The Dictionary of Human Geography (72 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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food
The study of the spatial and environ mental aspects of food production, distribu tion and consumption. Food is a recurring concern in several academic disciplines because of its centrality to human life for both physical and social sustenance. As a specific sub field with identifiable concepts and scholars, however, agro food studies has come into fruition only recently, a reflection of both the resurgence of poLiticaL economy, which found a new object of study in food systems, and the ?cuLturaL turn? in social science that brought renewed interest in consumption. While scholars of food draw from anthropol ogy foodways has long been a staple of that discipline and sociology, owing especially to the sociology of agriculture tradition, geog raphy is in many respects at the cutting edge offood studies. Arguably, this is because geog raphy is more ecumenical in its approaches, and because the spatial and environmental aspects of food are so critical to its theoriza tions. At the same time, there is a tendency to use food to illustrate other geographical topics, as demonstrated by the dozens of monographs published within the past 15 years that tell larger stories through particular food commodities. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Still, geographers have made considerable progress in producing and debating a set of meta concepts relevant to the study of food qua food. They have contributed to different ways of theorizing the agro food system, including systems of provision, commodity chains and food regimes. Recently, ?food networks? has become the favoured term in recognition of the fact that food distribution is more contingent than much of this earlier lan guage implies, and that even long distance trade depends on embedded social relations where trust must be secured (Arce and Marsden, 1994). Geographers have also looked at the scaLe dimensions of food provision and consumption (e.g. Bell and Valentine, 1997); and they have engaged in important debates regarding consumption, not only the politics of consumer purchasing in influencing the agro food system (e.g. Cook and Crang, 1996), but also the bodily materiality of eating practices. In addition, geographers have played a leading role in developing some meso level concepts, based largely on finely tuned empir ical studies. (NEW PARAGRAPH) famine, hunger and food insecurity persist as objects of study, especially as they pertain to uneven deveLopment and geopoLitics. Watts (1983) was one of the first geographers to develop the concept of social vulnerability as it relates to the uneven effects of famine. Geographers have since adopted the language of food security, which not only encapsulates a more objective and positive characterization than ?hunger?, but also highlights that food insecurity is rooted in insufficient income, entitlement or endowment (Dreze and Sen, 1989). These ideas underlie powerful critiques of how US food aid and concessionary sales of surplus commodities undercut livelihoods and thereby contribute to food insecurity. The activist developed notion of community food security (CFS) suggests that the local com munity is the scale at which adequate and nutritious food should be ensured. CFS move ments have noted the existence of food des erts, which are areas of poor access to the provision of healthy affordable food, usually related to lack of large retailers. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The twin themes of anxiety and trust are also pervasive in the geography of food, espe cially in light of the policy turn towards stand ards, labels and private regulation as the major response to recent ?food scares?. While the broader goal of standardization is harmoniza tion in the interest of trade as exemplified in the Codex alimentarus standards and auditing are increasingly employed to make commodity chains more transparent. Geographers have offered important criticisms of this new form of food regulation. Dunn (2003a), for example, has shown how attempts to impose harmony on an uneven geographical surface can have the effect of exacerbating differenti ation among producers. Guthman (2004) has argued that organic food labels have perverse consequences for the intended goals of organic agriculture. Whether voluntary labels constitute a new sort of commodity fetish has been the source of a lively debate within geography. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The other major response to recent trouble in the food system is the creation of alternative food networks (AFNs). According to Whatmore, Stassart and Renting (2003, p. 389), ?what they share in common is their constitution as/of food markets that redistribute value through the network against the logic of bulk commodity production; that reconvene ??trust?? between food producers and con sumers; and that articulate new forms of polit ical association and market governance?. AFNs have become a part of sociaL move ment strategies, and thus have been theorized as both alternative forms of development and resistance to gLobaLization. For example, fair trade initiatives, which tie wealthy consumers? moral concerns to the livelihood making of third worLd peasants, are what Goodman (2004) calls developmental con sumption. Some scholars have been less sanguine on these sorts of initiatives, which have considerable overlap with standard based regulation. Mutersbaugh (2002) has noted that certification processes can create new work routines and new levels of surveiLLance. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Another area that has seen a good deal of recent empirical work is in the transformation and consolidation of food processing, market ing and retaiLing sectors. Many have com mented on the enhanced power of retailers in food chains at the same time that supermar kets themselves have been at forefront of eth ical trading initiatives (Marsden and Wrigley, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Changing patterns of food consump tion associated with the fast food industry and multiple job househoLds are becoming major objects of study, as well, articulating with public heaLth concerns regarding a widely discussed crisis of obesity. This is an area that is likely to incite lively debate with geographers of the body, who are more sceptical of the discourse of obesity (Longhurst, 2005). This last research direction augments a growing literature attentive to the ways in which eating is simultaneously metabolic and ethical, such that the body is a site where various sorts of food anxieties are mediated (Stassart and Whatmore, 2003). Of course, virtually all of the above recent trends are interrelated and at the same time point to the extreme bifurcations within both food provision and consumption. For these reasons and many others, geography of food has become a rich area of enquiry indeed. jgu (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Atkins and Bowler (2001); Freidberg (2004); Lang and Heasman (2004); Winter (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
footloose industry
An industry that can operate successfully in a wide variety of loca tions because it has no strong material orien tation or market orientation requirements and wide spatial margins to profitability. Transport usually involves only a very small proportion of its cost structure as in the establishment of call centres in countries many thousands of miles from the customers served. rj (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Fordism
