Journal of Consumer Culture

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Enchanting Ethical Consumerism: The case of Community Supported Agriculture Craig J. Thompson and Gokcen Coskuner-Balli Journal of Consumer Culture 2007; 7; 275 DOI: 10.1177/1469540507081631 The online version of this article can be found at: http://joc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/7/3/275

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Journal of Consumer Culture

ARTICLE

Enchanting Ethical Consumerism The case of Community Supported Agriculture CRAIG J. THOMPSON AND GOKCEN COSKUNER-BALLI University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA Abstract This article analyzes Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) as a form of ethical consumerism organized by a nexus of ideological discourses, romantic idealizations, and unconventional marketplace practices and relationships. Our analysis explicates the aspects of CSA that enable consumers to experience its pragmatic inconveniences and choice restrictions as enchanting moral virtues. We conclude by assessing the societal implications that follow from these localized marketplace relationships and their ideological distinctions to the modes of enchantment that are constituted in postmodern cathedrals of consumption. Key words consumer resistance ● globalization ● marketplace ideologies ● McDonaldization ● sustainability

HERE IS A proposition to consider. If you commit several hundred dollars to a local farm, you will receive a weekly basket of organic produce for a growing season of around six months. The price you pay for these goods will likely be higher than a comparable assortment purchased at a conventional grocery store. You will have little choice regarding the specific items (and their aesthetic qualities) that make up your basket. Your weekly assortment will be primarily determined by the farmers’ planting decisions, the exigencies of weather, and other factors that determine the relative success (or failure) of the crops. Invariably, the basket will contain much less of Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications (London, Los Angeles, New Delhi and Singapore) Vol 7(3): 275–303 1469-5405 [DOI: 10.1177/1469540507081631] http://joc.sagepub.com

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some produce that you prefer and too much of some produce you seldom use. Furthermore, the basket may also include items that you are not familiar with, do not know how to prepare, and may in fact not like. There will also be times when the only way to retrieve your share of a highly coveted crop, such as strawberries, will be to come out to the farm and pick it yourself. Oh yes, there is one other little condition. You will have to make a weekly trek to a designated drop-off point or, in some cases, the farm itself to pick up your basket. Last but not least, as an added benefit you can purchase a worker share for about half the regular price. As a worker member, you will devote 5 to 10 hours each week doing arduous labor in pouring rain, baking sun or whatever inclement weather is doled out by Mother Nature. Now, are you ready to sign on? This description highlights the logistical complexities of participating in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. Despite these unconventional and seemingly inconvenient terms of exchange, the number of CSA farms operating in the USA has more than doubled in the last 10 years and now exceeds 1500 (Weise, 2005). To participate in a CSA program, a consumer buys a share in a specific farm, with the share price generally ranging between $200 to $600, or becomes a worker member, where labor is substituted for some portion of the share cost. In return for these investments, a CSA member receives a weekly box of organically grown produce for five to seven months (depending on the region) that is delivered to a centralized pick-up point. CSA farmers invite their members to visit the farm and they also host periodic gatherings – potlucks (social gatherings where each person is expected to bring a prepared dish to share), watermelon tasting events, farm tours – that are designed to foster a sense of community among members. These market-mediated communal connections are also premised on a model of shared risks and rewards in which consumers gain benefits when crops are bountiful and collectively absorb losses when crops are less successful or even fail (Henderson, 1999).1 CSA is one of the more well-established marketplace expressions of the local food movement and its manifold critique of de-territorialized food production and distribution (Halweil, 2002; Hawkins, et al., 2002; Pollan, 2003, 2006a). Tomlinson (1999: 148) characterizes de-territorialization as ‘a general cultural condition which proceeds from the spread of global modernity’. In developed consumer economies, de-territorialized production–consumption cycles are an institutionalized and mundane feature of everyday life that generally passes with little notice, particularly in regard to food (Ger and Belk, 1996). Consumers throughout the affluent world have grown accustomed to a cornucopia of vegetables, fruits, meats, cheeses 276 Downloaded from http://joc.sagepub.com by Craig Thompson on November 8, 2007 © 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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and beverages whose supply seems magically impervious to the constraints of place and seasonality. This global bounty is typically regarded as an incontrovertible enhancement of consumer welfare, affording an array of choices and options unimaginable to prior generations (Friedman, 2005). Critics of de-territorialized, corporate farming, however, tell a very different story that emphasizes the health and ecological risks posed by chemical-intensive agriculture, the vast amount of non-renewable energy resources that are consumed by transnational shipping, and the deleterious effects on local farm economies that emanate from the economic and political infrastructure that supports this system of transnational agricultural flows (Pollan, 2006b). We propose that the localized, and hence re-territorialized, market relationships organized through CSA constitute a form of ethical consumerism (Cohen et al., 2005; Miller, 2001). The ethical component of CSA emanates from the contextualized narratives through which CSA farmers, consumers and other proponents ideologically frame the meanings and social significance of locally grown produce, small organic farms and the community-generating power of food. These framing narratives meld an ideological critique of global corporate capitalism with romanticized idealizations of rural communities as bastions of moral virtues and independent organic farmers as noble artisans and responsible custodians of the land. From this standpoint, CSA can be seen as a cooperative, marketmediated effort among consumers and producers to contest the deterritorializing trajectories of globalization that have, among other consequences, made small family farms an economically endangered species (see Pollan, 2003). In analyzing this market system, we take a different tack than is conventionally found in the literature on ethical consumerism. Many of these writings have a decided activist bent, extolling the myriad reasons why consumers should mobilize around ideals of sustainability and social justice and seek to build awareness of the environmental, socioeconomic, and quality-of-life costs generated by a laissez-faire, advertising infused economy dependent upon ever-rising consumption rates (Schor, 2000). Still other analyses debate the realpolitik question of whether ethical consumerism is an effective means for transforming the capitalist system (Micheletti and Stolle, 2006) or if it is merely a way for affluent consumers to cloak their materialistic and status-conscious proclivities in socially responsible pretenses (Heath and Potter, 2004). In contradistinction to these orientations, our research objective is to explicate how ethical consumerism actually works under a specific set of 277 Downloaded from http://joc.sagepub.com by Craig Thompson on November 8, 2007 © 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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marketplace conditions. In