1In this paper we explore how “local” food plays a role in creating ethical relations between consumers and producers in today’s globalized, industrialised, standardized, and anonymized food system. Trading of food has a long history, and since World War II especially globalization and international trade agreements seem to have had major impacts on the food chain. Food production has been removed from direct consumer control, and globalization has increased competition, prolonged the food chain and made it less transparent. Both the physical and mental distance between producers and consumers has thus grown1. Globalization or actually mainly the discourses against globalization have been used as a symbol amongst those engaged in civil engagement and activism. Goods, commodities and brands are central to these discourses.

2Resistance to globalization can take form in different types of activities (Cohen, 2005), including anti-consumerism campaigns (for example, ‘Adbuster’) and anti-logo initiatives (Klein, 2000), but also as promotion of alternative forms of consumption and lifestyles (Micheletti, 2003). As suggested by Pretty2 “eating is the most political act we do on a daily basis because of its effect on farms, landscapes and food businesses.” It is in this context that initiatives focusing on local food have acquired a new relevance.

3With the spread of globalization, the concept of local has also been revisited and localization has become a catchword3. Local, when seen as an opposition to global, may imply nearness to geographically distant initiatives, which become “close” by virtue of new kinds of relations interconnecting producers and consumers (Raynolds, 2002; Jaffee et al., 2004). Examples of these are the Slow Food movement (Miele and Murdoch, 2003), Farmers’ markets, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) (Bjune and Torjusen, 2005) and ‘fair trade’ (Nicholls and Opal, 2004). In addition, there are other new strategies for reconnecting consumers and producers, including “adopting” e.g. a chicken or an olive tree, or forming purchasing groups, such as “gruppi di acquisto” in Italy. These initiatives can be regarded as relevant indicators of the creativity expressed in alternative food networks.

4Consumers have an important role in initiating or supporting these initiatives. Forms of consumer involvement broadly defined as political consumerism, highlight consumers behaviour as a way to express ethical and political involvement and of ‘taking responsibility’ (Micheletti, 2003). Consumers are said to have become more aware of corporate activities and industry processes and their impacts4. Companies are increasingly evaluated based on their social responsibility and ethical performance, including labour conditions and effects on employee and consumer health and the environment. Consumers are increasingly found to demand goods that are produced to certain ethical standards for safety, health, animal welfare, environmental impacts, wages and conditions, and ‘fair trade’ (Korthals, 2001).

6According to Featherstone (1996) within the sociological tradition local has generally been associated with the notion of boundary; a bounded space within which social relationships are based upon kinship ties and length of residence. Local as an adjective is commonly used to describe something that is of limited area or place, or a shorter distance. In this sense, local and localism have always self-evidently existed and could be taken for granted. However, with the rise of globalization the meaning of local has been debated and redefined within several traditions including rural sociology, food systems research and environmental politics5. This need to locate relations, concepts, experiences and activities in new spatial and symbolic contexts through a process of re-naming, is particularly true for food. Local food is no longer food that is just produced near you by people you know. It is also the product waving from the shelf of a supermarket, having travelled miles, with a label reminding consumers of the local dimension embedded within. Thus, the notion of local in food is multi-layered and enriched by contradictory meanings arising from the context, ‘time’ and viewer perspective (Hinrichs, 2003). Local food is thus conceived today in terms of gastronomy, tradition, authenticity, origin, quality, distance, social relations, production, provisioning, sustainability and politics.

7These complex meanings of local are reflected in the experiences we will describe in more detail in the next section. Overlapping interpretations of the ‘local in the global’ lead to the existence of a number of food initiatives referring to local as a central dimension, including fair trade, slow food and CSA. Supporting a local community of producers is at the core of fair trade whilst another dimension of local food focuses on the quality, taste, authenticity and origin of the food product, is at the core of the slow food movement. Furthermore, referring to Turner’s ideas on nostalgia (quoted by Featherstone, 1996) as an important sentiment of the modern world, local food culture can be viewed as a way of fulfilling urban ‘Rousseauian’6 dreams of a harmonious rural idyll. CSA, which is built on, not only direct interaction between consumers and producers but also, consumer participation brings the consumer close to farming and the land.

9Fair trade is selected to represent an example of how local can be understood as a critique of the consequences of globalisation. As indicated by Raynolds (2002) “the fair trade movement critiques conventional production, trade, and consumption relations and seeks to create new more egalitarian commodity networks linking consumers in the global north with marginalised producers in the global south”7. Although this experience is largely consumer-driven8, it is the conditions of producers that are at the core of ‘fair consumption’.

10Far from the final consumer, as most farmers joining fair trade networks in the southern hemisphere are, they are drawn closer when their products are purchased. But, as suggested by Jaffe et al. “fair trade is not necessarily far trade”9. Shortening the distance between producers and consumers is one of the main strategies of the fair trade movement. This is important not only in terms of simplifying the commodity chain – thus making it possibile for farmers to increse their profits, but also for nourishing the ties that consumers have to producers10.

12Although World shops still represent an important part of the fair trade movement, in many countries the conventional retailer system is the most relevant channel for the distribution of fair trade products today. Fair trade-labelled products, of which coffee is the most common, are now widely available in supermarket chains across Europe and are increasing their presence in countries such as the USA and Japan11. The Fair Trade labeling system guarantees that goods are produced according to fair trade principles. However, it is not likely that the experience of purchasing fair trade coffee in a supermarket is the same as in a world shop – at least from the consumer’s perspective 12.

