Gender, Consumption and the Relocalisation of Food: A Research Agenda

Abstract

This article adopts a gendered approach to the study of alternative/local food consumption. Drawing on Allen and Sachs' three analytical domains, the article explores material, sociocultural and embodied conceptualisations of the relationship of women with alternative food consumption. Using original data collected from a study of food relocalisation in the UK, it argues that a gendered perspective that examines responsibilities for food preparation and for provisioning the household is important in understanding the motivation for and implications of decisions to consume local food. Local food consumption often involves consumers in choices over not only what they eat but how they cook, encouraging a move away from processed food and a greater emphasis on raw food and cooking from scratch. Such shifts have a disproportionate effect on women as they are still largely responsible for feeding the household. The article also explores ways in which social pressures around healthy eating and bodily fitness, particularly in relation to children's eating patterns, are increasingly relevant to local food consumption arguing. Again, such pressures fall unequally on different members of the household and are central to a gendered analysis of food consumption.