terms of CSA, the question becomes how does this unconventional market system sustain itself in the increasingly competitive and corporate-dominated sphere of organic foods? Our analysis builds the case that this market system works through a confluence of economic, ideological and cultural factors that leverage antiglobalization sentiments in ways that serve the economic interests of small organic farmers and that provide a marketplace resource for consumers to co-produce feelings of enchantment – an experiential outcome that has not heretofore been identified as a significant motivational aspect of ethical consumerism. RESEARCH PROCEDURES To better understand the ideological meanings and enchanting experiences that animate CSA re-territorialized servicescapes, we conducted in-depth interviews with CSA farmers and consumers, and also engaged in observation and participant observation at a number of CSA sponsored events that were held on farms. The interviews and fieldwork were carried out in a Midwestern county that has a significant concentration of CSA farms. We were able to gather insights on the operations of five farms that varied in size, years in operation and proximity to the major metropolitan area that provided their respective customer bases. All participants in the study were assigned pseudonyms. Our five farmer informants hailed from different class backgrounds. Two of the farmers (Dennis and Tracy) came from agrarian families, whereas the others had non-agrarian working-class (Caitlin and Simon) and middle-class (Rick) upbringings. All the farmer participants were college graduates and all (with the exception of Rick) were the first in their families to attain post-secondary educational degrees.2 Our consumer sample drew from members of different CSA farms and ranged from those who have recently become CSA members to those who have been involved in CSA for many years. Like the farmers, our 12 consumer informants had diverse backgrounds – rural, working and middle class. With one exception, they all had college degrees and again many were the first in their families to attain a college degree. Our informants also varied in terms of income levels, with some reporting quite limited budgets. Some of these (Gail, Betsy and Kelly) have chosen to be worker members in part because they want to be directly involved in the world of organic farming, but also to make their shares more affordable. Interviews were conducted by the authors at each participant’s home. The interviews began with a set of ‘grand tour’ questions (McCracken, 278 Downloaded from http://joc.sagepub.com by Craig Thompson on November 8, 2007 © 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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1988) about participants’ personal backgrounds and interests and then turned to their personal histories, experiences and beliefs regarding CSA. In keeping with the conventions of phenomenological interviewing (Thompson et al., 1989), participants primarily set the course of the conversation, with the interviewer taking a more reflective role, while ensuring that key topic areas related to CSA, conventional farming and food distribution systems, and outlooks toward food (and organic food) were covered during the interview. The interviews lasted between one and two hours. All the interviews were audio-taped and transcribed, though several follow-up conversations with farmer participants were documented through field notes. We interpreted this body of qualitative data using a hermeneutic approach (Thompson, 1997). This hermeneutic mode of interpretation is premised on the idea that a given consumer is not expressing a strictly subjective viewpoint. Instead, he or she is articulating a system of cultural meanings that have been selectively and creatively adapted to fit his or her specific life goals and circumstances (see Thompson, 1997). A methodological implication of this hermeneutic view is that the underlying meaning system is the focus of analysis rather than the particularities of a given participant’s life-world. The interpretation of the data set unfolds through a process of dialectical tacking in which provisional understandings are formed, challenged, revised and further developed through an iterative movement between individual transcripts and the emerging understanding of the entire set of textual data. Thus, each interview is initially treated as a separate idiographic case whereby we sought to uncover the salient meanings and identity projects pursued by each participant. As our interpretation unfolded, we identified thematic and narrative commonalities that emerged across the data set. Our aim was to identify the most recurrent and robust patterns of underlying cultural meanings that contextualized these identified commonalities. We then broadened the interpretive frame by teasing out the historical antecedents to these identified patterns. At this point, historical analyses of the organic food movement and its genealogical connections to environmentalism and the countercultural ferment of the 1960s were integrated into the interpretation via an iterative process known as grounded reading in data (c.f. Straus and Corbin, 1990). As a final step, we compared the reflective narratives and behavioral rationales respectively expressed by our farmer and consumer participants to further evaluate the extent and nature of the ideological alignments fostered through the CSA market system. 279 Downloaded from http://joc.sagepub.com by Craig Thompson on November 8, 2007 © 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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ENCHANTING ETHICAL CONSUMERISM In cultural studies of consumption, ‘enchantment’ has become something of a shibboleth; an invocative and provocative incantation whose underlying meanings tend to be tacitly assumed rather than explicitly stated. Most commonly, however, enchantment is theoretically linked with experiences of magic, wonderment, spontaneity and transformative feelings of mystery and awe that are presumably lacking in commodified, ‘Disneyfied’ and ‘McDonaldized’ consumption experiences (Bryman, 2004; Langer, 2004; Partridge, 2002; Ritzer, 1999). Importantly, enchantment also provides a conceptual frame-of-reference from which to critique and perhaps resist the rationalization of everyday life that characterizes modernity (Ritzer, 1999; Schneider, 1993). Saler (2006) perspicaciously identifies three primary conceptualizations of enchantment that predominate in academic studies of consumer culture: (1) the binary thesis that posits a strict separation between an enchanted age of pre-modernity and the rationalized era of modernity; (2) the dialectical thesis that suggests that modernity is enchanted in a negative sense whereby the idolatry of instrumental reason functions as a pernicious myth that facilitates oppression and fosters widespread alienation; (3) a historical-reflexive thesis that portrays modernity as a Janus-faced juxtaposition of shifting contradictions and antinomies between rationalizing and enchanting elements. From this latter historical-reflexive perspective, enchantment is a social construction through and through, rather than a cultural universal or ideal type that can serve as an Archimedean point for adjudicating questions of authenticity and moral/spiritual rectitude. This sociohistoric construction of enchantment highlights non-instrumental, anti-bureaucratic and antiscientistic impulses that exist within modernity, as evinced by enduring cultural fascinations with the occult, neo-paganism, Eastern mysticism – in the sense of Said’s (1978) Orientalism – paranormal phenomena (which presumably defy conventional scientific explanation), and other magical fusions of the material and the spiritual and the sacred and profane that are experientially distinct from the quotidian concerns and routines of everyday life. These contemporary manifestations of enchantment have emerged in response to the ascendance and cultural dominance of secularism, nationalism, capitalism, industrialism, urbanism, consumerism and scientism. These rationalizing conditions have, in turn, sparked therapeutic infatuations with ideals of magic, spontaneity, wonderment and unmediated experiences of the sublime (see Lears, 1994).

