About the Project
The concept of “sustainable living” has found a niche in food consumption practices, informed by growing concerns for health and environment. These concerns are spurned by a vision of interconnectedness of the world, and through social media, are outpacing themselves in forming a globalized community action to resist corporate food-chains. This community action selectively appropriates, disrupts and reinterprets the dichotomies of global-local and digital-physical, and in turn provides fixity and malleability to them in forming coalitions for social mobilisation. Shaping alternative lifestyles, it retains Left’s preoccupations with production/labour, while focusing on consumption practices. These concerns, an organising thematic in my website, mobilize “sustainable living” in developing modes of consumer strategizing, which have prevailed on supermarkets to stock “organic” food albeit at higher prices, implicating classism. They also empower certain market spaces, like the physical, and significantly for this project, digital farmer’s markets, giving rise to new “middlepeople” arbitrating between producers and consumers. I am looking at the Food Assembly as a way to explore the socio-spatial relationships emerging from digital markets, and how these affect the experience of the local and community through consumer-activism. The Food Assembly is a social enterprise, which organises through a digital interface, and congregates in real-world around the consumption and materiality of food. Regulated through Headquarters in France, food assemblies are formed at neighbourhood scale through local semi-autonomous intermediaries, “Hosts,” who provide and manage the digital and physical interface between “Members” and “Producers.” My mini-ethnographic project with Kings Cross Food Assembly (KXFA) shows that this order of classification, itself a retail strategy, shapes roles and interests of the three constitutive groups, layered into my website, which in turn shapes their participation and perception of this platform, disrupting rather than fostering a uniform sense of community. The idea is to allow Members to pre-order through digital transaction from weekly digital food shelves, which showcase locally-produced food by recruiting sustainable Producers, who interact with Members at a pub every Sunday. In-between, words, ideas, and visuals are exchanged in digital place-time through newsletters, emails and social media to inform, direct and coalesce interests and practices of the constitutive groups. The digital interface provided by Headquarters and local website managed by Hosts are supposed to work as a seamless marketplace, like any shopping website, giving consumers control over weekly fridge/pantry restocking at leisure, and weekly congregation a sense of connectedness that may emerge as community, an aspect particularly important to KXFA Hosts. My project shows a disjuncture in this assumption, which is most apparent through the practice I call “curating the market,” and refers to both the digital interface and its physical counterpart, achieving alignment between the two and struggles in-between. To examine this, my approach was double-layered: I explored how ‘online’ connections exist within the local and material, and, through situated fieldwork, investigated the sociality of KXFA during collection-time. Since off/on-line worlds are recursive, my participant-observation was as volunteer at collection between January-March 2018, and as Member ordering online. I conducted interviews with Hosts, Members and Producers, and contextual analyses of written and visual material on the KXFA digital platforms. Through this project, I sought to look at a digital take on farmer’s market, use digital tools in my mini-ethnography, and employ digital media to communicate my findings. While the ideal of Food Assembly lies in focus on the Producer and shortening the food-chain, in practice it is the very production of “curating the market” that makes the Host, the proverbial middleperson, “the hub” of this enterprise. The seamlessness of online shopping assumes an uninterrupted supply-chain, repetitive demand-cycle, pre-existing consumer-base, and well-organised producers and consumers. “Curating the market” requires dealing with contingencies rather than certainties – Producers’ preference to attend farmer’s market, products pulled off the shelves on Members’ objections about out-of-season produce, delivery-guy forgetting the key to van’s lock-hold, expanding collection time to attract members in a “saturated market". For these contingencies, the Hosts have deployed several interventions, tweaking Headquarters’ model to local circumstances, from quirky hand-written messages to inexhaustible online postings. These contingencies are themselves product of and in turn produce the mediation between the structured regularity of online shopping and messiness and multifariousness of human interpretation. This mediation is intentional – the digital and physicals markets are rendered smooth to make invisible the muddle of techniques and technologies employed by one constituent group in mobilising the other, while also signifying the absent-presence of the non-local Headquarters in this mediation. But what does this say about the local and community in this marketplace? For one, there is disconnect between the ways digital and physical are deployed in this framework. The digital interface is tied to “sustainable living,” a disembedded tool to induce pre-ordering to reduce “waste” and food-miles, empower the Producer to monitor minimum delivery order, and “modernise and streamline” the farmer’s market. Part of this streamlining includes retaining the community feel of the farmer’s market through physical interaction at collection. It is assumed since all constituent groups agree and hence participate in this practice of “sustainable living,” a commonality of purpose and sense of community may emerge through multiple repetitions, augmented by surfeit of communication on social media. In practice, the digital becomes a conduit for administrative overload powered by several wo/man-hours which loops the Hosts in negotiations with Headquarters, Members and Producers, rather than an actual space to practice the creative aspects of community building (hooks 2006). For another, it is easy to forget that the digital has its own local, whether as laptop on a Member’s kitchen table as they scour the fridge to pre-order, or the smartphone in the Host’s hand as s/he responds to emails on the commute from day-job. Viewed thus, the local is a network rather than a fixed geographical space, which has its own project of scale-making (Tsing 2005). It is by viewing this scale-making as a creative and political exercise, and questioning the boundedness of locality by focusing on its interconnections with other sites, that we may broaden the digital’s potential to rethink Anthropology’s traditional field-sites. |