Digital Food Activism

Tanja Schneider, Karin Eli, Catherine Dolan, Stanley Ulijaszek, Tanja Schneider, Karin Eli, Catherine Dolan, Stanley Ulijaszek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138088320
• eBook ISBN: 9781351614566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Digital Food Activism is a new edited volume that investigates how digital media technologies are transforming food activism and consumers' engagements with food, eating, and food systems. Bringing together critical food studies, economic anthropology, digital sociology, and science and technology studies, Digital Food Activism offers innovative multi-disciplinary analyses of food activist practices on social media, mobile apps, and hybrid online and offline alternative spaces. With chapters that focus on diverse digital platforms, food-related issues, and geographic locales, this volume reveals how platforms, programmers, and consumers are becoming key mediators of the mandate of food corporations and official governing actors. Digital Food Activism thereby suggests that emerging forms of activism in the digital era hold the potential to reshape the ethics, aesthetics, and patterns of food consumption.

1 Introduction

Digital food activism – food transparency one byte/bite at a time?

Tanja Schneider, Karin Eli, Catherine Dolan and Stanley Ulijaszek

Food transparency by digital means

How many food apps do you have on your mobile phone? How often do you share information on food via a tweet or a Facebook post? How often do you see or upload food photos on Instagram? Even if you do not actively post or seek information about food online, it is likely that you have encountered numerous food posts, images, and videos on various online platforms. Food is an increasingly prominent subject of engagement online, from the aesthetics of cooking to the ethics of shopping. In this volume, we contemplate what happens when food, this visceral and enlivening matter, goes digital – and particularly what happens when activism surrounding food moves into the digital domain.

In examining food activism within contemporary ‘digital food cultures’ (Lupton, forthcoming), this volume focuses on selected websites, mobile phone apps, and social networking platforms that offer digital modes of activist engagement with food. These new platforms provide diverse types of information: where foods or their ingredients are grown and manufactured, which ingredients or nutrients various foods contain, what health or environmental effects these foods are reported to have, and who owns food products or brands. Together, these strands of information reflect the growing interest in, and concern with, questions of food transparency in the context of food-related anxieties among consumers in the Global North (Jackson, 2015).

What is unique about the ways in which food transparency is conceptualised in the digital realm? While food labels carry information on ingredients, nutrients, and safety (e.g. sell-by dates), activists – both offline and online – have pointed out that other consequential information remains hidden or difficult to obtain. Prominent lacunae include the political alliances of food companies and their interconnectedness with other companies, and the environmental impact of various foods (e.g. food miles, or the distance a food travels from its locus of production to its locus of consumption). Into this informational gap step digital food activists, who use the digital realm to redefine and/or expand food transparency, and to disseminate otherwise ‘hidden’ information to citizen-consumers who may share these concerns.

An example of the process of redefining appears in consumers’ use of the mobile app Buycott, which we studied as part of our project on digital food activism (see Eli et al., 2016). Buycott is a US-based barcode scanner app, with a global database that encompasses a range of retail products, including, predominantly, food. The app adopts the term buycott – antonym of boycott – as its name which means to purchase a product or brand deliberately in order to signal support of companies’ or countries’ policies or practices (Sandovici and Davis, 2010: 329). This concept of political consumption is embodied in Buycott’s stated mission to ‘vote with your wallet’ (Buycott, 2016). Users of the app can generate their own activist campaigns, as well as provide data to inform other users’ activist campaigns. While campaigns may focus on any political issue, Buycott includes a number of prominent campaigns concerned with food, including ‘Pro GMO? Or Pro-Right To Know’, ‘Monsanto Products Boycott – Say Not to GMO’, and ‘Support Organic Dairy Products’ (Buycott, 2017).

In Buycott’s case, food transparency is visually depicted through corporate kinship charts (see Eli et al., 2016). When consumers scan a food product with Buycott, the app informs them which parent company owns the product or brand, producing a phylogenic tree of corporate ownership structures. The app also alerts consumers to conflicts between the campaigns they have set up and/or joined and certain food production practices, such as the use of genetically modified organisms (GMO), in which either the company or its parent company engage. When we embarked on our research project, Tanja set out to test a couple of food apps, take notes, and report back on her experiences to colleagues of the Oxford Food Governance Group (the co-authors of this Introduction), which we later shared as an amended version on the group’s shared blog.¹ This is an extract from her report (Schneider, 2013) on learning how to buycott using Buycott:

The first product I scanned was a water bottle that was sitting on my desk right beside me. The water I had bought and was drinking that day uses the name of a Swiss thermal spring in its name and so I had assumed I was buying a local product and supporting a local company located in a Swiss mountain valley. To my surprise, I found out that the water brand was owned by Coca-Cola, a company whose products I don’t tend to buy very often. So, unintentionally, I had been spending money on one of their products.