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Our analytic perspective is consistent with this historical-reflexive thesis. Our contention is that CSA partially redresses feelings of disenchantment precipitated by the de-territorialization wrought by the globalized food chain, which have been rhetorically and experientially cultivated through romantic idealizations of local farms and personalized relations with farmers. CSA also offers a practical means to redress the de-skilling effects of rationalized and technocratic modes of production/consumption (see Ritzer, 1999). CSA enjoins farmers and consumers alike to become less dependent on labor-reducing, efficiency-enhancing technologies in both the production of food and meals.As Borgmann (2000) discusses, opportunities for enchantment are created when consumers shift from the ‘device paradigm’ to the ‘consumption paradigm’ of focal things and practices: In the culture of the table, the food and its settings are focal things. The preparation of the meal, the gathering around the meal, and the customs of eating, serving, and conversing are the focal practices. Focal things and practices disclose the world about us – our time, our place, our heritage, our hopes – and center our lives . . . The paradigm of the technological device . . . suggests erroneously that the pleasures of these things and practices can be detached from their actual context and made available by some technological device. The availability of a commodity, however, occludes or destroys the commanding presence of focal things and practices. (2000: 421) Through its rhetoric and practices, CSA provides multiple opportunities for consumers to disrupt and diverge from their convenience-oriented, technologically mediated foodways (e.g. McDonalized fast food, prepackaged microwavable meals, and the global chasm existing between producers and consumers). Our interview data suggest that the attendant experiences of personal knowledge, communal connections, and re-skilled modes of consumption exude enchanting effects by transforming food into a focal object, and food preparation and provisioning into focal practices. In contradistinction to the predictability of technologically mediated culinary consumption – e.g. branded microwavable food should ideally exhibit little variation in quality preparation after preparation (so long as the instructions are followed precisely) – food and cooking in the focal objects/practices paradigm should exhibit unique and unexpected qualities (sometimes pleasurable and sometimes not so pleasurable) in the course of each creative act of cooking.

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CSA and the cultivation of enchantment Ritzer (1999) argues that moments of surprise are fundamental to experiences of enchantment and, conversely, that no aspects of modernity’s rationalizing trajectories are more inimical to enchantment than standardization and predictability. Arnould et al. (1999) similarly suggest that in the age of postmodernity, magic may re-emerge from the margins of modernity to ritualistically re-inscribe consumers in an enchanted cultural milieu. Echoing this idea, our CSA consumers forge emotionally captivating connections between ideological critiques of de-territorialized agricultural production and their palates and food practices. As illustrated by Mary’s vignette, they condemn industrial agriculture for producing bland and predictable goods whereas they lionize CSA as a potent source of stimulating variety and sensory differentiation: This state has a really strong tradition of small-town farms and I think there’s a lot of value to that, especially coming from California where everything is huge agriculture. The valley is huge, huge, huge corporations that own everything and I think that the CSA movement has brought back some of the small farms but the vast majority of the agriculture is owned by large corporations, so you don’t get as much variety, you don’t see vegetables that much, which is part of variety. I like that, I think it’s interesting you get different flavors, different textures, different looks, different colors, food doesn’t look boring. I don’t mind that it might cost a little bit more because I think the quality is better than the mass produced tomato without any flavor shipped in from I don’t know where. (Mary) By ostensibly abdicating their choices to the CSA farm’s planting schedules and harvest yields, consumers also interject a degree of unpredictability into their dietary routines.A related consideration is that CSA farmers typically plant a wide variety of crops (including multiple varieties of a given crop), rather than cultivating larger, and more efficient to manage, mono-crop fields (Halweil, 2002). While this planting schedule creates smaller individual yields and necessitates more personalized attention to each variety’s distinctive cultivation requirements, this strategy enables CSA farmers to demonstrate their commitment to the ecological ideal of bio-diversity and,in a more pragmatic vein,it provides a needed hedge against total crop failures. Beyond practical benefits, this approach creates variation in the weekly basket. Furthermore, the exigencies of environmental conditions create considerable uncertainties about when (or if ) 282 Downloaded from http://joc.sagepub.com by Craig Thompson on November 8, 2007 © 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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certain crops will be available. CSA farmers’ newsletters often give crop updates that further fuel consumer anticipation about these pending delicacies. For consumers, this unpredictability facilitates experiences of surprise and the creative development of their culinary skills and knowledge. In this way, CSA-oriented consumption practices stand in sharp relief to the deskilled modes of consumption typical of a McDonaldized food culture (Ritzer, 1998). For example, Lis – a parent with two grade-school-age daughters – proactively treats her weekly CSA basket as a recurrent opportunity for fostering a greater appreciation for ecological balance and cultural diversity in her children: Lis: Some of the stuff I wouldn’t have chosen to buy from the grocery store because I didn’t recognize it beforehand. But it’s fun to get unfamiliar things and try to figure out what to do with them. Interviewer: So how did you figure out what to do with them? Lis: Sometimes they [the CSA farm] would send like a recipe. Sometimes still to this day I look at it and say what am I going to do with this, I don’t know what this is. A lot of time we will just take their suggestions because they have a newsletter, they’ll give recipes. We have a lot of cookbooks between the two of us and we also bought the A to Z Cookbook which is put out by the CSA organization and lots of times we will look in there. It’s like a turnip. What do you do with turnip? Or we’ll try a stir fry or just try something different or look for some other foreign cuisine that uses this. Most of the cuisines that use some of these items that we’re not as familiar with we don’t even have cook books for. We started a new thing with our daughters about trying foods from different countries so they can learn about food and foreign countries too. So, we get exposed, our kids get exposed and with kids especially when you know who’s growing it, they get to see the farm, they get to see the boxes, they’re more likely to try something instead of . . . Some things they don’t like, I made this very wonderful egg plant, pepper and yogurt dish the other night and we couldn’t get enough of it, but the girls, we forced them to take that, but I think when they do get to pick it and see it and get to talk to the farmers and get to visit the farms, they’re more likely to try something and sometimes they’ll be disgusted and then they’ll take a bite and see it’s not so bad. 283 Downloaded from http://joc.sagepub.com by Craig Thompson on November 8, 2007 © 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Our farmers report similar moments of enchantment. For example, during a carrot harvest, one of our CSA farmers expressed a palpable excitement and wonderment as he carefully pulled carrots out of the ground and inspected their characteristics. He further explained that he has always been captivated by root vegetables. As he explained, the mystery of root vegetables is ‘you never know what they will look like until they are actually harvested’. This enchanting quality, however, is