Vol.
9, No. 1, November 2007
Exploring
Consumer Perceptions
in a Food Backwater
by
Susan Munkres
Furman
University
susan.munkres@furman.edu
Until
five years ago, I was a comfortable Madison, WI alternative
foodie consumer. I bought most of my produce and meat
and cheese at the farmers’ markets and food coops that
were on my biking route to and from the University of Wisconsin. I
was friends with local farmers; I knew whose cheese didn’t
have rBGH in it and who did and didn’t use sprays, even
if they weren’t officially certified organic. I
followed the kerfuffle over organic certification rules in
2000 – the coop posted notices and encouraged us to write
letters of protest to our Congresspeople – and I participated
in discussions when the coop debated whether or not to go entirely
organic, even if that meant not buying as much local produce. (They
decided to stay local). When newspapers and magazines – even Time! – proclaimed
that “local was the new organic,” I agreed: all
around me were local organic farmers, selling directly to consumers
in community-supported agriculture ventures and at farmers’ markets. Even
the Whole Foods that had arrived in town bought from farmers
I knew, just as did the coops. Small-scale dairy farms
were going organic to stay in business: with the Organic
Valley Cooperative based in the region, they had the option
to switch over and gain a price premium from the cooperative
for their newly-organic milk, which guaranteed both the price
and a market.
But
when I moved to South Carolina, things suddenly became more complicated. The
doubling of farmers’ markets around the country (Halweil
2004) hadn’t brought anything more than a small market
to my new downtown, and of the four or five produce vendors,
two were wholesalers of non-local produce. There were a
few remaining old-timey local farms that were about as far from
organic as you can get and a handful of folks who had small-scale
farms (gardens, really) who said they didn’t use sprays. Looking
online, I found there were 14 certified organic acres in my entire state. Suddenly,
local wasn’t looking like the new organic; organic was
new (and strange), and local was old-time.
Back
in Wisconsin, the assertion in the sustainable agriculture community
of local and organic being the new ideal had seemed
not only obvious, but relatively achievable. Now I wasn’t
so sure. This new uncertainty about the glorious future
of local organic food made me wonder as well whether the obviousness
of local and organic was a movement frame, rather than a reality
to consumers. I decided to look at how consumers were responding
to the claims and frames of the sustainable agriculture movement. Did
they understand what organic was? Did they want to buy
local? How did they decide between the local pesticide-ridden
peach and the organic peach from California? When local
is not organic, and organic is from far away, which trumps the
other in purchasing decisions?
I
also wanted to know how savvy consumers were about the issues
behind the organic and local discussions. Local had been
a response to the industrialization of organic after sustainable
agriculture as a movement did something few movements have done – it
sought out government regulation. Although it took a few
rounds, the organic standards that have emerged are relatively
strong (with the exception of the problematic area of grass-fed
beef and free-range eggs; for more discussion see Frommartz 2006). With
uniform standards at the federal level, large-scale farming gained
access to organic certification, and as a result, many of the
organic products now in wide distribution are produced by large-scale
agribusiness, or by companies now owned by large corporations
(for a chart of acquisitions, see Howard 2007; for a discussion
of the development of the standards, see Ingram & Ingram
2005). The local food movement emerged as a way to reclaim
the attributes of organic that had been lost by what some see
as an agribusiness takeover (for a detailed discussion of industrialization
of organic see Frommartz 2006, and also Pollan 2006). In
most respects, though, local and organic are still conflated
in representations to consumers (more on this later).
Framing ‘Local’ and ‘Organic’
One way that some consumers no doubt first become aware of the
benefits of local and/or organic food is through the ubiquitous “Top
Ten Reasons For Buying Local [Organic],” which are found
on most advocacy websites, local food sites, posted in a food
coop, and – probably the most prominent location – the
side panel of the paper bags at Whole Foods. These lists function
as a highly distilled indicator of the frames used to promote
organic agriculture in the United States. The following claims
are part of the “organic” frame (this list was
generated by compiling over 15 various “10 Reasons To
Buy Organic/Local” lists), including the one on Whole
Foods’ paper bag. I’ve grouped them loosely
into categories:
- Personal Benefits: no drugs or hormones, greater
nutrition, reduced health risks, better taste;
- Environmental Benefits: no hidden costs, improving
the soil, good for the environment, good for wildlife, saves
energy;
- Economic Benefits: helps family farms, protects
workers, supports the local economy;
- Global Benefits: in harmony with nature, preserves
diversity, builds sustainability.
