runs a scheme to certify sustainable sher-
ies across the world, the Royal Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), which approves products
against animal welfare standards via the Freedom Food
logo in the UK, and the international FairTrade logo.
These are all attempts to use knowledge to connect con-
sumers with food production in order to promote sustain-
able and ethical consumption that is, attempts at a
knowledge-x in line with the agenda above.
When we reconvened for the second group meetings,
most participants initially expressed a lot of condence in
these assurance schemes, although they varied greatly in
which ones they trusted most, depending on whether they
recognised the organisations name (see Eden et al.,
2007). As might be predicted, both the allotment group
and the vegan/organic group recognised the Soil Associa-
tion: I denitely would respect anything they labelled
said Brenda. But the Soil Association was also widely
recognised across groups 14, as was the FairTrade logo
on the ethical grounds of giving the people who grow it
and pick it a fair deal (Matthew, group 1). In general,
there was much support for what we can identify as non-
governmental organisations (NGOs), which people in opin-
ion polls consistently say they trust more to tell the truth
than, for example, companies, industrial scientists, govern-
ment and government scientists (e.g. Worcester, 2001; Fre-
wer et al., 1996).
But how far do such proxies reconnect people with food
origins and production processes? For example, prior to
giving out these cards, we found that when we asked people
whether they read labels on food, they talked almost
entirely about processed food, taking it for granted that
fresh food has no labels because it has no packaging
and is unadulterated, so it is obvious what is in it and noth-
ing is hidden. When we tried to talk about organic labelling
on fresh foods, they were somewhat confused because they
associated organic primarily with fresh fruit and vegeta-
bles (also Padel and Foster, 2005) and labelling with pro-
cessed food their vernacular typology conated good
with organic and fresh. Note how Lorna equates organic
and farm-fresh carrots, for instance:
Lorna: you can buy some carrots from like the super-
market and they actually leave an orange rim on your
pan now when you boil them, which you never, ever,
ever used to get an orange mark when you boiled car-
rots. But you can go and buy organic ones or fresh
ones from the farm shop and they dont leave marks.
(group 2)
The point of assurance schemes is to provide information
that consumers cannot get or test for themselves, such as
about the chemicals used in production, the welfare of live-
stock and the treatment of workers. Indeed, in a 2005 sur-
vey (Food Standards Agency, 2006, p. 78), 47% of
shoppers surveyed said (unprompted) that the issue they
wanted more information on was chemicals in food,
far outweighing other issues. But one problem is that, be-
cause such schemes provide information that consumers
cannot get (credence qualities), equally consumers can
never verify that information, so they can never be sure
and continue to lack knowledge personally.
Tom: theres no way I can work out whether Fair-
Trade coee is actually working. I just believe. Well,
[Im] clearly very pleased in their ethos and I accept,
well, I know [speaking to another participant] youve
had dealings with them over 25 years, but you cannot
check it personally, so you assume it does what it says
on the can. And because you believe in it, that makes
it OK. (allotment group)
Brenda: Theres no way to know, really [if anyone
checks the claims]. I know the Soil Association are
very strict, because I know people who are organic
growers and Ive read about it, but the other ones I
wouldnt know. (vegan/organic group)
Only a label will distinguish organic from conventionally
produced food (Goodman, 2000, p. 217). Not for many
consumers. We have shown above how consumers use their
own senses to judge taste, texture, perishability, and apply
their own criteria to distinguish organic qualities. More-
 S. Eden et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 10441057
over, a label does not distinguish organic from non-organic
for them either, because a label must itself be interpreted.
Indeed, organic food is an excellent case for testing the
reconnection of consumers with producers, because it
necessitates thinking about processes of production, yet it
also is surrounded with considerable doubt and confusion
about what the term means and how it is regulated.
Mark: I think I sometimes buy organic food because,
at the end of the day it might not be any dierent
from the non-organic food, but at least I feel better
about it.
Sarah: You hope it is.
Mark: I hope it tastes better and often it will taste
better but I think often theres self-delusion that
Ive bought organic food, it will be better for me
and Ill be more relaxed about it.
Facilitator: And thats [to do with less] pollution. . .
Mark: Well, perhaps. Without someone doing scien-
tic analysis of it, I have to believe that it is organic
and if it tastes better than something thats not, thats
as far as Im concerned.