not exclusively due to the hidden nature of root vegetables. It is also contingent upon the smaller scale of CSA operations, which enables farmers to be intimately involved with their crops and to attend to the details of their harvests, as compared to industrialized farms where many daily farm tasks are mechanized or performed by legions of migrant fieldworkers. These enchanting sentiments highlight a culturally significant contrast between CSA’s ideology and the rationalizing discourses and processes that have been institutionalized in McDonaldized food systems (Ritzer, 1996). Throughout the course of the 20th century, the foodways of western societies (particularly in the American context) have become increasingly rationalized, with the health benefits (and risks) of foods and their molecular profiles (e.g. calories, cholesterol, fats, transfats, vitamins, chemical additives, etc.) emerging as pronounced cultural concerns (Levenstein, 1988; Thompson and Hirschman, 1995). CSA’s oppositional discourses offer an ideological rebuke to this rationalization of the diet by emphasizing the social and spiritual qualities of food. Rationalization also entails a process of sanitization as food comes delivered to consumers in prefabricated packages and forms (e.g. Chicken McNuggets) that seem more akin to a manufactured, rather than natural, good. For CSA consumers, witnessing the backstage aspects of agricultural production imploded these alienating facades of sanitization and sparked revelatory experiences of astonishment and surprise and brought to life a broader critique of America’s McDonaldized food culture: Well in the US everything was wrapped and refrigerated and packaged and I remember having friends who were not used to seeing things that weren’t prepared like that unless they grew up on farms, friends that grew up in cities and I remember once I spent my junior year of college living in France, in the south of France, and I was living with two American girlfriends and one of them bought chicken at the market and she unwrapped the paper and the head had been tucked under and she didn’t realize it and she picked up the bird and the neck lopped out and she

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dropped it and she screamed because she had never seen a chicken. It still had some feathers, it still had the head and she didn’t know what to do and I had to come in and cut the head off and pluck the feathers. I had watched my grandmother do this and to me it was kind of normal but she grew up in the States and chicken came in a plastic package with all the feathers plucked. This thing had been boiled and cleaned and had no head and no feet, yah and so that is the memory that really sticks out because that really showed the difference between a really typical American who hadn’t had really any relationship with another country where things were differently and was used to having things packaged. That was always the case, people didn’t touch things as much with their hands and I was used to people handing you things that wasn’t always like wash, wash, wash and all that kind of fear of germs and people tended to get less sick because they were used to the germs rather than using the antiseptic. (Laura) Our consumer participants effusively praised CSA events, such as potlucks, watermelon tasting events and farm tours, for rectifying the feelings of emotional detachment and sheer ignorance wrought by the separation of food production and consumption. In the following quote, CSA consumer Gail describes how these experiences of direct face-to-face connection promote greater empathy for the problems and travails faced by small farmers and deepen the pleasure she gains from food. Her passage also highlights that a re-territorialized servicescape can inspire an enchanting sense of historical grounding and cross-generational continuity: You can sit around and read your newspaper and say it’s going to rain, must be good for the farmers, but there’s no connection whatsoever, it may be lousy for farmers, maybe that’s the day they need dry fields. Ordinarily in the city you have no connection and community supported. We have a community in voting, we have a community in neighborhood associations, we have community when you meet people in the park, but this city to country, food producer and food eater, just the getting away from over processed things . . . But there is such a pleasure in real food. Also I have just this sense of living, I’m a human being now, but everything that I have done, having children, loving, losing, grieving over deaths, learning things, these things

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have been done for millennia, so I am the same mother as a Neanderthal mother, I’m the same mother as a Chinese peasant right now and basic food makes that connection just much, much simpler. (Gail) CSA also engenders feelings of enchantment by encouraging members to cook meals from scratch and to try new and unfamiliar recipes, thereby eschewing the efficient and routinized preparation and consumption of food. In keeping with these ideological commitments, many of our CSA consumers strove to avoid fast food chains, except as an absolute last resort, and recounted their views that cooking is a fundamentally important aspect of family togetherness and a pragmatic means to undertake food politics education: We don’t eat fast food, we don’t go through drive-ins, we don’t eat at McDonalds. We’ve never told our kids that we won’t allow you to eat that, we’ve allowed them to make their own choices. If there is food they decide they would rather eat, we’re not going to say we absolutely forbid you to do it. They’re getting to be teenagers so they may want to go with their friends to McDonalds but being part of the farms, and Slow Food and CSAs and us talking about it and learning about the cuisine and fresh food and we eat together almost all of the time and we make things from scratch most of the time so they already know that and know a lot of those foods aren’t good for you. And that it’s fun to make things from scratch and they’ve gotten involved in cooking. (Laura) CSA members, particularly worker members, further gain a sense of enchantment by physically immersing themselves in the fecund soil that produces bountiful harvests. In a cultural context, where cleanliness has come to symbolize the sine qua non of civilized living (Elias, 2000 [1939]; Fine and Hallett, 2003) and where an obsession with domestic cleanliness is an institutionalized feature of middle-class, American households (Hoy, 1995), experiences of dirt as a vital, life-giving force (rather than as a taboo or threat to well-being) can acquire significant symbolic meanings. In affluent parts of the world – where the use of commodities such as soap, detergents and shampoo, and sanitizing modern amenities such as hot water, washing machines and dishwashers are taken for granted – dirt becomes a veritable playground for consumers (Ger and Yenicioglu, 2004). In accordance with this ludic framing, our CSA worker members interpret their

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experiences of farm labor as a means to attain a magical connection with the land and, most of all, to escape the sanitized confines of contemporary, suburbanized, middle-class life: Interviewer: What are some of the things you like most about being in the CSA? Betsy: Being in the dirt. I joke around a lot because when I was a kid my parents lost three babies before I was born so I was this precious little thing so I could never get dirty, that kind of stuff, I always wore little dresses, I was never allowed to play and get dirty. I’m sure I was a little bit, but I was always in trouble if I was dirty. That’s got to have something to do with it. But to me it just feels good to be in the dirt, I love to see things grow. That’s why I like clay too, it’s dirty. CSA’s divergence from standards norms of economic efficiency is also highly conducive to enchanting experiences. In symbolic affirmation of nature’s bounty, CSA boxes frequently contain more of a given vegetable (or vegetables) than consumers find that they consume before spoilage sets in. This irrational volume of goods – in this sense of not being optimally synchronized with household consumption rates – precipitates sharing networks and, hence, feelings of communal connection: I ended up with way more than I could eat, and I had to learn how to eat all those things, and I had to accept the first year that I was wasting some money as far as my consumption was concerned and this was my gift to tutoring myself and to community support because that was part of the bargain. And then what would come out of it, I would find connections with neighbors to share it with, and so the first year I shared away what I had next year. We came in and we shared the initial money purchase as well and that meant sharing the pick-up duties and covering for each other if we were on vacation and that brings you to a connection with friends or neighbors. It’s easier with neighbors because you don’t have to pick up and drive along the way, you can bring it back home. (Gail) CSA’s peculiar penchant for delivering more supply than households actually demand also helps to create an enchanting linkage between the conventional exchange economy and the gift economy (Cheal, 1988), whereby consumers transcend the rationalizing logic of economic

