Introduction

When Guillermo Vargas from Costa Rica visited the British House of Commons in 2002 to publicize Fairtrade Fortnight, he delivered a stark message. ‘When you buy Fairtrade’, he said, ‘you are supporting our democracy’. It is hard to imagine a more powerful testament to the ripple effect of our food choices. Buying food may be a private matter, but the type of food we buy, the shops or stalls from where we buy it, and the significance we attach to its provenance have enormous social consequences. Our food choice has multiple implications—for our health and well-being, for economic development at home and abroad, for the ecological integrity of the global environment, for transport systems, for the relationship between urban and rural areas and, as the Fairtrade story shows, for the very survival of democracy in poor, commodity-producing countries. Although food consumption habits show considerable differences between countries, and between social classes within countries, a number of generic trends have emerged in recent years, some of which have been attributed to the globalization of style and taste. In the processed food cultures of the US and the UK, for example, the key trends include the increasing popularity of convenience foods, the decreasing amount of time devoted to preparing meals, the falling share of money devoted to food in the household budget, the primacy of price when buying food, and, more recently, burgeoning concerns among all classes of consumer about the quality and safety of food. Some of these trends appear to be contradictory, particularly the emphasis on cheap food on the one hand and the growing demand for healthy food on the other. Another example might be the growing interest in local food, which is often equated with fresh and wholesome produce, and ‘global sourcing’, which aims to transcend the constraints of locality and seasonality. Conventional food retailers are acutely conscious of the need to accommodate these conflicting signals, as a trade body in the UK freely acknowledged when it said that ‘the industry challenge is to find a balance between supporting British farmers and reducing food miles, and satisfying consumer demand for year round availability of an increased number of products, at ever lower prices’ (IGD, 2002).