Lost in the Supermarket: The Corporate-Organic Foodscape and the Struggle for Food Democracy

Jos e Johnston e
Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada; josee.johnston@utoronto.ca

Andrew Biro
Department of Political Science, Acadia University, Wolfville, NS, Canada; andrew.biro@acadiau.ca

Norah MacKendrick
Department Sociology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada; norah.mackendrick@utoronto.ca
Abstract: The corporatization of organics has been critiqued for the concentration of ownership, as well as the ecological consequences of the long distances commodities travel between field and table. These critiques suggest a competing vision of food democracy which strives to organize the production and consumption of food at a proximate geographic scale while increasing opportunities for democratically managed cooperation between producers and consumers. This paper examines how the corporate-organic foodscape has interacted and evolved alongside competing counter movements of food democracy. Using discourse and content analysis, we examine how corporate organics incorporate messages of locally scaled food production, humble origins, and a commitment to family farms and employees, and explore some of the complexity of the corporate-organic foodscape. This paper contributes to the understanding of commodity fetishism in the corporate-organic foodscape, and speaks more generally to the need for sophisticated understandings of the complex relationship between social movement innovation and market adaptation. Keywords: organics, food democracy, commodity fetishism, corporate foodscape, place

Introduction
We strongly believe that buying organic foods is a form of environmental activism. When you choose organic products, you are consuming products that not only are good for you, but also are good for the biosystem of todayand thats good for tomorrow. In many ways, you are eating and drinking for the futureyours and the planets (The Organic Cow website, http://www.theorganiccow.com/)
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For the past half-century, the primary manifestation of an alternative to industrialized agriculture in North America has been the organic food movement. The original movement emphasized the agrarian ideals of small-scale food production, community engagement, and ecological responsibility. While at least a rhetorical commitment to those goals is maintained, todays organic food sector has moved considerably beyond small-scale farm to table distribution to a corporate model of large factory farms supplying distant supermarkets (Guthman 2004a), a phenomenon we refer to as corporate organics. Organics is one of the fastest growing sectors in agriculture in both the United States and Canada (Canadian Organic Growers 2006; ERS-USDA 2005), with annual growth rates in both countries around 20% (Canadian Organic Growers 2006; Oberholtzer et al 2005:4). This production and distribution structure has raised questions about the ecological and social impacts of organic food production, particularly in terms of the fossil fuel required to transport organic products within global commodity chains (Fromartz 2006; Halweil 2002; Pollan 2006b). Consequently, the organics industry is viewed skeptically by many alternative food system activists, particularly since many of the original small organic companies have been purchased by the worlds biggest food processors (Howard 2005, 2007). The corporatization of organics can be contrasted with a competing vision of food democracy articulated by activists in alternative agricultural initiatives. While food democracy represents a decentralized terrain, these projects are commonly animated by an imperative to organize the food system at a scale where democratic needs are met, sensitivity to resource depletion is heightened, and privileged core regions do not live off the carrying capacity of the periphery (Halweil 2005; Hassanein 2003; Shiva 2003). Food democracy projects include farmers markets, community supported agriculture (CSA), and food box schemes, all of which are represented as alternatives to a corporate supermarket system that sells food grown, processed, and controlled thousands of miles away. The increasing popularity of food democracy options represents part of collective efforts to oppose the corporatization of agriculture and the commons more generally (Belliveau 2005; Goldman 1998; Hinrichs 2003; Johnston 2003). Food democracy supporters advocate eating locally as a way for communities to obtain greater control over the food system and engage in more meaningful interactions with food producers (Brecher et al 2000; Lapp and Lapp 2002; Thompson and e e Coskuner-Balli 2007). Calls for more local control and meaningful interactions between farmers and consumers have diffused into the public consciousness in North America and Europewith increasing media coverage of the local food movement (eg The Economist 2006), the development of local food certification programs, and eat
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local marketing schemes (Dupuis and Goodman 2005:362; Friedmann 2007). While the localization of food presents a promising alternative to an increasingly globalized and corporatized organic sector, a local versus global food binary is not as simple as it might initially appear (Allen 2004:179; Hinrichs 2003:34; Watts et al 2005:31). Scholars have identified significant problems with unreflexive localism, and caution against equating localized scalar relations with democratically organized social relations (see Belliveau 2005; Born and Purcell 2006:199; DuPuis and Goodman 2005; Hinrichs 2003). In this paper, we continue scholarly work critiquing the fetishization of specific features of the food system, like localism, and also explore the complexity of the corporateorganic foodscape while drawing lessons for food democracy projects. As we explore below, developing a robust food democracy requires consideration of both the limitations and possibilities of local eating. The corporatization of organics holds important lessons that clarify the importance of democratizing the underlying socio-economic relations of the food system. A central concern is the problem of commodity fetishism or, put differently, a lack of transparency in the food system that obscures how relations of production are socially produced rather than naturally given. It is not just that corporate-organic food is grown industrially or shipped long distances, but that food production, distribution, and consumption are not democratically controlled and organized, even though presented as such. Corporate-organic usage of food democracy themes, like eating locally and developing meaningful relationships with producers, demonstrates the potency of these desires; in this paper we ask how the articulation of these desires takes on an individualized, commodified form, and how this relates to collectiveoriented food democracy projects challenging centralized, privately owned relations of production. Analytically, our contribution is to emphasize that developing a robust food democracy requires a greater appreciation of the dynamic relationship between corporate adaptation and social movement innovation. Scholars have long identified how social movement themes can be transformed into marketing opportunities (Frank 1998; Jameson 1991:49), and while the co-optation of messages from the organic movement has received some attention (Thompson and CoskunerBalli 2007) this process requires further investigation. Rather than a simple story of co-optation, we advocate a dialectical approach that recognizes a dynamic relationship between market actors and social movements (Schor 2007) and sees the corporate-organic foodscape as a hybrid entity drawing from movement themes while using market mechanisms. This does not mean abandoning a critical perspective towards corporate capitalism, but analytically it necessitates skepticism towards simplistic binaries (good/evil, local/global, nature/culture) that
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obscure understanding of real-world hybridity (see Latour 1993). To more closely examine the process of marketmovement interaction, we develop the notion of the foodscape as a conceptual lens that focuses our investigation into food democracy and corporate organics. Empirically, our objective is to document how food democracy themes are being incorporated by corporate-organic marketing particularly in an individualized, commodified formand relate this process to collective-oriented food democracy projects challenging centralized, privately owned relations of production. To do so, we look at the top 25 global food processors that have acquired some of the smaller organic brands in North America to see how these companies use product websites to incorporate themes from food democracy projects, particularly themes of food being rooted in a local place, with connections to real producers. We find that the marketing of corporate organics consistently draws on food democracy images and narratives, connecting products to a particular locale and family farms, and highlighting a personal history behind the brand while obscuring spatially dispersed commodity chains and centralized ownership structures. The paper proceeds as follows. In the next section we outline the material and ideological elements of the corporate-organic foodscape, and chart key precepts of a vision of food democracy. We then map the contemporary corporate-organic foodscape using a discourse and content analysis of corporate-organic food websites. In the following section we analytically unpack our findings, arguing that the corporateorganic foodscape operates as a hybrid entity that cultivates a fetishized image of ecological embeddedness in locally scaled places, while obscuring long-distance commodity chains, globalized trade, and centralized corporate control over the food system. We conclude the paper by examining challenges and opportunities facing food democracy movements, particularly in light of the political-economic prominence and ideational maneuverability of corporate organics.

