Cooking up Consumer Anxieties about "Provenance" and "Ethics": Why it Sometimes Matters where Foods Come from in Domestic Provisioning

Provenance is fundamentally about foods' point of origin. It is thus, unsurprising that studies of food provenance typically focus on circumstances of production and the routes foods follow to get to situations of exchange and, to a lesser extent, final consumption. However, this dominant frami...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Food, culture, & society culture, & society, 2013-09, Vol.16 (3), p.495-512
Main Authors: Meah, Angela, Watson, Matt
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
care
consumer ethics
Consumers
Consumption
Ethnography
Food Preparation
practices
Production Consumption Relationship
provenance
provisioning
shopping
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Provenance is fundamentally about foods' point of origin. It is thus, unsurprising that studies of food provenance typically focus on circumstances of production and the routes foods follow to get to situations of exchange and, to a lesser extent, final consumption. However, this dominant framing leads to an asymmetry of attention between production and consumption. By neglecting the situatedness of food purchase and use, much of what makes provenance meaningful and productive for consumers is missed. This paper draws upon qualitative and ethnographic data to explore why and how it sometimes matters where food comes from. What emerges is an expanded and problematized practical understanding of provenance, where concerns for the point of origin is generally inseparable from, and subsumed within, a broader range of ethical concerns about where food comes from.
ISSN:1552-8014
1751-7443
DOI:10.2752/175174413X13673466712001