Consumption in the Age of Affluence

The World of Food

Ben Fine, Michael Heasman, Judith Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134779062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

With growing affluence in the developed world, food has become an increasing focus for attention. Here, the authors argue that in order to understand the extensive and dramatic developments in the world of food, a new interdisciplinary approach is necessary. The Age of Affluence successfully addresses food consumption in this way. The volume:
* argues the importance of socioeconomic and cultural factors over diet, in influencing the production, marketing and consumption of different groups of foods;
* places food systems theory on sound analytical foundations;
* draws critically upon food systems literature;
* includes case studies from the sugar, dairy and meat systems;
* employs novel statistical techniques to identify and explain distinct patterns of food consumption;
The book will help to revitalize the discipline of food studies and points the way forward for the continuing study of food consumption. As such, it will be invaluable to students, researchers and policymakers engaged in the world of food.

Part I
FROM FOOD STUDIES TO FOOD SYSTEMS

1
INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

BACKGROUND

In deference to the commitment of the United Kingdom's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to wider dissemination and popularization of results, ‘What We Eat and Why’ was ultimately settled as the shortened title for our research project which had previously been paraded under the guise of ‘Food Consumption: Social Norms and Systems of Provision’. The project was one of the first eight to be funded under the ESRC's programme, ‘The Nation's Diet’.¹ The programme was intended to explore the topic by research drawn from across the social sciences in the hope of providing interdisciplinary explanations for food choice. Not far in the background were two motivating themes: first, that eating habits were changing rapidly and, second, that healthy eating campaigns, attached to dietary guidelines, were at best meeting with limited success. Could social scientists complement the progress made by dietitians in order that healthier diets could not only be identified and publicized but also adopted by consumers?

The intention of the ESRC's continuing programme, then, has been to develop a rigorous and interdisciplinary social science of food consumption, together with the drawing out of policy implications, where possible. This book, and its forthcoming companion volume, contains the results of our endeavour to meet these objectives and, whatever their merits in content, arguably represent a landmark in the development of food studies as a discipline within the social sciences.

The case for such a bold claim can in part be justified by the content of Chapter 2. There we review the existing discipline of food studies, even if partially and cursorily with much greater attention to methodology and analytical principles than to detail. The chapter is organized around a number of themes. First, the discipline of food studies is highly fragmented, with little or no genuine integration between its separate components drawn from the various social sciences (which are our main concern) and nutritional sciences (which are not).

Second, the isolated contributions from the separate disciplines tend to fall into two types. From economics, psychology, geography and nutritional sciences, for example, diet is understood as the consequence of regular, determined individual behaviour and outcomes but from which there can be deviations. Each discipline identifies these determinate patterns in very different ways according to its own preoccupations (as due to prices, incomes and tastes for economics, and dietary requirements for nutritional science). By contrast, social theory, as represented by sociology and anthropology, tends to focus upon specific social determinants such as stratification or ritual, with a corresponding degree of indeterminacy depending upon how these social processes materialize in practice. This, however, has generally resulted in a fragmented approach to food studies within these disciplines, one intensified by the predilection to exploit food to illustrate previously derived social theories (stratification, inequality, patriarchy, etc.)—rather than to develop food–specific theory and insights.

The third theme taken up in Chapter 2 is that food studies as a whole and in its constituent parts has been shaken out of its fragmented complacency by a series of empirical developments, ranging from disarray in international food markets to growing incidence of nutritional disorders arising out of affluence and overeating. Food studies has been unable to address these adequately, and the lack of interdisciplinary integration has been sorely felt as a deficiency—particularly in identifying practical and effective policies.

As a final theme, apart from providing an overview of the ‘old’ food studies even as it is currently experiencing dramatic changes and challenges under the weight of its inherited inadequacies, Chapter 2 provides pointers to the analytical directions and themes to be pursued in this and the subsequent volume.

Our project was the only one in the first set of the ESRC's programme to be attached to an economics department although, as will be abundantly clear, it broke completely with mainstream economics in its approach and motivation.

Far from taking prices and incomes, together with the optimizing, constrained and rational individual as the determinants of food choice, emphasis has been placed within a fully interdisciplinary framework upon the social processes generating both uniformity and difference in the patterns of food consumption. Indeed, the project's origins resided less in economics, or a break with it, than in the continuation of research, previously funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Accordingly, the content of this research is worth outlining briefly, even if the contribution of this research to food studies is not immediately apparent.