The Corporate-organic Foodscape and the Struggle for Food Democracy

The term foodscape has been used generally to describe the spatial distribution of food across urban spaces and institutional settings (Winson 2004; Yasmeen 1996). Drawing from geographic and sociological literature on the landscape (eg Mitchell 2001; Zukin 1991), we employ the term foodscape to describe a social construction that captures and constitutes cultural ideals of how food relates to specific places, people and food systems. As Cook and Crang emphasize, foods do not simply come from places . . . but also make places as symbolic constructs, being deployed in the constructions of various imaginative
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geographies (1996:140). Just as a landscape painting has a mediated, indirect relationship to physical ontology or place, a foodscape may variously capture or obscure the ecological sites and social relations of food production, consumption, and distribution. Foodscapes involve elements of materiality and ideology and are contested spaces where actors struggle to define the terrain of political action, including the extent of market involvement and private ownership of food. In the next section we describe how the corporate-organic foodscape is both a material and political-economic phenomenon, and contrast this foodscape with the activities and ideals of food democracy movements.

The Corporate-organic Foodscape

As demand increased for organic food in North America, organics became part of the mainstream institutionalized food system, largely owing to the efforts of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which developed uniform national standards for organic crop production in 1990, and further detailed those standards in 2002 (Guthman 2004b; Ingram and Ingram 2005). The path of regulation and certification has been consistently controversial, and organic standardization has been a political, rather than merely a technical issue (see DeLind 2000; Ingram and Ingram 2005). The result of this political struggle was to transform organic from a philosophy governing many aspects of the food production and distribution process, to a regulatory label that focused onor some would say, fetishizedthe regulation of agricultural inputs. Organic certification institutionalized what was originally intended, for many participants, to be an antiinstitutional movement (Goodman and Goodman 2001). Consequently, other than synthetic inputs, the production conditions for many organic products now mirror those of their conventional counterparts; they often originate on large-scale industrial farms and are sold from supermarket shelves. Organic produce is commonly distributed with trans-continental and even global commodity chains (Raynolds 2004)1 from farms in California, and increasingly from China (Sanders 2006), to disparate market niches ranging from Whole Foods Market to WalMartall in direct contrast to the original aspirations of the organics movement. The institutionalization of organic agriculture through federal certification standards, along with a price premium and significant consumer interest in organics, has helped increase the presence of major corporate players in the organics industry (Fromartz 2006; Goodman and Goodman 2001:101). Most of the worlds largest food processing corporations are now involved in some dimension of organic food, acquiring many of the original organic food companies, as well as developing their own organic brands (RAFI, 2003:19). With a growing number of suppliers, a costly certification process has emerged
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and the price premium for organics has declined, thereby pushing (and keeping) small suppliers out of the market (Guthman 2004a; Pollan 2006b). Importantly, while corporate buyouts and economic concentration represent a significant shift in the ownership structure of this sector, this shift is frequently imperceptible at the level of the foodscape, as original product names and brands are retained by new corporate owners.

