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or external goods, and more generally, with the emergence of the consumer society and
consumption as a measure of social worth - see Sayer (2003).
3. I use this term throughout the essay. At one level, it merely denotes that the provision
of discrete objects and ideas has come to occur, at least in signifi cant measure, via com-
modities produced primarily for sale, and thus that these 'things' are increasingly avail-
able in the commodity-form. At another level, it expresses the increasing importance of
commodities as vehicles for the circulation and expression of value in a capitalist
society, and thus for value itself to take the commodity-form.
4. These terms are productively discussed by Lysandrou (2005) in a paper interrogating
globalisation
as
commodifi cation, but he draws on Marx's analysis of the specifi city of
capitalist
commodifi cation, particularly in Volume 2 of Capital.
5. I would like to stress here that my point is not to reify the preparation of food as inher-
ently women's work, but rather to simply observe historically that much of this work
did indeed fall to women in western households, and that as women have become wage
workers in increasing numbers, and as two-wage households have become more
common, this has been accompanied by important shifts and evidence of deepening in
the commodifi cation of food.
6. One thinks, for instance, of a range of novel synthetic organic and inorganic chemicals
produced during the 20th century for a variety of purposes whose toxic legacy, famously
chronicled by Rachel Carson (1994), is still unfolding.
7. I do not discuss all of these here, but instead recommend a careful review of Castree's
(2003) paper. Briefl y, privatisation is the creation of new and exclusive forms of prop-
erty claims over discrete bits of nature allowing them to be transferred between exclu-
sive owners. Alienability refers to the often taken-for granted physical but also cultural
processes whereby it becomes possible to sever bits of nature from sellers. This is related
to but not wholly synonymous with ownership. Castree offers the example of internal
organs, which may be owned but not easily (or painlessly) sold. Individuation is also
closely related, and refers to the physical and cultural process of divorcing discrete
things or entities from their social and ecological context. Valuation should also be
reasonably familiar but refers to the socially mediated processes whereby value(s) are
assigned, including monetisation, as well as (and conversely) how things become vehi-
cles for the circulation of value. Finally, displacement is the most inherently geographi-
cal notion at play here, though by no means is it only a geographical process. This
refers to the effects of time and space distantiation as commodities undergo complex
transformation en route from producers to consumers and in ways that make it diffi cult
for consumers to perceive the social and ecological relations, which underpin commod-
ity production and circulation. There is a close conceptual link with fetishism (see
below).
8. Marx writes specifi cally: 'In order, therefore, to fi nd an analogy, we must take fl ight
into the misty realm of religion. There, the products of the human brain appear as
autonomous fi gures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both
with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities and
with the products of men's [sic] hands. I call this the fetishism, which attaches itself to
the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and
is therefore
inseparable from the production
of commodities' (emphasis added).
9. Indeed, as Jackson (2002, p.15) notes in a largely sympathetic review, a danger in
'. . . literature on commodity cultures has been to become overly fascinated with the
spectacle of consumption and its liberating possibilities, to examine discursive and rep-
resentational aspects of commodities and their meanings without attending to how these
are produced, much less to explore in what ways consumption too underpins not just
social and cultural difference but culturally infl ected social
differentiation
'.
10.
On commodity fetishism and desire, see the discussion in Page (2005) concerning water
in the commodity-form.
