Food distribution

Abstract

It is a pleasure to write the introduction to this issue the History of Retail and Consumption. Such a theme is wholly appropriate for this journal; food has an obvious importance to retailing and consumption. It’s a large sector of most economies and perhaps the most critical ingredient in the survival and reproduction of people who will do the consuming and the provisioning and selling. Moreover, food cements the importance of businesses and enterprise to the societies in which they operate: food, and the businesses that sell it, are key to national, ethnic, and religious identities, sites for status performance and power relations, vehicles for cultural notions of health and purity, and hence also targets of moral outrage when these are violated. This special issue offers ample evidence of all of these themes. But these articles do much more than establish the importance of food to consumption and retail. They also speak to the complexities of food – and hence the complexities of retail and consumption. For instance, the pieces juxtapose the global and the intimate. Ingredients and knowledge that become the basis of ‘national’ dishes often come from foreign sources and require transnational connections, as Amy Tigner and Shane Hamilton establish. Food’s physical workings, the fact that it reproduces bodies and has such importance to individual health and everyday life, means that such foreign connections can come to seem either necessary (e.g. for knowledge and ingredients) or problematic (because they undermine local economies and individuals). Either way, food points to the inextricable connectedness of different spaces and regions. Food makes it difficult to keep our historical subjects in one place. Because it is so important, perhaps it is not surprising that food so often inspires complaint, conflict and enormous effort. As Anna Zeide and Christopher Deutsch (no relation) emphasize, food also reveals retailing and consumption as sites of ‘friction,’ in Anna Tsing’s sense. People do not necessarily ‘get what they want’ and they pressure businesses to do something else. Moreover, consumer demands are only one factor in business decisions. What food gets sold is a matter of what is noticed and transferred, by capital, diplomats, managers etc. Government policy, the vagaries of international trade, firms’ margins and models, even the need to dispose of waste and to reckon with environmental damage – all of this also shapes what is distributed and consumed. Food is the result of complex relationships that are nearly impossible to systematize. Scholars of retailing and consumption can take several lessons from this issue. One is the sheer importance of food; in all of these articles, food is the catalyst for changes to consumption and distribution more broadly. Food explains how people lived, and how economies, businesses, families and politics worked. It is literally consumed; there’s no need to resort to metaphor to describe its importance. Food is a key to the systems we claim to study. It also disrupts all of these systems. In the articles here, food drove changes in people who ate it and the worlds they inhabited. There are no independent rational actors here, neatly imposing ideas or changing course based on predictable signals. Studying food makes clear that there is more contingency and less stability than phrases like ‘mass retailing,’ ‘mass consumption’ or ‘global capitalism’ might suggest. Finally, scholars should take this special issue as a charge to connect systems of consumption and distribution Taken as a whole, these articles make it clear that there is no consumption without the business of retail, and similarly that retail and distribution are embedded in