Alternative Agriculture and the Struggle for Food Democracy

For many in the food democracy movement, this corporatization process represents a corruption or co-optation of organic ideals. At the core of food democracy lies the idea that people can and should be actively participating in shaping the food system, rather than remaining passive spectators . . . [it] is about citizens having the power to determine agro-food policies and practices locally, regionally, nationally and globally (Hassanein 2003:79; see also Lang 1999). Organics represents one of the earliest manifestations of a vision of food democracy. While there were important exceptions,2 many of the original organic farming ventures were part of a social movement seeking to take control of food production away from agro-food corporations, and put it into the hands of smaller operators, communities, coops and urban neighborhoods (Belasco 1989; Buck et al 1997; Goodman 1999). Reflecting the movements social ideals, organic food was distributed primarily through small-market or non-profit mechanisms, fostering direct connections between producers and consumers (Raynolds 2004). With the corporatization of organics, proponents of food democracy have been forced to rethink strategies for resisting the unsustainabilities and inequities associated with industrial food production and distribution, and transforming the food system. This involves politicizing the food system: pushing the notion that access to safe and nutritious food is a basic righta notion that fundamentally contradicts the corporate vision where food is principally viewed as a commodity produced for sale (Hassanein 2003; Riches 1999)and using the concept of food democracy to create new political spaces where agricultural producers and consumers can act as citizens. On a pragmatic level, food democracy is about creating alternative mechanisms for individuals and communities to produce and procure food sustainably. Food democracy encourages the expansion of organic agricultural production techniques, but with greater attention to fair wages and living conditions for laborers and farmers (Halweil 2002; Shiva 2000). It resists cooperation with transnational food producers and major supermarkets, and encourages distribution mechanisms that foster meaningful interactions between producers and consumers, such as through farmers markets, food boxes, and CSAs (Halweil 2005). These mechanisms are thought to enable food
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security and sovereignty by placing control over food production and distribution in the hands of citizens rather than corporations (Riches 1999; Shiva 2000, 2003). Localization is an important element in the vision of food democracy (Halweil 2002, 2005).3 As Ostrom observes, local food is a unifying theme among social movements challenging the modern agri-food system, coming to signify all that is believed to be the antithesis of a globally organized system where food travels great distances, is controlled by behemoth, transnational corporations, and is wrought with environmental, social, and nutritional hazards (2006:66; see also Dupuis and Goodman 2005:359). Advocates for food system localization make numerous explicit and implicit normative claims that associate localism with democratic interpersonal relations, cooperation, decentralization, environmental and community sustainability, embeddedness in local systems, family farms, and resistance to global corporate capitalism (Dupuis and Goodman 2005; Hinrichs 2003). These themes are compatible with food democracy, but are nevertheless susceptible to romanticized and unreflexive deployment. Scholars have called for a de-reification of the local, arguing that eat-local activists must carefully consider the meaning and limits of the local scale (Belliveau 2005; Dupuis and Goodman 2005; Hinrichs 2003; Johnston and Baker 2005), and guard against defensive localization (Hinrichs 2003:37). Localization defined as spatial proximity to the consumer may not adequately capture energy use in food transport (Wallgren 2006), nor necessitate equitable labor practices or meaningful interactions between consumers and producers (Belliveau 2005). Spatial relations of proximity also cannot be simply equated with social relationships of democratic accountability and substantive equality, which we argue are of primary importance to a meaningful vision of food democracy.

Mapping the Corporate-organic Foodscape

Having discussed both the emergence of the corporate-organic foodscape, as well as key facets of food democracy, we can now begin to map the corporate-organic foodscape in greater detail. This section describes a marketing aesthetic of locally scaled life that draws on place-based ideals, while employing romanticized conceptions of specific places, face-to-face community, and rural life. Using strategic narratives emphasizing locality, place, and the connection between brands and real producers this locally flavored marketing strategy is grafted onto production and distribution practices that, at least in part, can be identified as part of globalized corporate agribusiness. To map the corporate-organic foodscape, we conducted a discourse and content analysis of the websites of organic brands (eg Lightlife, The Organic Cow, Back to Nature) that have been acquired by North
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Americas top food processors (eg Heinz, ConAgra, Kraft Foods). We focused on acquisitions rather than the introduction of new brands because of our interest in corporate organics use of food democracy messages, a process that is especially visible after the transition of brand ownership from a small company to a major transnational corporation. We selected websites for analysis as they capture highly detailed and comprehensive messages about the company, its products, and brand image. Websites are identified in the marketing literature as virtual storefronts that communicate corporate, product, and brand images, as well as information on the brand that cannot be communicated through product packaging and advertising (Argyriou et al Melewar 2006; Chen 2001; Singh and Dalal 1999). In short, websites are a part of integrated marketing platforms that construct a coherent and consistent narrative for corporate brands (Rowley 2004), that is highly amenable to empirical study. While not all consumers access websites to learn about products, websites provide a way to identify and interpret elements of the discourse associated with corporate-organic brandsthe narratives, ideas, and images that the purveyors of corporate organics seek to associate with their products. Corporate ownership was determined using a chart compiled by The Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems (Howard 2007). This chart documents organic brand acquisitions by the top 25 North American food processors, last updated in July 2007.4 Our sample includes 34 organic retail brands that are partly or wholly owned by, or involved in strategic alliances with, these corporations. The organic commodities sold by these companies include dairy products, processed foods, canned produce, seeds, and tea. Some companies sell only a few organic commodities, while others are entirely dedicated to organic products.