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exchange by sharing their weekly boxes with other households or donating excess vegetables/unpicked boxes to food banks and homeless shelters. CSA also facilitates a small-scale bartering economy whereby consumers trade their excess or unwanted items with other members. Kozinets (2002) suggests that bartering facilitates communal connections and enchants goods by eschewing the rationalizing and depersonalizing medium of money in favor of playful and creative negotiations over exchange value. In this same spirit, CSA farmers barter for meat with their surplus vegetables, and share machinery with other farmers and, at times, trade vegetables with other CSA farms to create more variety in the weekly baskets delivered to their members. Through these bartering networks, these farmers have established a community of cooperation that is galvanized by the idea that small-scale organic farmers must unite in order to survive in an economic world dominated by large corporations and rationalized commodity pricing: When it comes to folks like me, the small organic farms, the family farms, we, we have a lot of drive and motivation because we believe in what we’re doing, we’re supported by the people around us, both friends, family, customers, neighbors, that support what we’re involved with. It’s a very integrated, innovative group of people who are good at problem solving. It’s a pretty tight-knit community. We’re supportive of each other. . . . You know like, all of a sudden, bang! . . . the end of Summit Road here, a guy bought a piece of land there, and he’s gonna raise organic beef. And I was like, how cool is that, now I got my organic beef guy right here in the neighborhood. And so, and I can trade . . . I do a fair amount of trading. That’s a real value-added component for me is to trade my stuff and to go home with uh you know, whether it’s organic beef or bison or whatever. (Rick) Cultivating ethical consumerist orientations These ideologically tinged experiences of enchantment also seem to have exerted a transformative influence on other aspects of our CSA consumers’ outlooks toward conventional consumption practices. For example, CSA worker member Betsy notes in her interview that she had fully internalized her parents’ fastidious approach to housekeeping, with Lysol and Clorox being family staples. As Betsy became more committed to CSA and more enamored of her primal experiences of dirt, she moderated her atti288 Downloaded from http://joc.sagepub.com by Craig Thompson on November 8, 2007 © 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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tudes toward domestic cleanliness. She has also become quite skeptical toward the advertising mantra that homemakers must relentlessly undertake chemical intensive acts of germicide in order to protect their families from disease: I don’t think I’m quite as obsessed about having that shiny clean house anymore. I think I’ve learned not to bleach everything and not to use Lysol 24 hours a day because you don’t really need it. It’s kind of like you have been taught you have to sterilize everything but it’s not actually all that healthy even. You should have some germs on your hands. It’s not going to kill you. (Betsy) Other CSA consumers expressed similar stories about altering their consumption practices in ways they deem to be more consistent with the ethos of CSA. Across a range of consumption contexts, they describe switching to alternatives that they believe to be more natural, more ecologically friendly and supportive of local businesses: actions that they interpret as striking small, but consequential, blows against the hegemony of global corporate capital: I’m very much in favor of using everything local as possible so I go out of my way to use local distributors, use local produce, local wine, local beer, everything that I can locally, there’s a lot of stuff that evolves around that. There’s the supporting the local economy and people that you know. I hate Wal-Mart. I think that they take over the whole economy. I think that they, the purchase power that people do have, you spend a dollar at Wal-Mart, it’s not supporting the local community. It’s supporting all foreign manufacturing, so there is that aspect of it. There’s no domestic production anymore because places like Wal-Mart is getting everything outside the United States so all those companies that used to be produced in the United States now send their production and manufacturing outside of here. So all the manufacturing moved means the workers have less money and there’s that aspect of it, but there’s the other aspect of it that they are totally taking advantage of underprivileged people who live in other countries whose governments don’t have the power to really ask the wage that they need to live and the working conditions that they need, it’s really taking advantage of people, it’s slavery in a different form. (Allison) 289 Downloaded from http://joc.sagepub.com by Craig Thompson on November 8, 2007 © 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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In comparison to their own customers, the CSA farmers in our sample were considerably less strident in their anti-corporate sensibilities and seemed far more comfortable in accepting their reliance upon mainstream, corporate foods and other packaged goods: We’re all consumers. So, we’re not trying to be minimalistic in our consumption because it would be hypocritical to be too critical. We consume a lot. We’re probably pretty middle of the road on a consumption end. I know people that have a goal not to be consumers, I don’t have that as a goal. You can recycle, you can do organic, we do those sorts of things, but we’re not zealous one way or the other. (Dennis) These CSA farmers did not see themselves as engaging in a grand struggle to radically reform the capitalist system, nor did they seek to escape the influences of consumer culture through practices of voluntary simplicity (e.g. Elgin, 1998) or corporate boycotting. Interestingly, one of the farmers in our sample had, for both personal and financial reasons, located her first farm in a rural community quite distant from any metropolitan area and isolated from the major power grids. As the passage below highlights, Tracy can easily understand this period of her life in terms that echo many of the benefits commonly attributed to voluntary simplicity, such as a slower paced life, tranquility, and greater attunement to nature. After several years of leading a lifestyle that could be described as structurally necessitated simplicity, however, Tracy took on considerable debt to buy a farm much closer to a thriving metropolitan area. She has gleefully exchanged the simple life for ready access to consumer amenities: Tracy: Well I had one building that did have electricity in it that had a walk-in cooler. The land was kind of long and narrow so it was about a mile down the road from the house. I had a computer in there and could do the computer stuff. We used candles and oil lamps for lighting. In some ways you learn to enjoy the quiet and listening to the birds. I had a hand pump for water and I had a windmill that pumped our water out of the well, but we had to power it to where you wanted it to go. We had a hand pump in the house, in some ways it was a quieter, and slower pace of life and that is good on one hand. Interviewer: So what was it like to make the transition to the 20th century? 