But as the organic market now contains a large number of agri-business
firms (even Wal-Mart sells organic milk), not all of these claims
have remained (or ever fully were) accurate. All that
remains definitively true of organic in principle are
the following: a) no drugs or hormones, b) reduced health
risks, c) protects workers, and d) better for the environment.
Note that these last three are true because of the reduced pesticides
used in organic methods. The greater nutritional value
of organic food has been documented for some organic produce,
but has not been confirmed for industrial organic food specifically
(Kimbrell 2002). So much of the list is at this point highly
idealistic when applied to organic food as a whole.
By
contrast, when those same claims are made of local food (and
usually the “top 10 reasons to buy local” are comprised
of these items as well), the list becomes a different set of
idealistic overstatements. What remains accurate are the
following: a)saves energy, b) helps family farms, and c) supports
local economy.(And what becomes idealistic includes everything
related to how the produce was actually grown). Depending
on how local food has been handled, one might make a claim for
better taste and better nutrition, but this has not yet been
confirmed independently. Supporting local farms might
under some circumstances protect workers and preserve diversity,
but local farming can be just as pesticide-ridden and monocropped
as any other farming – you just happen to be living near
it, if it is local.
Consumers’ Responses to Local and Organic Claims
Little is known about how closely consumers have tracked the
vicissitudes of “organic,” from the battles over
certification and standards to the promotion of local organic
food as a response to the industrialization of organic. From
within the movement – as I was in Madison – it
seems everyone knows about buying seasonally and is joining
a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) organization. From
outside the movement – as in South Carolina – most
folks don’t really understand what the fuss is all about,
and some seem to resent organic as elitist, yuppie food (Guthman
2003). And despite the recent spate of attention to the
local / organic conundrum (Pollan 2006, Cloud 2007, Smith
and Mackinnon 2007), most consumers still aren’t really
paying much attention.
We
also don’t know very much at all about what consumers think
about these food issues. Most of the research has been done for
the food industry by market research firms, and their data is
available only for a large fee. Julie Guthman, who is one
of the only people to examine in detail the scale, composition
and practices of the organic industry as a whole, says that consumer
understanding is one of the biggest unknowns. Focus
group data from the Food and Society Project at the Kellogg Foundation
suggests that consumers have a great deal of difficulty thinking
about food at a systemic level) and that they find the proliferation
of labeling systems – organic certification, fair trade
certification, fair trade, and so on – more than a little
confusing (Cultural Logic, for the Kellogg Foundation, 2005). Most
organic purchasing seems to be done for health-related reasons,
although studies of such purchasing have focused primarily on
supermarket and health food store shoppers, and have left largely
unexplored the alternative systems of distribution that are central
to the mission of the sustainable agriculture movement. And the
bottom line is, the percentage of people who are committed to
buying organic food is quite small (in the range of 2-3% of the
population (Sligh 2003) – in part because, consumers are
concerned about a growing range of food issues, from genetic
engineering (Center for Food Safety, nd) to globalization of
food systems (Wimberly et al 2003).
Investigating the Choice Between ‘Local’ and ‘Organic’
If consumers are confused about organic standards and about food
issues in general, one way to develop a deeper understanding
of the trade-offs between local and organic is to start with
people who are already informed at least to a degree in food
issues. These consumers would potentially understand
the trade-offs between local and organic, and would likely
have at given at least some thought to which of the local and
organic frames they find compelling. Available to me
were a few sites: a newly formed organic buying club
whose members joined together to buy organic produce at reduced
costs from a wholesale distributor; two health-food stores,
both of which carried organic food as well as a little local
produce; and two farmers’ markets, one run by the state
that included wholesalers as well as local farmers, and the
other downtown, composed almost entirely of local farmers. I
decided to work with the organic buying club and the downtown
farmers’ market, primarily for reasons of access, but
also because I guessed these people would be the most committed.