My surprise and my researcher’s curiosity led me to check out the water company’s website and search for more information on who owns the company. Interestingly, there is no mention that the company is owned by Coca-Cola under the ‘company’ tab on their website. So I suppose the use of the app was helpful right away in knowing more about the products I consume. However, the information left me wondering what to do now. Being only an occasional drinker of bottled water but a frequent user of empty plastic bottles for tap water refills when I’m on the go, I knew that the clever solution would be to stop buying/using plastic bottles and buy a glass, metal or hard plastic water bottle for refill. That would have the positive side-effect of reducing plastic waste. On the other hand, it would have the negative side-effect that I wouldn’t support jobs in a company located in a Swiss mountain village.

[…]

Reflecting further about my experience with the app, I kept wondering how the app and the information it provided had altered my relationships to the products I buy and consume …

Here we see how the use of an app like Buycott resignifies a mundane bottle of water, connecting everyday consumption to broader ethical concerns such as local sourcing, corporate profits, and environmental sustainability. As the chapters in this volume suggest, digital food activism is enacted not merely through technologies, foods or ‘things’, but rather through the relationships between them, as they are mediated and transformed by digital network infrastructures. To study these relationships, we draw on our multi-disciplinary backgrounds in anthropology, sociology and science and technology studies (STS) to address the overarching research question of this volume: how do diverse actors, including activists, computers, mobile phones, digital network infrastructures and platforms, enact new relationships between food, its producers and consumers, with implications for food activism and food governance?

With this question in mind, we first review the literature on food activism and digital activism. We then introduce the concept of digital food activism, which we have developed to capture diverse forms of digitally mediated practices of food activism, their distinctiveness and their constitutive effects. Next, we situate these practices within the larger multi-disciplinary literature on digital devices, platforms and infrastructures, focusing on the affordances² of digital platforms; here, our aim is to explore the kinds of interactions these platforms enable and constrain, and what this means for digital food activism. We then consider digital platforms used for food activism as ‘infrastructures that give rise to ontological experiments’ (Jensen and Morita, 2015). Building on our own research and that of the contributors to this volume, we show the multiplicity (cf. Mol, 2002) and experimental nature of digital food activism and call attention to how food is ontologically respecified in the entanglements of diverse types of activists and digital platforms. To conclude, we discuss the implications of this ontological respecification for agency, democracy and the economy, and elucidate the similarities and differences between ‘traditional’ food activism and digital food activism (Counihan and Siniscalchi, 2014).

Digital food activism

This volume stems from our three-year research project,³ entitled ‘Understanding Emerging Forms of Food Consumption: The Role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in European Food Governance’. When we began our project, we encountered a surprising lack of engagement between extant research in food studies and research in digital sociology, anthropology and geography, as well as communication studies and political science. In response, we developed the concept of digital food activism, to bridge these previously disparate research realms. In developing this concept, we built on existing research concerning food activism and digital activism, as well as on Science and Technology Studies (STS), anthropological and related studies of infrastructure, with a specific focus on digital platforms.

Food activism

In Counihan and Siniscalchi’s introductory chapter to their edited volume, Food Activism, they define food activism as ‘efforts by people to change the food system across the globe by modifying how they produce, distribute, and/or consume food’ (2014: 3). These efforts encompass ‘people’s discourses and actions to make the food system or parts of it more democratic, sustainable, healthy, ethical, culturally appropriate, and better in quality’ (Siniscalchi and Counihan, 2014: 6). They range from spontaneous and institutionalised, to individual and collective acts and are performed by ‘political activists, farmers, restaurateurs, producers and consumers’ (ibid.: 6–7). Food Activism is part of growing scholarship in the field of critical food studies that considers a set of multi-sited practices of ethical consumerism, commodity chains, local food, community-supported agriculture, food-focused social movements, peasant movements for food justice and social movements against biotechnology and agribusiness (ibid.: 4). Grounded in an ethnographic approach to food activism, the volume makes important contributions to our understanding of consumer citizenship and alternative food networks in specific cultural settings (see also Goodman et al., 2014; Grasseni, 2013; Kneafsey et al., 2008; Lien and Nerlich, 2004).