14“In the name of productivity … Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes. So, Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer. If McDonald’s represents, according to the words of Aries13, ‘the negation of all pre-existing food culture’, preserving the roots of local tradition becomes a way of fighting - or at least resisting - this wave.” Slow Food Manifesto. 1987

17Echoes of fair trade emerge in the Terra Madre (Motherland) initiative, which is a network of small scale producers scattered around the world and with a special focus on developing countries14. The main aims of these initiatives are to preserve biodiversity and sustain local communities through justice in labour relations and solidarity amongst producers. Interestingly, the Terra Madre network overlaps in some instances with Fair Trade. One example is the cooperative of farmers in Community of Chiapas Organic Coffee Growers. These families cultivate coffee organically; the coffee is sold in local markets and exported to Europe, where it is sold on the Fair Trade market.

18The physical and mental distance between consumers and producers decreases especially dramatically in the third case we describe: Community Supported Agriculture. The concept of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) seems to have occurred simultaneously in Japan and Germany about the mid-1960s. Whereas “solidarity” has been the key founding element in the case of fair trade, and “preservation of taste” an important determinant at the start of the slow food movement, CSA originated from the concept of ‘delocalization’ of agriculture, and safety of food consumption15. In Japan, consumers reacted to food industry safety scandals by contacting farmers and inviting them to cooperate directly in producing safe healthy food that the consumers wanted. This partnership was called TEIKEI, meaning something like “food that carries the face of the farmer” (Henderson, 1999). At about the same time, the first CSA farm - Buschberghof - was established in Northern Germany.

19In 1988, one of the founders of the German CSA, Trauger Groh, travelled to the USA to present his ideas. This eventually led to the establishment of The Community Farm of Ann Arbor in Michigan16. Today, the number of CSAs in the USA has grown to more than 200017. In Europe there are fewer CSAs but there is currently an initiative to form a European Network of CSAs18.

20Key aspects of the CSA are dialogue and a binding agreement between farmers and consumers sharing the risks and rewards in food production, and a transparent economy. CSA may provide a context where people can become aware of and experience realities behind food products, and may as such be regarded as a way of exchanging consumerism for a more informed citizenship in relating to food. CSA may also be regarded as primarily a space for “non-market” relations, with focus on community, value-sharing, and the celebration of interdependence19.

22Trust and dialogue between farmers and consumers are crucial in a CSA. Fieldhouse (1996) refers to three dimensions of CSA20:

23Fieldhouse (1996) points to “sharing” as the central notion of CSA, because participants share the real costs of food production through a fair price to the farmer and by assuming part of the risk of poor harvests. Consumers also share the rewards that come through a season’s supply of fresh produce, the development of fellowship, and the knowledge that they are part of an effort to “think globally, and act locally”21.

24In practice, CSA has combined with organic production. There are no formal claims to this effect as yet but we are not aware of any CSA that uses conventional (inputs-driven) methods of farming22. Actually the combination of organically produced food, with alternative often locally based forms of distribution, has been at the core of the organic movement itself from the outset. The organic food movement has been described as a form of resistance to the global food system as dominated by corporations. Resistance in this context has been used to describe a more complex set of strategies and practices. For example, Stevenson et al. (2000) refer to three modes of resistance activities - warrior, builder and weaver work - and argue that all three are important contributions for creating positive changes in the food system in favour of ecology, justice, fairness etc. The authors use the term resistance to refer to ‘social change activity oriented towards the transformation or significant reformation of the contemporary food system’ and to ‘kinds of inclusion-oriented activity that has significant reformative goals’ (Stevenson et al., 2000).

25In the previous section we considered the potential that local has in creating closer and more direct relations between persons, products and places. Creating re-localized food systems such as these, may endow consumers with awareness about the conditions of food production and origins of food23. Researchers have pointed out that the complexity, opaqueness and fragmentation of the food chain undermines the possibility for establishing ethical relations at the extreme ends of the chain. “Localising” the product, by adding a history and identity, is a strategy for shortening this distance.

28Consumers are often viewed today as active agents that have both rights and responsibilities. To be able to act ethically, consumers need knowledge about where the food comes from, the story of how it is produced and how production affects other people, animals and the environment (Coff, 2005). When consumers are unable to look back on the production story they are also unable to see how their food consumption influences nature and society24. As Kloppenburg and Lezberg (1996) have questioned: “How can we act responsibly and effectively for change if we do not understand how the food system works and our role within it?” Ethical transparency and ethical traceability are tools in communicating the production story to consumers. Thus tracing the local dimension of food gives consumers an opportunity to make ethical judgements of food production practices.

29Local is often framed discursively as nostalgia, “going back to nature”, that allows consumers to imagine happy farm workers and clean earth, when buying ethical products25. However, the local as we experience it today is not the same as before; it has been transformed into a local-in-the-global. And, since local-in-the-global implies new experiences and new uses of technology and information systems, what we view as local today has parallels to ‘hybridization’ (Pieterse, 1995). However, as more meanings attach to the term ‘local’, the boundaries between meanings become blurred and the way is opened to conflicting interests.