Content Analysis: Assessing the Prevalence of Food Democracy Themes

Analysis of the websites led to the inductive identification of prominent themes within the corporate-organic foodscape, which were then related to values associated with food democracy. This allowed us to make explicit the mostly implicit messages about how corporate-organic foods were seemingly connected to locally scaled places and identifiable individuals, rather than being part of a larger and faceless commodity chain. We then conducted a content analysis to assess the prevalence of food democracy themes identified (Table 1).5 Because some subjective elements of the corporate-organic foodscape could not be reliably coded (eg feelings of simplicity and authenticity conveyed through web design), our coding provides conservative counts of food democracy themes used in corporate-organic foodscapes.
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Table 1: Food democracy themes identified in corporate organics

Use of an our story narrative Specific geographic references Personal stories of founders/ employees Connection to family farms Explicit connection to parent corporation

Parent corporation

Brand

Reference to small/ humble beginnings

The Corporate-organic Foodscape

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Cargill+ Coca Cola Con-Agra Dean Foods Dean Foods Dean Foods Dean Foods General Mills General Mills HC HC HC HC HC HC HC HC HC HC

French Meadows Odwalla Lightlife Alta-Dena Horizon Organic The Organic Cow Whitewave/Silk Cascadian Farms Muir Glen Earths Best Organic Arrowhead Mills Casbah Celestial Seasonings Deboles Garden of Eatin HainsPure Foods Health Valley Imagine Foods Soy Dream/Rice Dream (Imagine Foods)

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Table 1: Continued
Use of an our story narrative Specific geographic references Personal stories of founders/ employees Connection to family farms Explicit connection to parent corporation

Parent corporation

Brand

Reference to small/ humble beginnings 14 41 21 62 19 56 23 68 10 29

HC HC HC HC HC HC

19 56

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HC HC Hershey Foods Kellogg Kellogg Kraft Foods Kraft Foods Mars M&M Pepsi

Nile Spice Shari-Anns Tofu town Walnut Acres West Soy Westbrae Little Bear and Bearitos Westbrae Natural Spectrum Organics Dagoba Kashi Morningstar Farms Boca Back to Nature Seeds of Change Naked Juice

Total Percentage

: theme present; : theme absent. + Cargill involved in a strategic alliance with French Meadows. HC: Hain-Celestial. Heinz has partial ownership in Hain-Celestial. Hain-Celestial is also involved in a strategic alliance with Cargill.

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Codable themes that we found included the following: connection to family farms, which were used to demonstrate an attachment to a particular rural locale and/or to symbolically connect consumption of the brand with an idealized agrarian mode of life (29%); personal stories of founders or employees, which worked to humanize the commodity, and suggest a sense of a locally scaled operation (41%); an explicit emphasis on the firms small-scale, humble beginnings (68%); the use of an Our Story narrative that also created a humanizing effect for the corporate commodity, suggesting a local rather than transnational scale of operation and constructing a foodscape quite distinct from the imaginary of the faceless corporate food system (62%); and specific geographic references to locally scaled places, which tended to involve descriptions of the companys history in a particular locality, even though current operations for corporate firms are clearly much more geographically expansive across national and transnational spaces (56%). At least one of these themes was present in all of the brands examined, suggesting that themes associated with food democracy are a broadly utilized corporate-organic marketing tool. We also examined brand websites to see if they openly acknowledged an association with a corporate owner or strategic partner. Here we looked to see if copyright information showed an association, if news release sections included details of the buyout, or if pages describing the brand history or profile acknowledged ownership or strategic partnerships with a major food processor. We found that just over half of the brands acknowledged corporate ownership/partnership on their website (56%). However, of these brands, most (86%) are owned by the Hain-Celestial company, a company that specializes in organic and natural foods, but is partially owned by Heinz and is involved in a strategic partnership with Cargill. Importantly, no Hain-Celestial website mentioned an affiliation with Heinz or Cargill, and as such we found all but three of the 34 brands (91%) did not acknowledge the full extent of corporate ownership and partnerships.