Sarah: Unless you grow your own, you dont know,
do you? (group 1)
Sarah: Organics are supposed to be regulated,
because I did watch a programme about organic once
and they said there were so many things that had to
be specied and go through before they could actu-
ally put that it was organically grown on it. I think
the ground had to be so long without having any
chemicals on it. But who keeps up with it all? (group
4)
There were two diehard sceptics in the six focus groups,
dismissive of the practices of certication and regula-
tion in general, although somewhat ironically one of
them was highly supportive of the principles of organic
production and fairtrade economics. Rob in particular
frequently argued that certiers and regulators can be
fooled by the food producers; in the following comment,
in comparison with the positive authenticity of dirt
described above, he uses dirt as a way for producers to
deceive certiers:
Rob: You could put 50% organic, 50% normal and
cover it with dirt and youd look at it and think
straight out of me granddads eld! (group 4)
9. Logo overload
So far, by taking a more consumer-oriented perspective,
we have raised some problems for the knowledge-x by
looking at how consumers understand and compare assur-
ance examples in a horizontal way. There are two other
problems to mention here. First, there seem to be more
assurance examples than ever for people to make sense
of. The UKs National Consumer Council (2003) argued
1053
that consumers understanding of product labelling, includ-
ing assurance schemes and endorsement practices, was low
and what understanding there was confused. For example,
a programme shown on terrestrial television shortly before
some of the focus group meetings about the practices of
battery chicken rearing (reminiscent of Schlosser, 2002)
was confused by Alison with three dierent proxy qualities:
certication to organic standards, the Assured Food Stan-
dards red tractor mark on food that meets the legislative
standards of UK food production regardless of origin, and
chicken promoted as a low-fat food. Note how she mingles
her own visible evidence of the chickens skin, learnt from
the programme, with assurance provided by the label prox-
ies, although neither the programme nor the red tractor
proxy specied organic produce:
Alison: They were talking about the tractor one
whats that called again? Food Assurance something
or other [she means the Assured Food Standards red
tractor scheme]. And it turns out that actually means
nothing and its on loads of stu. And Ive been shop-
ping this week and I was looking at everything and I
looked, I went to Morrisons [supermarket] and I
looked at their organic chickens. And every one of
them had these hock burns on. Every one of them
organic chickens had these hock burns. Do you know
what that is? What happens is, they feed the chickens
up so fast so the legs dont develop fast enough to
hold them up, so they end up buckling down on their
knees and crawling about in all their own. . . you
know. And it burns all the skin and theyre living in
all these conditions. This is organic chickens! This
had the Food Assurance thing on it. So obviously
whatever it is theyre doing isnt good enough.
Theyre not monitoring things enough. . . [and later:]
chicken is meant to be the low-fat food. . . And they
did a test where it was all drained out of the chicken
when it was cooked and they had a pint of fat out of
one chicken. And that was covered. That was one of
the ones that was covered by this Food Assurance
thingy. (group 3)
Second, assurance schemes may have to compete with
each other, again as brands do, for the same aware con-
sumer market, bringing the danger of ethical label fatigue
(Goodman, 2004, p. 10). In a challenge to mass produc-
tion, it is not so much no logo (Klein, 2000) as which
logo? Some schemes therefore generated a complicated
trade-o dilemma for our participants, who tried to weigh
up the dierent criteria to judge good food. Are low food
miles or localness more important criteria than being
fairly traded or organically grown? Is avoiding big corpo-
rations more important than supporting organic
production?
Kate: I do the local food/organic food compromise.
Id rather buy something local when I say local, sort
of France than something organic from Australia.
1054 S. Eden et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 10441057
But if its organic and European then Ill buy it.
(vegan/organic group)
Gabrielle: It seems better to buy non-organic in the
market than organic in Tescos, doesnt it? (vegan/
organic group)
This is a direct confrontation between the two types of
alternative food networks described earlier, again illus-
trating how important it is to consider consumption as a
comparative practice, not an either/or state. Evidence so
far suggests that the local wins at the moment in the
UK: in a 2005 survey of UK shoppers, over 80% said that
they would prefer to buy a locally grown non-organic
product rather than an imported organic product (Soil
Association, 2006, p. 58).6 And despite this professed
enthusiasm, organic and local food remain a very small
share of total food sales in the UK (Soil Association,
2006, p. 75; Ilbery and Maye, 2006).