290 Downloaded from http://joc.sagepub.com by Craig Thompson on November 8, 2007 © 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Tracy: It was great [laugh]. It was very easy to go back to. There is nothing like a hot shower at the end of a day when you are dirty and hot. I like sitting around watching TV. I like to open the refrigerator and it is full of cold beer. Our CSA farmers do not zealously pursue anti-consumerist lifestyles (e.g. Dobscha and Ozanne, 2001) or even place that much stock in the political significance of their everyday consumption choices (particularly in sectors outside of food). One likely reason is that they regard the continued operation of their farms, in the face of economic and corporate forces that militate against their economic viability, as a defiant political act in its own right. Through their farms, they see themselves as providing consumers with a politically, culturally and economically important alternative to corporate dominated agriculture and as part of a larger collective group of like-minded farmer-citizens, protecting the integrity of the food chain and revitalizing consumers’ relationships to food one household at a time: Don’t look for my picture on the cover of Time magazine because I won the Nobel Peace Prize. That’s a huge macroeconomic scale, but philosophically I feel that with the micro picture with my little scratch of earth here, and how I approach that and do things that we’ve talked about before, and do things responsibly, and do things that are gonna benefit the people involved here, the people eating the food, benefit the land. Hopefully I’m gonna leave things in a lot better shape than I found them. Realistically, in my life, that’s what I can do. That’s where I can make one small improvement in this world, and that’s what I’ve chosen to focus on business-wise. (Rick) In this sense, our CSA farmers find little practical relevance (or resonance) in an abstract politics of ideas. Rather, they are engaged in a pragmatic politics that is enacted through forms of expert citizenship and a corresponding refusal to capitulate to the authority of technocratic experts (Connolly, 1999). Their microscopic attention to the details of their crops and soil conditions is emblematic of the all-consuming effort it takes to defy the hegemony of industrial agriculture. As a consequence, they give little heed to grand visions about instigating sweeping social change through their farms or bringing down demonized symbols of corporate malfeasance such as Monsanto and Wal-Mart. From their standpoint, the personal and, most importantly, the communal become the political: 291 Downloaded from http://joc.sagepub.com by Craig Thompson on November 8, 2007 © 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Maybe that’s a personal thing, maybe that’s what it’s about, these things that I’m saying feel really small. That’s how I think about it, they’re really small personal issues, I don’t have this grand idea about the thing as a whole. I try to eat locally, I try to be really conscious about what I eat, it’s very personal for me. I just read three articles in The New Yorker about global warning and that makes me really worry. But I have a hard time holding those issues present in my daily life. The way I hold them present is by making decisions about how I’m going to live my life and being consistent and thorough with those. What can I do, this is so tired but I’m going to say it, what can I do about Dole? I can choose not to buy food from them, got it but I’m not in a position where I can have an effect on that big organization. I can talk to my CSA members more, I could do that but I don’t. Maybe that’s something I could do. If people that come on the farm, if they want to talk about these bigger issues, I want to hear what they have to say about it but for me it comes back to weeding the carrots in a timely fashion, that’s what I can do about it. (Caitlin) For ideologies to sustain enduring commitment (without the need for continuous coercion), they must generate practical and psychological benefits for those who enact their constituent values, ideals, and imperatives (Foucault, 1984). On the farmers’ side, CSA enables these small-scale producers to feel economically empowered rather than being at the mercy of broader institutional forces. CSA farmers also gain an ineffable sense of existential satisfaction through their intimate connections with the land and they take considerable pleasure in facilitating similar experiences among their customers. Consumer gain a host of benefits through their membership in CSA, ranging from perceptions of better taste to higherorder meanings related to cultural ideals of safety, rural authenticity, antimaterialistic moral virtues, discovery and, most of all, a sense of enchantment. ENCHANTING ETHICAL CONSUMERISM IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD Explanations for ethical consumerism have tended to veer between the idealized image of altruistic consumers deeply committed to socially responsible values (Micheletti, 2003) to cynical contentions that consumers are making a new kind of status claim through their conspicuously virtuous lifestyles (Heath and Potter, 2004). The case of CSA suggests a more subtle 292 Downloaded from http://joc.sagepub.com by Craig Thompson on November 8, 2007 © 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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and dialectical process can motivate ethical consumerism.We argue that this market system operates through a confluence of ideological and cultural factors that leverage local food and anti-globalization ideals in ways that serve the economic interests of small organic farmers and that provide a marketplace resource for consumers to co-produce feelings of enchantment. Importantly, this sense of enchantment is embedded and contingent upon this beneficent ideological framing of CSA farms (and the organic bounty they produce) and conversely, these compelling experiences of enchantment render these ideological discourses (and critiques of conventional consumer culture) more emotionally engaging. We further suggest that this dialectic of local food ideology and enchantment can spark a greater commitment to ethical consumerist values. The enchantment afforded by CSA is closely linked to the ideals of preservation and cross-generational continuity, with impermanence representing an ominous threat and cautionary tale. CSA’s ideology hinges on the rhetorical construction of small organic farms as a besieged and sacred cultural resource whose very survival is jeopardized by adversarial market forces. CSA accentuates an array of meanings and practices that symbolically distinguish this re-territorialized marketplace from the globalized, corporate-dominated commercial sphere. The significance of this symbolic boundary further reflects that the profane aims of commercialism and the sacred connotations of enchantment exist in a state of cultural tension (see Arnould and Price, 2000; Belk et al., 1989; Kozinets, 2001). CSA’s constellation of creative consumption practices and re-territorialized marketplace relationships thereby fulfills deeper cultural impulses to symbolically reclaim sacrosanct ideals and values from the rationalizing and commodifying forces of global corporate capitalism. In this sense, the ethical consumerism enjoined by CSA is a countervailing response to grobalization, a construct that refers to ‘the imperialistic ambitions of nations, corporations, organizations, and the like, and their desire and need to impose themselves on various geographic areas’ (Ritzer, 2003: 192). In corporate contexts, grobalization entails an incessant quest for ever-expanding market share and increasing profit rates, both of which are necessary to support rising stock equities and levels of capital investment (Ritzer, 2004). The development and global distribution of highly standardized goods and services are key market mechanisms for implementing grobalization. Ritzer (2004) argues that products are easier to globalize when they are systematically rationalized, de-territorialized, and denuded of substantive content. Ritzer refers to these goods and services as ‘nothings’ or 293 Downloaded from http://joc.sagepub.com by Craig Thompson on November 8, 2007 © 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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nullities because they are not tied to a specific locale, historical particularities, or the demands of local tastes and, owing to this paucity of distinguishing cultural content, they