The Quest for Ecological Modernization 441Consumption and production: socially and culturally
reconstructing the commodity
While considerably more emphasis has been placed upon understanding the rela-
tionships between production and consumption, and particularly the ways in
which the very fabric of food fuses both natural and social hybridities, there needs
to be more attention given to the ways in which the hybrid social and natural rela-
tions surrounding food are governed, empowered and used. While accepting that
there has been something of a (somewhat overdrawn) conceptual distinction made
between the more political economy-inspired analysis of production and the more
culturally inspired consumption studies, there is a clear need to explore how new
alliances, relationships and metabolic equations can be brought together in ways
which progress the understanding of alternative food networks or chains. Also, we
need to know much more about how these both use and travel through space. Our
recent European evidence suggests high levels of spatial variability between differ-
ent rural regions in the setting up and sustenance of alternative supply chains
(Renting et al, 2003). These variabilities are particularly affected by the type and
degree of institutional support, via, not just the national state, but regional and
knowledge and skill-based agencies, and by the highly context-dependent types of
associational involvement from a variety of different actors. It is clear that the
innovation patterns, the skills bases and the degree to which such initiatives can
utilize and exploit the ‘territorial worth’ of their localities and regions are all critical
factors. These factors show that aspects of space, quality convention, nature, and
agricultural and food socio-technical practices (the particular ways of cutting, cur-
ing, salting and carving of meats, for instance) come together in rural spaces.
Moreover, many of these initiatives also reconstruct important new co-locational
alliances with specific groups of consumers. Many consumers, for their part, are
increasingly searching for ‘something else’ other than the standardized or indeed
mass-produced specialized types of food product. The consumption experience,
often involving direct contact with the producer or the seller becomes an impor-
tant ritualistic consumption practice.
However, what marks these alternative food chains out from the conventional
system is by no means their face-to-face nature necessarily. In some of the more
maturer quality supply chains we see the development of spatially extended net-
works, which are selling brands, labels and seriously commodifying their culinary
repertoires (e.g. Parmigiano Reggiano Cheese). They are still categorically alterna-
tive, however, in that they have done and do re-equate nature, space, socio-technical
practices and quality conventions in ways which make it impossible to replicate
these outside that network. These then are the new ecologically deepened supply
chains, and to describe and understand them requires much more than a recourse
to such generalized notions of mutual or reciprocal metabolics. Rather, it requires
a concerted effort to understand the theory and practices of the actors – producer,
consumers and exchange actors – who mobilize and animate/demarcate such net-
works (see Verschoor, 1998, for instance). These new food networks are now a