Abstract
This chapter aims at exploring the meanings of organic and local foods amongst Portuguese urban and British rural consumers through their food memories. The empirical material draws on about 60 interviews with consumers in both countries. It was possible to identify similar processes through which Portugal and the UK went through across time: the reconfiguration of provisioning systems together with processes of institutional, social and market mobilisation around ‘quality’ food. It is concluded that food memories served, to a certain extent, to overcome the rural–urban divide, as both groups of consumers evoke similar rural images despite positioned in different urban–rural configurations in two different countries. However, consumers use and enact their food memories in everyday food handling and display evocative images of the rural to demarcate what is quality food, ending up reinforcing, instead of totally overriding, the rural–urban divide.
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Notes
- 1.
Interestingly, a similar campaign with objectives alike took place in Portugal during the war. It was called Campaign for Agricultural Production (1942–1943) with the motto Producing and Saving Today More than Yesterday, promoted by the Ministry of Economy (Freire 2008). Contrary to British interviewees, the Portuguese respondents failed to mention it.
- 2.
It is important to note that expressions of easy access to greengrocers and small-scale shops that sell local food were more prominent in Herefordshire rather than in Anglesey. This illustrates aspects of a differentiated countryside in the UK, wherein some regions can better harness local resources (human and natural capitals) to build alternative agro-food networks and mitigate the negative effects of globalisation and modernisation of agriculture (Morgan et al. 2006).
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Acknowledgements
The empirical material in this chapter was supported by the following organisations, to whom gratitude is expressed. For the material in the UK, the UK Research Councils through the RELU programme funded the project ‘Comparative Merits of Consuming Vegetables Produced Locally and Overseas’; in Portugal the Foundation for Science and Technology funded the author’s Ph.D. thesis ‘Organic Food in Portugal: Conventions and Justifications’.
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Truninger, M. (2013). Connecting Food Memories with the Rural: The Case of Portuguese and British Consumers. In: Silva, L., Figueiredo, E. (eds) Shaping Rural Areas in Europe. GeoJournal Library, vol 107. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6796-6_10
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