10. A problem of opinion and some conclusions
Julie: If you buy processed food, its so far divorced
from actually growing it, isnt it? You buy it and
its already cooked, you just see it as a meal, without
even thinking whats in it, from the point of view of
where the constituent bits came from. (group 1)
Julie, who elsewhere expressed strong anti-government and
generally right-wing views, here nicely expresses the classic
Marxist argument about the alienation of consumption
from production and the concealment of the social and
environmental conditions of production (e.g. Fine, 2002).
We quote her to illustrate that our participants were often
aware of the more general agenda that we outlined at the
beginning of this paper, because they articulated both the
agenda and the problems of implementing it throughout
(also Weatherell et al., 2003), although they did so in ver-
nacular rather than academic language. But there is a ca-
veat. The way that people talk about food does not
necessarily match the way that they consume it. In other
words, it is likely that the focus groups indicated ideal
diets and expectations of what is good, rather than what
foods the participants actually buy or eat. For example,
in a 2005 survey of UK shoppers (Food Standards Agency,
2006, p. 24), 67% said that they knew they should be eating
the government-recommended amount of ve portions of
fruit and vegetables a day, but only 30% said that they were
eating this many.
We do not therefore use our focus group evidence to argue
that the population in general is now buying more ethically,
although the organic market is certainly growing, with an
estimated increase of 30% in the UK and 14% globally in
2005 (Soil Association, 2006). Instead, we have shown how
6
An estimated 66% of primary organic produce sold by UK multiple
retailers is produced in the UK, although this varies by sector from 97%
for dairy products to 11% for fruit (Soil Association, 2006, pp. 4950).
our sample of consumers judge dierent knowledges about
production, from the material immediacy of mucky carrots
to the abstract remoteness of organic certication. In the case
of assurance schemes, this has practical importance, because
assurance claims hold no value if they do not resonate with
consumer perceptions, if they fail to generate purchases
and if they thus fail to sustain (or expand) better food pro-
duction as part of the reconnection agenda.
We have therefore problematised the sometimes easy
knowledge-x proposed for reconnecting consumers and
producers, using empirical examples of how consumers in
our focus groups talked about and judged food. Informa-
tion about food is contingently valued in the context of
intermediaries, location in time and space and histories of
relationships with food providers, both faceless and per-
sonally known. The way our participants talked about
direct sales and farm shops reects the academic and policy
agenda described above, but these outlets were not seen as
alternatives but as readily routinised within mainstream
consumption (and even these were not unproblematically
trusted simply because they were short supply chains).
But participants also inclined more towards scepticism
and suspicion as group discussions continued. Assurance
schemes attempt to provide information to counter the dis-
tancing of consumers from food production but, when our
participants talked about these schemes, they recast the
problem of not knowing about food and its production
to the problem of not knowing about the assurance inter-
mediary and its knowledge. In other words, instead of hav-
ing a problem with how food production is distanced from
consumers, we have a problem with how the intermediary
assurance organisations are distanced from consumers.
In Fig. 1, we suggest therefore that assurance schemes
eectively replace multiple black-boxes of food growing
and processing with one black-box of assurance. Such
black-boxing (Latour, 1987) wraps up the complexity of
food production (and certication) systems and packages
it out of sight, providing a standardised shorthand for ease
of use or, as here, for quick purchase decisions. The point
of black-boxing is that the outputs of complexity (in this
case, good products) can be accepted uncritically, without
needing to know about the processes involved. Against this
denition, the assurance box might be more grey than
black, in that it may provide more information than before.
For example, naming the assurance organisation may
prompt consumers to actively search for further informa-
tion about it, for example, on the internet. In this sense,
the box of certication is by its nature more transparent
and open than the box of industrial production which is
protected by commercial condentiality. Indeed, certica-
tion schemes may seek the legitimation of transparency
by publishing audit reports, because their interests are in
opening up the black-box of food production more
generally.
But schemes, like brands, compete with each other as
they are sold through the biggest retail outlets in the UK.