The term used to describe both the manufacturing techniques and societal condi tions underlying the mode of production developed by Henry Ford in the USA during the early 1900s. Ford revolutionized the pro duction of the motor car, as well as manufac turing more generally, through his system which was based around four main principles: (1) vertical integration, whereby all elements of the manufacturing process take place at one site and assembly occurs on a moving produc tion line; (2) scientific management and the principles of tayLorism that allow worker productivity to be increased; (3) standard ization and economies of scaLe with a limited number or only one product model offered; and (4) mass consumption as a regime of accumuLation, driven by the fact that workers are paid well and thus became consumers themselves and create a self reproducing demand for goods. (NEW PARAGRAPH) As work framed under the reguLation theory of poLiticaL economy has shown, Fordism was widely adopted by manufactur ers in the post Second World War period and was applied to industries as diverse as biscuit production and film. Because of the unpreced ented period of economic growth and stability associated with Fordism up until the 1970s, the period became known as the ?Golden Age? of Fordism (Glyn, Hughes, Lipietz and Singh, 1991). However, the very principles upon which Fordism was founded were also respon sible for its undoing in the 1970s. Consumers began to develop a disdain for the homogen ization associated with the one size fits all approach of Fordist manufacturing. Scientific management and the deskilling of work led to worker dissatisfaction and frustration, because of the monotonous and time pressurized production in factories. In addition, economic instability, particularly associated with the OPEC oiL crisis, led to a slow down in wage increases, thus threatening the whole regime of accumulation upon which Fordism was founded. At the same time, workers began to rebel against the way management and work ers were distinct and separate categories in Fordism. This created little opportunity for progression, but most significantly meant that wage negotiations between labour and management took place through collective bargaining, something accepted in times of large wage increases but rejected as wage increases declined. However, as Sayer and Walker (1992) point out, this does not mean that Fordism ended in this period and was replaced by post fordism. Rather, Fordism was challenged (but not necessarily displaced) by the (re )emergence of different logics of production and accumuLation. (NEW PARAGRAPH) For geographers, Fordism is often associ ated with the emergence of important indus trial regions such as the Black Country in the West Midlands of the UK (see Daniels, Bradshaw, Shaw and Sidaway, 2005); indus tries such as fiLm production, in particular in (NEW PARAGRAPH) Los Angeles, that adopted Fordist principles at an early stage (see Christopherson and Storper, 1986); and also a gendered division of labour, in which the place of men was seen to be the factory and women the home (McDowell, 1991). jf (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Murray (1989). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
forecast
The construction of an estimated value for an observation unit, where the obser vation might be for a place, region, individual or time period. The forecast may be generated by several quantitative models and methods (see prediction), and the term is usually employed for estimates applying to observa tions outside the group used in the model?s calibration: it is an ?out of sample? estimate, most likely for a future time period, or, in a ?spatial forecast?, for a region not included in the estimation process (see space time forecasting models). lwh (NEW PARAGRAPH)
forestry
Most commonly, forestry refers to the development and application of knowledge and practices aimed at managing forests for human use. The word has a scientific conno tation befitting the evolution of specialized, increasingly technical and professionalized knowledge about trees and forests aimed at their intentional manipulation, and of the par ticular emergence of silviculture as the science of growing trees. As a science, forestry emerged largely from German and French antecedents in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from Japanese and Chinese prece dents in the intentional growth and manage ment of forests for wood, and from early twentieth century Scandinavian contributions, particularly in the areas of provenance, seed source and the intentional cultivation of seed stock for plantation forestry (Boyd and Prudham, 2003). This ostensibly technical field of knowledge, widely institutionalized under the auspices of forestry departments and programmes in universities and colleges, as well as in state agencies at various scales from local to national, and propagated via scientific journals, is part of what is conveyed by the term ?forestry?. However, several ques tions arise in the very invocation of this specialized term, not least: What is a forest (and is it merely a collection of trees)? Which particular human uses dominate in shaping the trajectory of forest management? These ostensibly simple questions lead to the realiza tion that forests and forestry, whatever else (NEW PARAGRAPH) they are, comprise sites of struggle where interacting and contending processes of social and ecological reproduction are partially constituted. For instance, the management of forests emphasizing the reproduction of commercially valuable tree species, resolved primarily at the localized level of discrete stands of forests, has been the dominant prac tice of scientific forestry in the European tradi tion (epitomized by the German notion of Normalbaum). This approach was widely institutionalized in both europe and North America between the mid nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries, and has increasingly been exported around the world. However, critical examination of this paradigm reveals that it is hardly ecologically or socially inno cent, prescribing the elimination of older trees, for instance, as well as biological organisms whose existence depends on habitat com promised by conversion to plantations (e.g. the northern spotted owl in western North America), while at the same time privileging commercial timber interests over competing human values (e.g. hunting, fishing, trapping, gathering, recreation, agriculture etc.). All of this reinforces the need to avoid reifying apolitical renderings of forests that would naturalize them as non human landscapes. Rather, as works such as E.P. Thompson?s Whigs and hunters (1975) demonstrates, it was not so long ago even in English history that forests were decidedly populated and contested, not least by conflicting property claims. Thus, as Willems Braun (1997) more recently argued in the context of First Nation struggles in British Columbia, Canada, the apparently empty lands typical of scientific forestry representations are often sites of past and ongoing forced removals and exclusions. In short, despite its technical connotations and widespread professionalization, forestry is a complex categorical invocation of attempts to manage complex political ecologies, where trees, humans and other organisms interact, and where human attempts at intentional man agement rely on constructions of what is desir able and useful that can be (and are) politicized all the way down to the level ofwhat constitutes a tree, and what does and ought to count as forest cover (Robbins, 2001). sp (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Demeritt (2001b); Scott (1998). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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