can be readily transported to any region of the global economy. From Ritzer’s (2004) standpoint, local farms and farmers’ markets constitute a glocalized something – that is, ‘a social form that is, generally, indigenously conceived, controlled, and comparatively rich in distinctive substantive content’ (Ritzer, 2003: 191) – and that stands as a counterforce to the standardized, rationalized, depersonalized and homogenized consumer goods and experiences that are globally propagated by the grobalization of nothing. In this same spirit, CSA is a glocalization of ‘something’ that has emerged as a defensive market reaction to the grobalization of ‘nothing’. CSA farmers and consumers have co-created a network of marketplace relationships, consumption practices, and ideologically infused consumer experiences of enchantment that are anchored and authenticated by their immutable ties to a specific locale. Rather than buying food from a distant and impersonal place, CSA consumers are encouraged to revere food as a source of magic and wonderment, as they can witness the miraculous transformations of a CSA farm from its dormant to bountiful stages. Furthermore, CSA consumers are provided with innumerable narratives and rituals that highlight and reinforce these magical properties. This unique constellation of experiences and offerings reflects the distinctive characteristics of the farm (via soil, location, farmers’ skills and predilections), local geographic ties and humanized social relationships, which cannot be easily reproduced in grobalized, de-territorialized systems. Whereas globally distributed food tends to be genetically and chemically engineered to have the standardized attributes and extended shelf life conducive to transnational shipping,3 food produced and distributed through CSA must be fresh and local in order to have any marketable claims to authenticity and value added quality. Through CSA’s divergence from grobalizing agricultural practices, the banes of consumer society – inconvenience, variance in quality and constrained variety – acquire a beatific aura, symbolizing societal transformation, consumer emancipation from corporate influence, revitalizing connections with nature and opportunities for enchanting experiences of surprise and wonderment. CSA’s co-creation of enchantment exhibits some noteworthy parallels and points of difference to Ritzer’s (1999) analysis of the postmodern marketplace and the new means of consumption, which function as the dialectical counterparts to McDonaldization. According to Ritzer, the forces of McDonaldization render consumption and leisure more efficient, 294 Downloaded from http://joc.sagepub.com by Craig Thompson on November 8, 2007 © 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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predictable and controllable. Consequently, consumers have also become disenchanted with the marketplace and less willing to spend their time and money on these rationalized experiences, which has led to another transformation in the means of consumption. Many sectors of the commercial marketplace have sought to attract these disenchanted consumers by reenchanting the consumption sphere. However, these new means of consumption, or ‘cathedrals of consumption’, still operate through rationalizing principles, which aim for varying degrees of control, efficiency and calculability (though in a more subtle fashion than overtly McDonaldized enterprises) (Ritzer and Stillman, 2001a). Hence, cathedrals of consumption can afford only a simulated enchantment that lacks the enduring, sublime and revelatory impact of more spontaneous or less institutionally managed forms of enchantment.4 While McDonaldization is built into the routine functions and design of cathedrals of consumption, a different set of ‘front stage’ principles are integral to their enchantment: (1) implosion; (2) time and space manipulation; and (3) simulations. We suggest that these three principles also play a role in CSA but that they are situated in a very different ideological context that in turn creates distinctions to the modes of enchantment that arise in cathedrals of consumption. To draw out these distinctions, it is necessary to first consider in more detail the way in which these principles induce feelings of enchantment in a given cathedral of consumption. Implosion refers to the blurring of cultural boundaries in ways that create new hybrid forms of leisure and consumption that, in turn, stimulate demand (and desires) for a broad spectrum of consumer goods and consumption experiences. These cultural hybrids are enchanting, at least initially, because they can afford experiences of surprise and novelty, such as shopping malls that double as amusement parks, Las Vegas hotels that blend gambling, family vacations and world travel (via simulations), and retro baseball parks that offer a gamut of consumer amenities ranging from microbreweries to shopping malls to video arcades (see Ritzer, 1999). Time and space are manipulated in ways that ostensibly mitigate the adverse effects of rationalization. In terms of time, newly constructed cathedrals of consumption now widely borrow iconic features and atmospheric touches from earlier and less rationalized consumption venues, such as turn of the century amusement parks and department stores, and early modern baseball parks, such as Ebbetts Field and Wrigley Field (Ritzer and Stillman, 2001a). Through these atavistic leisure/consumption spaces, 295 Downloaded from http://joc.sagepub.com by Craig Thompson on November 8, 2007 © 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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consumers are structurally encouraged to adopt a nostalgic mindset that recalls the magical moments of the past. Space is transformed through designs that leverage the distinctive qualities of local settings (and appeal to desires for diversity and heterogeneity) and hence that run counter to McDonaldizing tendencies toward de-territorialization and homogeneity. These reconfigurations of time and space are intended to create a consumer spectacle that invokes a dream-like state and an enchanting sense of wonderment on the part of its (paying) patrons. Last but not least, cathedrals of consumption appeal to customers through simulations of spectacular places and locales. The paradigmatic forms of simulation include Disney’s Epcot, which offers simulations of various landmark world cities, and Las Vegas’s themed casino-hotels, such as Paris-Las Vegas or the Luxor Hotel, which simulates the cultural world of ancient Egypt. Such simulations are intensified and highly distilled versions of the real thing. For example, a visit to the actual Paris might include getting lost repeatedly, grappling with language barriers, wading through large crowds to catch an obstructed glimpse of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, and many other moments of frustration, confusion and exhaustion. In contrast, the simulated Parisian experiences made available by cathedrals of consumption such as Epcot or Paris-Las Vegas allow consumers to enjoy exemplary touristic moments with far fewer hassles and transaction costs. Ritzer and Stillman (2001b) further extend this application of simulation to the new generation of retro baseball parks, such as Baltimore’s Camden Yard and Houston’s Minute Maid Park (formerly Enron Field), which respectively pay homage to the warehouse districts and railroad yards that once thrived in their locations. However, the warehouses and train stations are now just aesthetic props that no longer serve any socioeconomic function outside of helping to simulate the bustling working-class neighborhoods that once provided the core fan base for professional baseball teams. Manifestations of these three principles can easily be discerned in CSA. This re-territorialized market system implodes boundaries between the metropolitan and the rural, effacing the conventional and institutionalized chasm between producers and consumers, and blurring the boundary between economic exchanges and moral obligations more characteristic of the gift economy. The CSA model of shared and risk rewards further collapses the differences in economic interests that normally pit consumers against farmers (a structural tension managed in the market through supply and demand price adjustments). CSA manipulates space by emphasizing the distinctive and irreplaceable qualities of a local farm (a claim buttressed by 296 Downloaded from