This risks re-fetishizing food, with consumers habitually
 S. Eden et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 10441057
grow your own field
(production)
pick your own field (production)
buy at a
field (production)
farm shop
buy at a
supermarket field (production)
buy produce
that is
field (production)
independently
certified
Fig. 1. Simplied knowledge topologies and black-boxes for dierent types of food consumption.
choosing their favourites not because of price or taste, but
because of ethical or sustainable attributes. Often, indepen-
dent certication is wrapped up with mainstream branding,
for example when the Soil Association certies Tescos
organic range of products, but only the UK5 identier
(in small type on the product packaging) tells the consumer
this. Rather than unveiling connections, assurance schemes
reconnect in a simple, convenient, pick-it-o-the-shelf man-
ner that seeks to be in the public interest but ironically
works within the existing consumerist approach to food.
This is problematic because it is precisely this unthinking
approach that so many have criticised: the solution of
assurance itself can therefore become a problem for
assurance.
Moreover, the assurance schemes partake of and benet
from the logoisation that is common to modern consump-
tion, using the tools of what they are supposed to be oppos-
ing (Jackson, 2002; Goodman, 2004). This is not a new
problem: there are many examples of resistance and alter-
native movements being commercialised by the main-
stream, once they prove protable, which generate
discomfort amongst commentators who would rather
retain a small but purist market than use consumerism,
even if the sector benets. But is such conventionalisation
(Guthman, 2004) not necessary to grow the market, espe-
cially amongst time-poor consumers?
There is a positive aspect to this. Although proxies like
farm shops, known-by-name retailers and assurance
schemes do not necessarily provide a knowledge-x to the
reconnection problem, the very fact that they raise debates
and awareness may be useful. Indeed, Hartwick (1998)
thinks of a politics of reconnection as mainly occuring
through the deconstruction of commodication, rather
than through assuring the product itself. We note that
our participants moved from initial condence in many
1055
consumer
consumer
shop consumer
factories
(processing)
shop consumer
trucks, planes etc.
(transport)
factories
(processing)
shop consumer
trucks, planes etc.
(transport)
verification by intermediaries
of the 15 assurance schemes to increasing scepticism and
distrust of their claims, as well as of associated companies,
government and media. If nothing else, this was at least evi-
dence that questioning about food production and regula-
tion was prompted by such information, although not
evidence that such information inuenced their consump-
tion knowledge or practices. Although Wynne (1995) sug-
gests that ignorance might be socially intelligent, the
everyday routinisation of food consumption can also be
questioned and disturbed, if not overturned. Hence, ambiv-
alence might itself be a positive and constructive state
(Bauman, 1991), certainly in comparison to blind accep-
tance of the status quo.
To conclude: the knowledge-x is easy to argue but dif-
cult to implement. So, rather than arguing for reconnec-
tion through information, let us look more closely at how
consumers think about reconnection and why they often
do not (perhaps deliberately) think too much about the ori-
gins of the food that they routinely buy. Whether we call
this a politics of reconnection, a politics of traceability or
a politics of informed consumer choice, the point is that
it should raise questions for consumers about food produc-
tion and not necessarily lead them to expect simple or easy
answers the knowledge-x itself can be problematic if
that is its eect.
Second, let us put consumers back into research. Too
many papers evoke them merely as constructs, thus making
large assumptions about consumer knowledge, rather than
investigating how that knowledge itself is produced and
consumed in a complex and comparative network. We
have looked in detail at how real consumers think and talk
about food, but we have only drawn on a small sample of
45 people, leaving plenty of scope for more empirical work.
Third, we have plenty of good research on specic
commodities and their vertical supply chains, but again
1056 S. Eden et al. / Geoforum 39 (2008) 10441057
this is not how consumers see the world. We need to think
about how to integrate theoretical frames that deal with
the complex verticalities of production with frames that
deal with the (equally complex but in very dierent ways)
horizontalities of consumption and, in particular, how
people weigh up seemingly contradictory or competing
information from multiple sources in order to make
sophisticated judgements about that most basic necessity:
food.
Acknowledgements
This work was funded by the Economic and Social
Research Councils Science in Society programme, under
Project RES-151-25-00035. We would like to thank all
our participants and interviewees and especially our re-
cruiter in York and the Soil Association for helping us
to set up the focus groups. All participants have been gi-
ven pseudonyms. Thanks also to Lewis Holloway for his
comments and those who provided feedback on an early
version of this paper at Lancaster University in 2006.
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