Discourse Analysis: Putting Food Democracy Themes to Work

Given the diversity of products under discussion and the large scale of corporate-organic operations, our content analysis revealed a substantial presence of food democracy themes. To better understand the ideological work occurring in the corporate-organic foodscape, discourse analysis was used to demonstrate the construction of a narrative focused on specific places, humble origins, as well as face-to-face social and labour relations. For instance, many organic brands, such as Arrowhead Mills, Horizon Organic, Cascadian Farms, and Dagoba provide a romanticized description of a specific locality where the company began, whether it was on a specific farm, in a particular rural region of the United States,
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or a humble store located in a certain city or town. Invoking a specific geographic place is often done in conjunction with an emphasis on the small-scale nature of the operation, at least in its original incarnation, and most often with no mention of the firms current corporate ownership. Arrowhead Mills, for example, provides a map of the exact location of the founding office in Texas and includes the following description, which is emblematic of the Our Story feature found on many websites:
Arrowhead Mills was founded over 40 years ago in a tin roofed building in the Texas panhandle by Frank Ford. Frank believed synthetic pesticides and herbicides weakened crop varieties, broke down resistance to disease and pests, and ultimately, polluted the food chain. He put his life savings down on a tractor and set out to farm organically grown corn and wheat. With a stone mill he ground his harvest and delivered it to local stores from the back of his pickup truck (Arrowhead Mills 2007:para 1).

References to highly specific geographic locations, and the metonymic identification of the company with a single individual that we can know on a first name basis, fosters an image of a company rooted in locally scaled places, engaged in personalized transactions, and dedicated to ecological principles, even when these roots have long been transcended in the process of corporate consolidation and expansion. Similarly, to maintain the image of a connection to a locally scaled place of food production, some brands prominently feature home farms or factories designed for public tours. As part of its proud history, Cascadian Farms website details the companys origins on a single farm in the Upper Skagit Valley of Washingtons North Cascade Mountains. The corporate buyout of Cascadian Farm (it was bought by General Mills in 2000) is briefly noted, but what is emphasized is the home farm as a real placea working, active, productive farm that can be viewed online and visited in person (Cascadian Farms 2007: para 1). However, even Cascadian Farms corporate founder, Gene Kahn, admitted to journalist Michael Pollan that the Skagit Valley farm is a PR farm for General Mills (Pollan 2006a:145), not a farm that produces goods for Cascadian Farms internationally distributed commodities. Physical sites such as the Cascadian demonstration farm project an image of locally embedded and publicly accessible operations, but are fundamentally disconnected from the actual industrialized, large-scale operations where food is grown, processed, and packaged, as well as the geographically dispersed commodity chains. Of course, the social constructions of the corporate foodscape are open to contestation, and corporate organics in particular is a dynamic hybridized entity. The view that corporate-organic marketing is no more than an ideological veil for transnational agribusiness, while containing some truth, is too simple. Marketing campaigns can be deconstructed,
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and advertisements and websites can be read critically, and it is clear that many food analysts and at least some eaters are aware of the disjuncture between the claims embedded in corporate marketing and actual conditions of production. Corporations may respond to criticisms by changing their material practices and/or the discursive framing or marketing of their products. Thus The Organic Cow of Vermont changed its name to The Organic Cow in April 2006, after critics challenged its claim to be a Vermont-based company when it is headquartered in Boulder, Colorado (Totten 2004).6 Yet despite this challenge, the website for The Organic Cow continues to describe the companys Vermont origins, and outlines its support for Vermont family farms (The Organic Cow nd). Similarly, the producer profiles page on its website describes two farms, both located in Vermont (The Organic Cow ndb). These messages work together to construct a marketing discourse imbued with localism, and as instances of integrated and doubtless carefully constructed marketing campaigns, provide insight into the kinds of affective associations that transnational food corporations think consumers want to associate with organic food. The local scale and personalized relations can be seen as a rhetorical proxy for socially embedded and just labour relationsanother keystone of food democracy. Food sourced from the global South, however, presents distinct challenges in this regard, given the deep structures of global inequality. For example, the Dagoba website explains that its chocolate comes almost exclusively from small farms and co-ops but notes that when a higher-producing farm estate was discovered, we saw how equitable this farm was and tasted their amazing cacao [and] we were hooked. This partnership has yielded exquisite cacao, a better quality of life for cacao workers and their families, and the preservation of many plant, animal and insect species in the face of environmental degradation (Dagoba 2007:para 2). The Dagoba website then provides testimonials from current farm employees, which show the farm to be a relatively benevolent work environment, but simultaneously reveal deeply ingrained hierarchies and paternalism at odds with the ideals of food democracy:
Always when I needed something, the bosses reached out their hand . . . The bosses treat us very well. They do not exploit the workers. Therefore I would like to offer my gratefulness for the treatment received . . . Don Hugo . . . is not a boss like so many who are always punishing or complaining or abusing the workers with bad words. (Dagoba 2007:para 79)