In
focusing on these two groups, I wanted to assess their members’ knowledge
in several dimensions. First and foremost, I was interested
to see if they could differentiate between industrial organic
and local organic – and if they could recognize that local
does not necessarily mean organic. Did they value both,
as movement leaders often assume, or were they committed to local
only OR organic only? That is, are local food consumers
convinced by the overly broad claims of the sustainable agriculture
movement, or are there actually separate audiences for organic
and for local?
Obviously,
these are broad questions, but since we know almost nothing,
a pilot study is a good place to begin. I surveyed
20 members of the organic buying club and about 20 regular attendees
of the farmers’ market (meaning people who came almost
every week). Response rates were very high: approaching
90% for the buying club, and very few attendees at the market
refused to participate. The survey asked questions about
their purchasing habits, purchasing priorities, their definitions
of local and organic, and also asked them to rank various attributes
as more or less closely associated with local and with organic
(the attributes were the 15 claims discussed above).
Purchasing Choices and Priorities
The differences between the groups lined up in the way I had
assumed. The members of the organic buying club made
a point of purchasing most of their food organically (a quarter
exclusively buy organic food, and a majority said they did
so frequently), while the farmers market regulars were much
more likely to say they bought local food (some claimed to
do so “always,” which is an impossibility in this
region!). Most organic club members bought local food
only sometimes.
Their
purchasing priorities reflected their group memberships as well.
The groups were given the following options to prioritize: grown
locally; grown locally & pesticide free; grown locally & certified
organic; grown in SC & certified organic; and certified
organic. Organic club members valued local, but prioritized
organic higher: they ranked grown locally & certified
organic the highest, followed by grown in SC & certified
organic, but most chose certified organic as their
third choice, and locally grown was a distant fifth
behind grown locally & pesticide free. The
farmers’ market regulars also ranked grown locally & certified
organic the highest, but differed in that they ranked locally
grown over even grown in SC & certified organic. The
buying club members said they would pay more for organic food;
the farmers’ market regulars would do so for local food.
The
groups also differed in their attitudes about, and knowledge
of, organic food. The organic buying club trusted certifying
labels more (for example, they agreed that food is actually organic
when it is labeled as such), but they also understood that farms
can be organic without being officially certified (particularly
small farms often forego the expensive certification process),
and they were more willing to trust and recognize those farms
as organic. Farmers’ market attendees rejected farms
that were not certified, but also tended not to trust the certification
process (a contradiction that suggests a deeper confusion about
the role of certification).
The
organic buying club had a much broader definition of what constituted
local food, defining such food as being grown within 100 miles,
while farmers market regulars saw local food as being grown within
25 miles. This is consistent with the finding above, where
farmers market attendees didn’t seem to see grown in
SC as locally grown. I believe that the organic buying
club holds this broader sense of local because it is organic
or sustainable local farms that count as local in their minds. These
farms are scarce and thus, more spread out: the buying
club was more likely to occasionally purchase from a organic
CSA 100 miles away than its members were to frequent a large
local non-organic farm 15 miles up the road. I take from
this that the buying club members related to local from the standpoint
of organic consumers: that is, they were coming to local from
organic. For them, local meant an extension of organic,
so the only local that they could see was small-scale local that
was also organic or that was self-consciously identified with
sustainable agriculture. Farms in the region were not,
I believe, for these consumers, actually “local.” If
this is the case, then, at least for these consumers, it is a
highly partial local which counts as local, and therefore we
would expect to see some serious misunderstandings of local by
the organic club members. It is to these constructions
of organic and local that I now turn.
Consumers’ Understadnings of ‘Local’ and ‘Organic’
To address consumer acceptance of the local and organic frames,
we asked the buying club members and market regulars to rank
each of the fifteen attributes discussed above (from “no
drugs or hormones” to “builds sustainability”)
in terms of how closely they were related both to the term “organic” and
to the term “local.” We found that organic
club members were, in general, more accurate then market regulars
about the elements of both frames that were correct. However,
they were also more idealistic about the attributes of organic
food.
