Feed Me

If the world of food and drink is your specific bag, then Consuming Geographies by cultural geographers David Bell and Gill Valentine (1997) is well worth a look. This is not the book to give as a present to a food retailer or manufacturer client, as it can be highly critical of the food business. The authors critically examine our relationship to food, issues of body shape, cooking, eating, the role of food technology and the roles of supermarkets in mediating our experience of food. However, as a thought-provoker, something that works to stretch our thinking, this book is an excellent starting point.

Continuing with the focus on cultural geography, research emanating from the geography department of University College London during the 1990s (see Cook, Crang and Thorpe 1999, 2000) represents a significant contribution to the academic knowledge pool. The UCL team of which I was a part sought to examine the role of provenance and ’imagined geographies‘ on the way people shopped, consumed and thought about both food and their own identities as people and consumers. Ethnography, stretching over 18 months, was the primary research tool used. The research, like Miller‘s, was based in north London, evidently a popular location.

The UCL team was primarily looking to use the micro-focus of ethnography to help put ’Big Picture’ thinking into context. For example, one of the core questions was how do individuals, households, supermarkets, personal worlds and commercial (food) worlds relate and/or intersect? In short, we were asking what cultural stories lay behind contemporary food shopping and consumption. In many ways, it was the sort of research many food companies and retailers should be doing, but which is essentially prohibitive in terms of time and financial resources.

Within anthropology, the work of Daniel Miller on consumption and the meaning of things – how and why material objects are imbued with meaning – is seminal (see for example Miller 1987, 1994, 1995, 1998a and 2001). His book, A Theory of Shopping (1998b) is based on a long-running ethnographic study undertaken (once again…) in North London.

The book is actually an amalgam of a triad of ’grand’ theories of shopping set out in the three core chapters: ’Making Love in Supermarkets‘, ’Shopping as Sacrifice‘, and ’Subjects and Objects of Devotion‘. It seems that this book has been designed to make us sit up and take notice, and then to think very hard about one of the most ‘obvious‘ components of people’s daily lives.

In it, Miller draws upon some well-trodden anthropological territory to help make sense of shopping. Perhaps most intriguing is his argument that the dynamics of food shopping bear a striking resemblance to primitive forms of sacrificial practice.

From his perspective, food shopping is not merely a necessity but is, rather, a ritualised enactment of devotion and celebration. In short, shopping and the subsequent consumption are acts of sacrificial ritual, linking us directly with amongst others the ancient Greeks. Mad, maybe – but it makes you think, and from such thinking comes perhaps a more penetrating understanding.
 

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