For corporate organics sourced from the global North, the idea of buying food from a family farmer is prevalenta theme which reflects deeply seated North American ideals of agrarianism (Guthman 2004a). Horizon Organic, for example, emphasizes that: [f]amily farms hold
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a very special place in our company (Horizon Organic 2006:para 1). Corporate-organic marketing links its products not only with farms, but also with specific people working for the companyemployees, farmersuppliers, and even consumers. Spectrum Organics website similarly explains that: Here at Spectrum we recognize that the sum of our parts is greater than the whole. That means we value every individual involved whether the family olive farmers from the Cretan Agri-Environmental Coop who make Spectrums Organic Greek Olive Oil or Kristy in Quality Control who makes sure the caps fit tight. Youll soon be able to check out their profiles and stories here, or add one of your own youre Spectrum too! (Spectrum Organics nd:para 1). These narratives, along with links to employee profiles, represent an effort to humanize the process of commodity exchange, even if the commodity chain is globalized and the production process is industrialized. While the companys website demonstrates responsiveness to consumer demand, it is not clear what youre Spectrum too! actually means in terms of food democracycan a profit-driven company in strategic partnership with food conglomerates like Heinz and Cargill meaningfully devolve control over the food system to Spectrum consumers? The question should not be seen as entirely rhetorical, but as a push to discuss the pragmatic implications and contradictions for this type of humanizing discourse in the corporate-organic foodscape especially if we are to take seriously the idea that the corporateorganic marketing constitutes a hybridized identity that both opens and closes political opportunities. The contradictions and possibilities are perhaps best revealed when corporate-organic brands explicitly try to engage consumers in specific projects of food politicseven when these projects contradict the imperatives of industrial food production. The Kashi brand of cereals and crackers (owned by Kelloggs), for instance, has a page on its website dedicated to designing personal challenges for consumers and employees. Included among these challenges is an injunction to Discover a local farmers market, because [l]ocally grown foods are not only beneficial for the environment, theyre often a lot fresher and cheaper too. Then, theres the added bonus of supporting local businesses. Make an effort this week to find out where and when your communitys next local farmers market takes place. Plan a trip (Kashi 2007:para 1). The apparent contradiction between the basic purpose of the Kashi siteto promote a brand that sells processed commodities made with grains sourced globally and distributed through global commodity chainsand the politics of local food provisioning, supports the view that corporate organics represent a complex case of hybridization rather than a simple, black and white instance of ideological obfuscation. One way to understand this contradiction would be to note that within the hybrid corporate-organic foodscape, there is space for a core of corporate
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food provisioning, as well as a periphery of food democracy projects. In addition, we could observe that the particular types of products sold by Kashiand even Kelloggs more generallyare not frequently found at farmers markets. So in this particular instance, support for farmers markets might be seen as a less threatening motif of food democracy (or even eat-local more narrowly) than, say, committing to eat exclusively within a 100-mile radius (Smith and McKinnon 2007). A different, but related response would focus on the differing conceptualizations of the farmers market on offer. In the vision of food democracy, farmers markets are a core site where the relations between food producers and consumers are concretized; the force of the food democracy vision lies in the fact that these relations are humanized, rather than objectified or commodified. This distinction between humanized and objectified relationsthe essential distinction on which the Marxist category of reification is foundedin turn grounds the possibility of subjective agency (Loftus 2006). As these relations are recognized as socially produced rather than naturally givenor in other words as they are defetishizedgreater possibilities for democratically remaking those relations are opened. The Kashi website, by contrast, presents farmers markets as a consumer choice that exists within the corporate-organic foodscape. The injunctions to discover and Plan a trip to the farmers market situates this environment as something more akin to a novel consumption object, rather than a site in which social relations are negotiated and community and citizenship are generated. To make farmers markets a democratic food issue and part of a larger struggle for universal food rightsrather than an elite niche market where markets are available for only a few hours or one day per week and accessible mainly to affluent consumersrequires more than passive consumer consumption, but mandates active participation of citizens organizations, social movements, and producers, as well as state involvement. More generally, for food democracy projects to avoid becoming yuppie chow excursions that map onto class hierarchies (Guthman 2003:55), we require active and ongoing citizen attempts to democratize and defetishize the food systema topic to which we now turn.