Though Food Activism examines multiple forms of food activism, the use of websites, blogs, social media and mobile applications does not feature prominently in the volume. This is surprising, given the usage of websites and blogs by a range of food-focused social movements and alternative food networks (e.g. the Slow Food movement, the Fair Trade movement or Solidarity Purchase Groups) and the frequency with which activists employ social media as a key communication platform. In addition, a review of the wider literature in food studies reveals that examinations of how food production and consumption practices are portrayed and discussed online tend to focus narrowly on consumers’ or eaters’ food-related social media practices and the roles these play in individual identity formation, rather than on collective, organised activism aiming to change food practices or the food system as a whole. For instance, de Solier (2013) dedicates the final chapter of her book on Food and the Self to food blogging and argues that blogging is a meaningful and self-defining practice for foodies in post-industrial times. Blogging, according to de Solier, enables people to share their culinary knowledge (about cooking, growing food or reviewing restaurants) rather than merely to consume or acquire other people’s (often food professionals’) knowledge about food and eating. Rousseau (2013) illuminates the roles of social media in food procurement, cooking and eating, and the emergence of a digital food community, ranging from food professionals to, in her words, ‘food amateurs’ who participate in food-centred reviews, displays or conversations through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and other formats. Both books provide important insights into the growing uptake of new media and the manifold roles they play in re-mediating food messages or even provoking new food practices (see also Leer and Povlsen, 2016). However, their focus on individualised consumption practices does not elucidate activists’ uptake of ICTs to challenge and critique the current food system or propose alternative visions.

Thus far, there has been limited scholarly consideration of food activists’ use of digital platforms to challenge, critique and change the conventional global agri-food system. One exception is the research of Alana Mann, who engages with food activism and explores some of the roles that new ICTs play in fostering alternative food networks’ goals. In her book, Global Activism in Food Politics: Power Shift, Mann (2014) studies the transnational social movement La Vía Campesina, which acts as a global umbrella advocacy organisation for peasant farmers and landless workers. The movement promotes food sovereignty with the goal that those producing, distributing and consuming food should be in charge of the mechanisms and policies of food production and distribution. Focusing on case studies of three member organisations of La Via Campesina located in Chile, Mexico and the Basque country in Spain, Mann analyses how the realities and priorities of local chapters are translated into the global movement’s agenda, and in the process evaluates the capacities and limits of transnational advocacy. Mann shows how access to alternative media and digital platforms has become crucial for La Via Campesina and its member organisations in challenging dominant narratives converging around food security – narratives which are driven by corporate actors favouring technological solutions to end global hunger. As an example of the digital contestation of dominant narratives, Mann discusses the online initiative farmsubsidy.org, which provides an alternative, virtual sphere where data on farm subsidies in EU states is made publicly available, thus touching on digitally enabled food activism.

Another study that engages with digitally enabled food activism is Cristina Grasseni’s (2013) ethnographic research on Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale (GAS) (Solidarity Purchase Groups) in Italy, in which farmers and consumers connect directly (without intermediaries such as retailers) and negotiate the terms of producing, selling, buying and preparing food. Grasseni’s research reveals that ICTs play a negligible role in these negotiations, in part because many GAS members refuse to place orders online via the organisation’s website. These members emphasise the problem and, in their view, the paradox of using global digital network infrastructures to support local food provisioning infrastructures and farmers; they argue that digital platforms are another form of intermediation, albeit a digital one, that blocks direct forms of information exchange and communication. GAS members, then, foreground the value of direct, personal and offline communication to foster the affective relations central to the sort of ‘solidarity economy’ they seek to foster (ibid.).

In a recent study exploring how alternative food networks (AFNs) draw on online spaces to foster ‘reconnection’ between producers and consumers, Bos and Owen (2016) emphasise that ‘there is scope to better understand the relationship between online space and reconnection, particularly in light of the increasing usage and embeddedness of online and social media activity across society’ (2016: 4). While they acknowledge existing studies (Cui, 2014; Fonte, 2013; Hol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: digital food activism – food transparency one byte/bite at a time?
• 2 Hacking the food system: re-making technologies of food justice
• 3 Diabetes on Twitter: influence, activism and what we can learn from all the food jokes
• 4 Digital connections: coffee, agency, and unequal platforms
• 5 Political consumers as digital food activists? The role of food in the digitalization of political consumption
• 6 Marketing critical consumption: cultivating conscious consumers or nurturing an alternative food network on Facebook?
• 7 Displacement, ‘failure’ and friction: tactical interventions in the communication ecologies of anti-capitalist food activism
• 8 ‘Both fascinating and disturbing’: consumer responses to 3D food printing and implications for food activism
• 9 Hashtag activism and the right to food in Australia
• 10 Food politics in a digital era
• 11 Digital food activism: values, expertise and modes of action
• Afterword: the public’s two bodies – food activism in digital media
• Index