Organic
club members were more likely than market regulars to accurately
assess the organic frame elements: they saw greater nutritional
benefits to organic food and lessened health risks for organic
food. They also believed it tasted better, improved the
soil, and was good for the environment, which are relatively
accurate. But they were also much more idealistic about
organic food than the market regulars, tending to believe that
organic helped family farms, built sustainability, and was in
harmony with nature; this despite their own purchasing of globally
transported industrial organic food through a distributor. Thus,
while club members were better informed about the actual benefits
of organic, they were also more uncritically accepting of the
untrue elements of the organic frame – and more likely
to miscast organic as having the benefits of local organic.
Organic
club members also were more likely than farmers market attendees
to accurately comprehend the most distinctive attributes of local
food. They were more likely to see helping family farms
and supporting the local economy as very closely related to local
food. (These were in fact the attributes they saw as most
closely related to local food.) They also saw local food
as saving energy, which demonstrates an understanding of the
environmental implications of the global transport of food. But
they did not see local food as being fresher, even given this
transportation issue; in fact, they did not see nutrition or
taste as a quality of local food at all, even as local food proponents
focus on nutrition and taste as key elements of food which has
not been shipped thousands of miles. Market regulars didn’t
emphasize the fact that local saves energy, but they did see
local food as tasting better. Interestingly, while they
saw “local” as beneficial, they were much less consistent
in their responses and missed some key benefits of local food
(at least as articulated by the sustainable agriculture movement).
Implications
What we see here is consistent with market research that finds
that consumers are primarily motivated to buy organic for health
concerns. The buying club members were clearly concerned
primarily with nutrition and the health risks of pesticide exposure. This
focus led them to glorify organic food to some degree. However,
their involvement in the club had clearly exposed them to more
elements of the organic frame and to important ideas about local
agriculture, thus encouraging them to think about food at a more
systemic level as well. They may be very consumers who
evolve into the ones who agonize over a choice between local
and organic. But for now, they definitely choose organic.
The
market regulars are not the sustainable agriculture
movement’s ideal consumer, knowledgeable about food systems
and making purchasing decisions that take into account the multiple
factors of “food drenched in oil” and pesticide
use. This raises a key question: in a state with
a rural tradition that has persisted entirely distinct from the
sustainable agriculture movement, are local food purchasers likely
to be part of that movement or something completely different? The
persistence of rural tradition does not necessarily breed a consumer
for local organic. And the “sustainable local” frame
presumes a certain orientation towards food systems that is very
unlikely to be shared by rural people or formerly rural people.
I
also see a larger problem in how I, and others, have thought
about these issues. We have accepted the (market-driven) premise
of much of the research so far, which has asked questions primarily
about what consumers believe and what they understand. But
the movement is larger than consumption, and many participate
for reasons and in ways that go beyond what they choose to spend
their food dollars on. The organic club promotes organic
purchasing, but also requires that its members do volunteer work
and offers educational events to the community at large. Similarly,
purchasing locally produced products at the downtown market may
be as much entertainment, civic pride, or downtown involvement
as it is supporting local agriculture. Teasing out these
various interrelated meanings will require a broader understanding
of the meaning that the work of procuring food has in people’s
lives. Taken in this context, the assessments that people
make of the claims for local and organic are far more complicated
than one might expect.
References
Allen, Patricia. 2004. Together at the Table: Sustainability
and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System. University
Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Cloud, John. “Eating Better Than Organic.” Time
Magazine, March 2, 2007. Available at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1595245-1,00.html
Cultural Logic, Inc. 2005. “Not While I’m
Eating: How and Why Americans Don’t Think about Food
Systems” report published as part of Kellogg Foundation
Document Perceptions of the U.S. Food System: What
and How Americans Think about their Food. Available
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October 31, 2007.
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_____. 2004. Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming
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W.W. Norton.
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It.” http://sasw.chass.ncsu.edu/global-food/foodglobal.html. Accessed
October 31, 2007.
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