De-Fetishization and the Limits of Consumer Regulation

To recap, our discourse and content analysis suggest that many elements of the food democracy movementparticularly the most recent, eatlocal variantshave been taken up and woven into the marketing discourse of the corporate-organic foodscape. These marketing narratives fetishize locality and obscure spatially dispersed commodity chains as well as the corporate ownership structures antithetical to democratically controlled food systems. The attempt by transnationalized agribusiness
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to recuperate or preserve a connection to locally scaled placesalong with the specific farmers stories and humble, small-scale operations associated with local foodrecapitulates the more general dilemma of corporate-organic foodscapes, where ideals of sustainability and social justice grind against the drive toward mass production and consumption through spatially expansive distribution networks. Food analysts have documented an ongoing debate between smallscale local organics and corporate long-distance organics (Fromartz 2006; Pollan 2006a). The corporate-organic foodscape might seem to confound this distinction, insofar as it incorporates local themes into the messages used to sell long-distance corporate products. At one level, it could be argued that the corporate-organic foodscapes usage of food democracy themes constructs a sense of foods origins that is largely divorced from material, social, and ecological considerations, and is thus a fetishized one: local places are understood in a reified fashion, with human and ecological communities romanticized, and the real ensemble of ecological and social relations underlying the commodity obscured. While there is some truth to this view, we need to look beyond simply exposing the hypocrisy of globalized agribusinesses, and explore how this particular form of commodity fetishism arises, and what flags it raises for food democracy projects. In other words, we must ask what does it mean when organic foods are sold using the food democracy discourse of local embeddedness? As organics become mainstreamed and corporatized, the focus on place and locality in the marketing of corporate-organic brands suggests that unique localities and thus unique food experiences are still possible, a theme that works against the increasing sameness and homogenization in the corporate foodscape more widely. The sheer range of corporate-organic products on the one hand provides consumers with the benefits of cosmopolitan globalization, while on the other, the marketing of these products seeks to communicate a sense of inhabiting (or perhaps more precisely, consuming) locally embedded places or a distinct socio-ecological community. Corporate organics offers a world of multiple local products shipped globally. But it is important to ask to what extent it can deliver on what it promises, and in particular, to what extent its objectives clash with the ideals of food democracy. Images and messages associated with place, locality, and real producers do seem compatible with food democracy ideals, yet become more problematic when we consider how these messages have been produced within a corporate foodscape designed to maximize profitability through long-distance commodity chains, economies of scale, and centralized corporate control. The corporate vision necessarily sees food as a commodity, or in other words, a vehicle for the accumulation of value. The concept of food democracy, however, defines food as a life good that should ideally exist within democratic control in
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the commons.7 What the corporate-organic foodscape arguably provides is thus a simulation of place, locality, and humanized producers: images of precisely those things that are destroyed by capitalisms tendency to subsume everything to the law of value. In this view, if corporate organics represent a bridge between corporate agriculture and food democracy, then they are in fact a fetishized link with an era, and a localized form of social exchange, that predates globalized capitalism. It is this fetishized relationship that illustrates the crucial limitations of corporate organics, as well as the potential pitfalls for newer iterations of food democracy such as the eat-local movement. Corporate organics attempts to bridge the two worlds require that food democracy be identified as a product with particular reified features, whether this is organic (defined in terms of non-synthetic inputs), local (defined as specific geographical locations and/or geographical proximity), small-scale (defined as involving identifiable individuals), or some combination of these features. Without denying that products with these features may be more ecologically sustainable than their conventional counterparts, as long as these features in and of themselves are taken to be a static index of food democracy, then the conception of democracy here remains thin and staticit is a vision closely identified with consumerisms ideals of individual choice and voting with your pocketbook, and resists the more challenging elements of democratic process, such as moving towards decentralized ownership structures and creating non-commodified social and economic relationships around food. While consumer-based activity is recognized as an important source of social change (Miller 1995; Stolle et al 2005), the contradictions and limitations of consumer-based forms of political action are increasingly well documented, theorized, and linked to neoliberal agendas (Freidberg 2004; Goodman 2004:909; Guthman 2007:263; Johnston 2008). Work by Barnett et al (2005) casts doubt on the assumption that ethical shopping is a straightforward affair, or that information defetishizing commodities automatically leads to different purchasing decisions, and hence social change. Part of the reason for this may be precisely the thin conception of democracy that such a view of consumer-based social change entails. Because consumer identities, social relations, and capitalist institutions are taken as pre-given, consumer-based politics are often focused on in-store decision-making, and less concerned with the myriad of decisions made long before shoppers confront products on store shelves. The robustness of food democracy therefore depends less on the ability to vote with ones dollar, and more on the capacity to defetishize. But defetishization involves more than revealing the real production relations that lie beneath the ideological veneer, or exposing marketing hypocrisy. As Castree (2001) argues, following
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Jean Baudrillard, the semiology of commodity surfaces deserves to be taken seriously as a kind of productive reality in its own righta reality that we incorporate into our conceptualization of the foodscape as a material and ideational realm producing corporate organics as a hybrid entity. The point of defetishizationof the corporate foodscape as well as of capitalist relationships more generallyis not to posit another pre-given, essentialized understanding of the nature of social reality, but rather to open the constitution of that social reality up to question. In other words, it is not just a matter of revealing the reality of corporate-organic hypocrisy, but a matter of making the social relations of food production, distribution, and consumption transparent and open to political contestation and transformation. In the face of increasingly globalized agribusiness, a first step for defetishization and democratization would be a challenge to concentrations of corporate power that marginalize community and citizen capacities. In the face of corporate hybridization and appropriation of food democracy themes, new modes of discursively organized food democracy constantly need to be developed, with past lessons kept firmly in mind. The challenges of creating new citizen-based modes of engagement, versus a menu of new, guilt-free shopping options for affluent consumers, should not be underestimated. Conceptions of farmers markets or CSAs that see participants as individual clients or consumers (particularly in urbanized settings, where these can operate as a boutique mode of food procurement), work to reproduce a mode of political engagement grounded in individual consumer choice and favoring elite social classes, rather than aiming for the conscious re-constitution of more equitable, democratic, and sustainable socioecological relations in the food system.

