The Politics of Grocery Shopping - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 644

bureaucracies that monitor agricultural production and establish health and safety stan-
dards for food commodities, and involvement in negotiating global trade agreements.
While the state's role in the food system is highly significant, it is typically rendered
invisible in everyday consumer interactions, particularly in an affluent North American
context where markets play a dominant role in everyday food provisioning. In fact, as we
argue below, contemporary food politics is more commonly associated with changing
norms of personal consumption and food culture than with collective action directed at
the state and regulatory reform.
Consumer food politics date back to the late nineteenth century, when consumer
boycotts and cooperatives emerged to combat local monopolies that controlled grain
milling and the price of food (Hilton 2003; Lang and Gabriel 2005, 41; Schudson 2007).
In the latter half of the twentieth century, food emerged as central to the counterculture's
critique of modern industrial life. Belasco (1989) documented the emerging food poli-
tics of the 1960s and 1970s, coining the term “countercuisine” to describe a movement
that was heavily invested in exploring the political implications of food choices. The
countercuisine was not a unified, monolithic movement, however, but instead operated
from multiple vantage points such as food co-ops, the peace movement, and “back to
the land” lifestyles. A common thread that united diverse culinary interests was a focus
on unearthing the political implications of food choices. White bread was decried as a
symbol of an industrial era of soulless convenience foods, while “brown rice became the
icon of antimodernity,” and a mechanism for standing (and eating) in solidarity with the
world's oppressed peoples (27, 49).
Contemporary gourmet culture has taken up many of the themes of the 1960s and
1970s countercuisine, incorporating them into the contemporary valuation of authen-
tic, exotic, and delicious foods (Johnston and Baumann 2010). Of course, not all dimen-
sions of food politics are taken up with equal intensity, or by all “foodies.” Some research
(Johnston and Baumann 2007, 2010) suggests that environmental issues are most fre-
quently incorporated into North American gourmet palates, with social justice and
equity issues less commonly prioritized. While food politics has taken on increased
importance, food quality, pleasure, and deliciousness frequently trump political com-
mitments (Johnston and Baumann 2010, 127, 164). One self-described foodie explained
this view: “Here's the thing, the ethical concerns are there. I have them, and they live
in me as a kind of guilty conscience . . . but I'm too interested in my pleasure to actu-
ally impose them on myself ” (Johnston and Baumann 2010, 168). In short, food politics
has entered mainstream and gourmet food discourse in a significant way, even though
not all people enact these politics in daily life, and even though there are numerous
contradictions involved, particularly between sensual culinary pleasures and political
commitments.
As food culture became more explicitly politicized, the study of consumers as politi-
cal actors in late modern societies has expanded greatly since the early 1990s (see
Micheletti 2003; Miller 1995; Sassatelli 2007; Slater 1997; Soper 2004; Szasz 2007; Zukin
and Maguire 2004). While definitions of political consumerism abound, we draw on
Micheletti's conceptualization of it as “the politics of products, which in a nutshell can