The research concerned the relationship between female labour market participation and household ownership of consumer durables. There is a presumption that households with working wives (and/or children) would have a greater incentive to possess consumer durables because of their greater worth as labour–saving devices—this over and above any effect arising from the availability of higher levels of income. This simple hypothesis, however, prompted a number of much more complex areas of investigation.

The first was to employ an entirely novel way of identifying patterns of consumption empirically (in the context of ownership of consumer durables). Essentially, this is based on the idea that society orders or ranks durables according to their popularity in ownership. This reflects, from the potential adoption of a common culture through to the imperatives of mass production, the outcome of a range of socioeconomic processes. In addition, it also proves possible to investigate the extent to which separate socioeconomic strata of the population either conform more or less to the overall population norms or rankings or whether they exhibit a sharply distinct ‘norm’ of their own.

Although these methods are elaborated in detail in the body of the text, where they are applied to foods rather than durables, it is crucial to recognize that the derived norms, whether for the population as a whole or for subgroups, are concerned with the ranking by frequency of ownership or purchase, not with overall levels of ownership. Thus, rich households almost inevitably own more durables (although not always purchasing more foods) than the poor households, but the norms for the two groups could still be the same. In this case, the implication is that the purchase behaviour, or order of acquiring durables, is the same and the poor aspire to, but do not generally achieve, the same patterns of consumption as the rich. Of course, it is equally plausible that the poor not only consume less but also differently, acquiring or ranking durables in a distinct sequence. In terms of food, then, do different types of households have the same patterns of consumption even if at different levels (because of income or household numbers), or do they simply consume differently altogether both quantitatively and qualitatively?

In principle, then, it proves possible to estimate consumption norms and their variation across the population, according to socioeconomic factors such as the presence of a working housewife and/or children, as well as income, class, age, etc. A separate task is to explain why these norms should prevail, with empirical associations between socioeconomic variables and consumption patterns at best being suggestive of causal links. This was broached through a critical review of theories of consumption across the social sciences, thereby constructing an alternative approach based on what is termed systems of provision.

The results of this research are fully reported in Fine and Leopold (1993). It is found that theories of consumption are usually concerned with ‘horizontal’ factors, those that are presumed to apply equally across society as a whole or a broad range of consumer goods. One example among many is provided by emulation and differentiation of status through consumption, with its corollary of the trickle–down of tastes and consumption habits. Such horizontal theories, as in this case, also tend to project existing theories, constructed for other purposes or in other contexts, on to consumption and to be derived from within an academic discipline. The result has often been neither to address consumption specifically (it is simply a reflection of class, or diffusion, or some other analytical category that could equally be applied to other areas of study), nor to open up the potential for an interdisciplinary study of consumption other than as the stacking of otherwise unconnected theories. A further feature of the literature is that specific moments in the more or less direct determinants of consumption, such as production, retailing, culture, etc., have also been examined horizontally as if they were appropriately understood as general, undifferentiated categories. We would argue, however, that it is inappropriate to construct a general theory of the impact of production, retailing or advertising, etc., upon consumption. Rather the influence of each depends upon what is being produced, sold or advertised and how these separate activities are specifically attached to others along the system of provision of specific consumption goods.

In contrast, the systems–of–provision approach argues that consumption must be investigated within a ‘vertical’ framework in which each commodity or group of commodities is differentiated from others. Consumption of a specific commodity is linked to a chain of activities, originating in production, which are structured and reproduced in a way that is both integral and distinct from that of other commodities even if the separate components are shared in common. Analytical reliance upon systems of provision resolves the problems previously identified—creating an interdisciplinary approach, appropriate and targeted for consumption, and distinguishing the different impact of socioeconomic factors according to their specific role from one area of consumption to another.

Before pursuing these lines of argument further, connecting them to their development in this volume, it is helpful to consider the results of the research on female labour market participation, reported in Fine (1992), even if focusing upon their methodological significance. This work was concerned with a historical explanation for the changing patterns of women's paid employment and, in particular, why labour market participation rates of married women, especially those with children, had increased over the post–war period in the United Kingdom (and in many other developed countries). This is treated not so much as a matter of detailed estimation of elasticities—how much more female employment for an increase in women's wages—as one of causal factors and historical timing.

Traditional explanations in one way or another, most notably in the new household economics associated with Gary Becker,² have relied upon the increasing productivity of the commercial relative to the household sector, so that comparative advantage has shifted in favour of women taking paid work to finance household goods rather than providing these or their equivalent directly through domestic labour. This, of course, all depends upon assumptions concerning presumed skews in preferences and abilities by sex, and the net effect of rising real wages (and the potential negative effect on women's employment from higher male earnings), but also upon decisions over fertility and family size. Each of these assumptions can be rationalized through further reasoning—the choice of fewer, ‘higher quality’ children in the new household economics, for example, to save a housewife's time for waged work without skimping on the level of enjoyment as parent.

