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Alternative food networks and food provisioning as a gendered act

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Abstract

Alternative food networks (AFNs) are exemplified by organic, fair trade and local foods, and promote forms of food provisioning that are ‘corrective’ to conventional agriculture and food (agrifood) systems. Despite enthusiasm for AFNs, scholars have increasingly interrogated whether inequalities are perpetuated by AFNs. Reproduction of gender inequality in AFNs, particularly at the level of consumption, has often been left empirically unexamined, however. This is problematic given that women continue to be predominantly responsible for food provisioning in the US, and that this responsibility can lead to negative physical, psychological and social outcomes. Using quantitative methods and data from the 2012 Ohio Survey of Food, Agriculture, and Environmental Issues, this paper examines the extent to which gender inequality in the division of labor is reproduced in AFNs by focusing on the potential persistence of gender inequality in food provisioning among AFN participants. Findings suggest that among AFN participants, particularly those utilizing local food systems, women, compared to men, remain predominantly responsible for food provisioning, spend more time in food provisioning, and engage in more food provisioning from scratch. This research confirms that food provisioning remains a gendered act amongst AFN participants, calling attention to the persistence of gender inequality in AFNs. The paper concludes by suggesting that AFNs are positioned as a place to create change, albeit small scale, in the gendered division of household labor in the US, and provides some practical suggestions for how this might occur.

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Notes

  1. Poor women, women of color, and immigrant women have long worked for pay, and the rise of employment in the twentieth century was dominated by white, middle and upper middle class women (Duffy 2007; Andersen 2011).

  2. Time inflexible tasks are those that must be done at regular intervals and often at specific times of the day.

  3. The term “local” has a geographic connotation, as well as relational and qualitative elements. While there is debate about the distance that should exist between production and consumption in order for an agrifood item to be considered “local” (Ostrom 2006; Adams and Salois 2010), the US Congress adopted a definition in the 2008 Food, Conservation and Energy Act, asserting that the an agrifood product can still be considered locally or regionally produced if the distance it is transported does not exceed 400 miles, or if it is transported within the state in which it is produced (Martinez et al. 2010).

  4. Engagement in AFNs can be assessed both attitudinally and behaviorally, but there can be a gap between an individual’s concern with the agrifood system, and their subsequent behavior (Vermeir and Verbeke 2006). Therefore, only behavioral measures of engagement in AFNs were used in this analysis.

  5. Ideally, gender ideology is measured using a variable created from a number of measures. However, due to space limitations on the survey instrument, only one item could be used to measure gender ideology. The measure of gender ideology used in this research has been used by many scholars in previous work to examine gender ideology (i.e., Blair and Johnson 1992; Greenstein 1996; Sanchez and Thomson 1997).

  6. As noted, the cleaning variable was not significant in this model, and therefore these results are not discussed.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editor, reviewers and Virginia Husting for their helpful comments on this paper, as well as Jeff Sharp, Linda Lobao, and Kristie Lekies for their guidance on the larger research project this paper emerged from. Financial support for this project was provided by USDA National Needs Graduate Fellowship Competitive Grant No. 2008-38420-18750 from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and from the Coca-Cola Critical Difference for Women Grant.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Boise State University, 1910 University Drive, Boise, ID, 83725-1945, USA

    Rebecca L. Som Castellano

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Som Castellano, R.L. Alternative food networks and food provisioning as a gendered act. Agric Hum Values 32, 461–474 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-014-9562-y

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