Conclusion
Our mapping of the corporate-organic foodscape illustrates that the biggest and best-selling organic brands have adopted and fetishized key themes from a vision of food democracy. Brand websites are heavily imbued with the imagery of specific places, family farms and rural landscapes, and personalized narratives. These have become a key marketing feature, even if they have little relationship to the longdistance commodity chains and centralized ownership structures that also characterize corporate agribusiness. The corporate expansion and industrialization of organics has raised the possibility of the organic label losing the public trust (DeLind 2000:204), and the emphasis on local places and people in corporate organics can in part be explained as an adaptation to accommodate resistance to emerging public critiques. Corporate-organic marketing strategies provide a commodified way to consume locality (rural Vermont dairy products, or olive oil from Cretan family farms), and
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respond to anxieties about placelessness that accompany globalized production processes. The inclusion of food democracy themes in corporate-organic advertising presents real challenges for food democracy movements. For food system activists, it raises the question of how best to make food democracy projects an attractive option in a sea of corporate commodities, many of which seem to offer the promise of a locally embedded, socially just food system. While it is important for food system activists to think strategically, to pose the question exclusively as a concern of market differentiation risks missing an essential point: that food democracy is not simply a product to be marketed. One way of understanding the corporate appropriation of food democracy themes is to recognize that the desires for humanized socio-ecological relations have public resonance, and that corporate-organic marketing campaigns may open up further spaces for the articulation of those desires. In addition to encouraging greater attention to ecological stewardship, food democracy also entails the opportunity to realize those desires through the collective constitution of the relations of food production, distribution, and consumption. Food system sustainability needs to be seen as much more than a set of ecological standards easily met by discerning consumers: it is a fundamentally political project with obligatory cultural, social, and ideological dimensions. Just as food democracy needs to be conceptualized as both an ecological and political project, an additional challenge is the simultaneous embrace and transcendence of localism (Hinrichs 2003:34). While proximity is an important starting point for a food system, particularly since re-localization can provide manageable opportunities for civic engagement (Allen 2004:207; Hendrickson and Heffernan 2002:364366), for defetishization to work all the way down into food democracy requires that we let go of a local that fetishizes emplacement as intrinsically just (DuPuis and Goodman 2005:364). Advocates of a new politics of scale call for a reflexive localism which avoids defensive xenophobiait is rooted in place, but simultaneously looks outwards to establish solidarity and equality translocally, and even transnationally as in the case of fair-trade (Allen 2004:176177; Castree 2004; DuPuis and Goodman 2005; Goodman 2004; Grenfell 2006:241242; Johnston et al 2006). In other words, while the local scale may be appropriate in some cases (eg progressive community projects), in other cases governance and ownership issues may be more effectively organized at the regional or state scale, where demands for food sovereignty in the international political economy can be negotiated (Allen 2004:175; Johnston and Baker 2005). While the challenges facing food democracy are significant, it is politically and analytically important to avoid deterministic conclusions. The rise of corporate organics is in part a response to the feeling
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that consumers are implicated in ecosystem crisis and globalized networks of exploitation with every trip to the grocery store (see Le Billon 2006), and embedded within a political economic system that provides a profusion of consumer choices which contribute to feelings of disorientation (Iyengar and Lepper 2000; Jameson 1991). The rise of corporate organics appears compatible with a story of capitalist cooptation, but, as we have emphasized, this is not simply a story about how genuine alternative practices are annulled by corporate appropriation. The articulation of food democracy themes in the marketing of corporate organics speaks to the powerful social meanings of food democracy themeseating locally, supporting local growers, organizing production on a manageable scale. Food democracy activities attempt to channel these themes through non-commodified programs, while marketers produce similar narratives to sell their products. A process of corporate appropriation is indeed occurring, yet the meanings and social critiques within these marketing messages may escape the authors intentions. The feeling of being lost in the supermarket can also work to motivate eaters to search for meaningful alternatives, and think beyond a politicaleconomic and ideological foodscape that favors corporate agribusiness. Most crucially, this collective re-thinking of the industrial food system can, and must, motivate a collective challenge to the neoliberal reliance on consumer choice as the optimal means of regulating how and what we eat.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank anonymous Antipode reviewers for their useful comments on this paper. Other useful feedback was provided by commentators at meetings of the Canadian Communications Association (2006) and the Social Research in Organic Agriculture conference in Guelph, ON (2007). This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs Program.

Endnotes
1

One British study estimates that a shopping basket with 26 imported organic goods travels up to 241,000 km before reaching the consumer (Jones 2001:1). 2 In California, organic agriculture began as industry with large corporate-owned organic farms and few smallholders (Guthman 2004a). 3 While the parameters of locality are debated by eat-local activists, the term generally refers to food that travels hundreds (rather than thousands) of miles from farm to fork; local foods can be transported to market within a few hours of truck transport, rather than a few days of transnational air-transport supply chains (see Halweil 2005). 4 Our sample of brands, generated in October 2007, is slightly different because of the absence of some product websites (eg Fruiti de Bosca and Millinas Finest). 5 The themes observed on the websites reviewed speak to the nature of the consumer desires that the corporate foodscape seeks to satisfy. Because we see a dialectical relationship between corporate marketing and consumer desires, a reception analysis of consumer interpretations of the corporate-organic foodscape would be a useful complementary piece of research to our corporate discourse analysis, but one which is beyond the scope of this paper.
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The Organic Cow of Vermont was originally based in Stowe, Vermont, but the headquarters was moved to Colorado once it was bought by Dean Foods in 1999. 7 We are thinking here, for example, of community gardens, publicly subsidized good food boxes, and the myriad other community food security projects that prioritize sustainable, culturally appropriate access to food for low-income populations (Johnston and Baker 2005; Norberg-Hodge et al 2002).

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