The argument in Fine (1992) is of a different type. It seeks a much stronger, systemic connection between the rise of mass production and consumption, the demographic transition to a family system of households with fewer children, and the shifting patterns of women's employment. The logical connection between these is established, although their historical chronology is troublesome with an apparent sequence of lags between them; why did fertility falls and greater female labour market participation not occur earlier?

The details of the answer need not detain us, other than two important methodological points. First, the presumed shift of comparative advantage in favour of the commercial sector and against the household is not only uneven across products, it may even be reversed. Increases in productivity in the commercial sector have the effect of both undermining domestic production and of enhancing its viability through, for example, the provision of consumer durables and other household goods that are used in the home at the expense of bought–out commodities. Sewing machines, textiles, cooking ingredients and equipment illustrate the point as do, of more recent vintage, a range of equipment providing for home self–entertainment.

One way of accommodating such observations is to appeal to net outcomes and greater levels of detail in disaggregating to specific goods and services. Our approach is different in, first, regarding the separation between the commercial sector and the household as a social structure that is reproduced in a much wider context than is encompassed by the economics of shifting comparative advantage. Moreover, while non–economic factors can be understood as simply impeding or even accelerating the outcomes attached to comparative advantage (with custom or culture, for example, competing with or complementing what are perceived to be purely economic factors), we reject such simplistic dichotomies. Second, then, we perceive the economic pressures upon the structural division between commerce and the household as contradictory, underlying forces whose outcome is complex and uncertain—neither generalizable nor reducible to a simple balancing act in allocating activities across the structural divide between the household and the commercial economy. In other words, we emphasize the tensions inherent within and between socioeconomic forces and how these reproduce social structures.

While apparently unduly abstract and removed from the issue of the determinants of food choice, the relevance of this discussion for our continuing work on food is twofold. First, it is directly of significance for analysing the relationship between the household and the commercial provision of food. Second, it is indirectly of importance because of its methodological implications for examining the reproduction of socioeconomic structures other than those at the boundaries between commerce and the household—within commerce itself in terms of the vertical integration of economic activity, for example. How are we to understand, for example, the relationship between production of (manufactured) foods and their retailing as well as the separate activities attached to production itself? How is the relationship between agriculture, as a source of inputs, and food manufacturing to be addressed and, by the same token, agriculture's own increasing dependence upon manufactured inputs, such as fertilizers and insecticides and, most recently, new varieties of seeds resulting from the leap forward in biotechnology?

This, and related issues, make up the subject matter of Part II of this volume. It furthers the work of Fine and Leopold (1993), where the virtues of analysing the determinants of food consumption in terms of systems of provision have already been established. Food is attached to a distinct series of systems of provision like other commodities—and we only refer to the food system when referring to all food systems taken together. However, food systems are further marked by the extent of their ‘organic’ content. With origins in agriculture and an ultimate destination in human ingestion, food is inescapably dependent upon biological processes at the extremes of its provision and, consequently, throughout the chain of activities attached to consumption. Moreover, the imperatives of food systems’ profitability have subjected the food system to economic forces that continuously shift its relationship to the organic—through the industrialization of processes and products (as in the ‘technological treadmill’ in agriculture, and the use of additives in food manufacturing). The shifting balance and content of the organic in the food system are intimately related but not identical to the restructuring of the chain of activities along the food system.

OVERVIEW

These insights around the nature of food systems are explored in Part II. It argues for a number of propositions that build upon and reconstruct existing food systems theory. First, emphasis is placed upon differentiation between foods. There is not a single food system, either across all foods or even globally for a single food, with differentiation between one country and another even if it serves a common world market to a greater or lesser extent. Each food system is potentially structured differently and has a distinct chronology. This contrasts with the presumption that there has been a global, Fordist food system over the post–war period that has suffered crisis and fragmentation from the 1970s onwards. It follows that uniformity in the food system has been exaggerated for the earlier period and, ironically, differentiation and fluidity have been unduly emphasized currently.

Second, as in the previous methodological discussion, irrespective of the balance of shifts along the food system (between agriculture and industry, industry and retailing, commercial and household provision) and their separate connection to the organic content of the food system, the restructuring of the food system should be examined in terms of contradictory forces acting upon the division between its various components. This contrasts with much...