http://joc.sagepub.com by Craig Thompson on November 8, 2007 © 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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the ever-present threat that suburban housing tracts and strip malls will replace the farm once it fails to be a viable economic enterprise). Time is manipulated through unabashed invocations of pre-modern farms and romanticized rural communities of the bygone past. Yet, CSA farms remain simulations of pre-modern farms because their operations are inevitably enhanced by all forms of modern technology, ranging from indoor plumbing to computer software for creating newsletters, crop planning and bookkeeping. Furthermore, CSA farmers try to the best of their abilities to rationalize their planting decisions and cash flows through the close monitoring of their membership rates and surveys that track customer satisfaction with the volume of goods and the variety of goods. Many other manifestations of these re-enchanting principles could be noted. For present purposes, the relevant question is whether CSA’s mode of enchantment is different in any socioculturally or ideologically significant way from Mall of America, Disneyworld, Miller Park or the Bellagio Hotel. In the most fundamental sense, all of these enterprises are seeking to foster and leverage experiences of enchantment in ways that serve their respective economic interests. Yet, beneath these common economic motives and principles of re-enchantment lie two noteworthy differences. First, de-McDonaldizing processes (e.g. Ritzer and Stillman, 2001b) are central to the operational logic of CSA, rather than being a peripheral element that has been grafted onto a predominantly rationalized system. The artisan model that is so essential to the CSA philosophy – and its ‘beyond organic, authentic food’ promotional claims (see Coleman, 2002) – encourages farmers to experiment and try new crops and varieties, and otherwise push the limits of their skill. On the flipside, farmers with artisan sensibilities are also likely to gravitate toward this market system. This artisan narrative militates against rigidly rationalized and routinized production schemes and it interjects a high degree of variation and unexpectedness into the consumer assortment (which can bring surprises both good and bad). Relatedly, CSA farmers and consumers are immersed (though to varying degrees) in the exigencies of weather and the vast array of unpredictable contingencies that can affect small-scale agricultural production. CSA participation also defies McDonaldizing principles by placing structural demands upon consumers to alter their lifestyle patterns by adopting a culinary sensibility more akin to the Slow Food movement and forgoing many standard forms of convenience, the raison d’être of McDonaldization. This unconventional mix of re-territorialized market exchanges, anti-corporate discourses, the sacralization of food and eating, 297 Downloaded from http://joc.sagepub.com by Craig Thompson on November 8, 2007 © 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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and communal connections provides the cultural setting in which CSA consumers experience feelings of enchantment. From our standpoint, the most critical difference between the quasirationalized cathedrals of consumption and CSA emanates from their divergent and, indeed, antithetical ideological relationships to McDonaldization. In Ritzer’s formulation (1999), the re-enchantment engendered by the new means of consumption is both a therapeutic compensation for what rationalization has taken away and an ideological veil that prevents consumers from realizing that they are, in effect, mired in an iron cage of rationality that extends from their work life to their leisure time and that has transformed them into highly controlled consumers (a disconcerting and disenchanting realization if there ever was one). In contrast, CSA is a market system that is designed to lift this ideological veil and to sensitize consumers to the social, environmental, cultural, health and psychological costs imposed by de-territorialized, McDonaldized and grobalized food production. More than just a critical narrative, CSA is a market resource consumers can use to at least partially exit from the grobalized food chain and to make substantive connections with other sectors of the consumer culture that also privilege the local over the global, the communal over the corporate and the sustainable over the most convenient and low-price alternative. More generally, CSA may also be a market mechanism for bridging the historical chasm that has arisen between the political and hedonic/experiential, which Michael Schudson (1998) argues has reduced the relevance of politics (and political causes) to the everyday lives of consumer citizens. Schudson’s argument seems particularly apropos to ethical consumerism and its austere appeals to consumer-citizens. For half a century, social critics ranging from John Kenneth Galbraith (1958) to Juliet Schor (2000) have admonished consumer-citizens to turn their proverbial backs on crass materialism, to orient their lives around higher values and ideals, and to resist the consumerist influences exerted by mass media and the status seeking expenditures that drive the work-and-spend cycle (also see De Graaf et al., 2001). These longstanding moralistic pleas, which echo Veblen’s (1994 [1899]) seminal condemnations of conspicuous consumption and invidious comparison, are now bolstered by the disconcerting specters of global warming, ecological degradation and rapidly declining stocks of non-renewable resources. Yet, these dire warnings have done little to slow the consumption rates or the corporate colonization of culture. One reason may be that these anti-consumerist proposals are themselves paradoxically rational and often 298 Downloaded from http://joc.sagepub.com by Craig Thompson on November 8, 2007 © 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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convey an aura of Puritanical seriousness and self-denying aestheticism, as embodied by the abstemious figure of Ralph Nader. Even when these proposals emphasize the enhanced quality of life that can accrue from stepping off the consumerist treadmill (Schor, 2000), they still have to compete in a commercial marketplace dominated by advertising imagery and enticingly themed servicescape settings (Arnould et al., 1998) designed to entertain, seduce and fulfill desires for immediate gratification of the senses. Under these conditions, ethical consumerism is likely to remain a marginal social movement until an ecological crisis tipping point is reached or, perhaps and far more optimistically, until its underlying ideals and values can be enacted through marketplace alternatives that are more emotionally engaging and experientially captivating. The co-production of enchantment that occurs between CSA farmers and CSA consumers offers some cultural insights into how such a dynamic can be constituted. Notes 1. While organic food production constitutes only 2.5 percent of the US food market, this niche category generates over $14 billion of annual sales (Pollan, 2006b). Most importantly, organics constitutes the fastest growing segment of the food industry, expanding at a yearly rate of 20 percent versus 3 percent for conventional agricultural products. CSA farms are a small but also rapidly expanding fraction of the organic market and one that returns on average a higher rate of income per acre of cultivated land relative to conventional and non-CSA organic farms (Tegtmeier and Duffy, 2005). 2. National surveys indicate that CSA farmers are on average about 10 years younger than other farmers and have a much higher percentage of college graduates in their ranks. Over 70 percent of CSA farmers have college degrees, with 25 percent holding graduate degrees. Approximately 40 percent of primary CSA farm operators are women, which compares to a national average of 10 percent for other types of farms (Stevenson and Hendrickson, 2004). 3. In Ritzer’s framework, grobalization can also involve the global diffusion of something. In this case, distinctive goods and services are globally marketed but on a necessarily limited scale because their idiosyncratic nature precludes mass market standardization. The grobalization of nothing – which engenders concerns about homogenization and the erosion of local cultural traditions – is the aspect of globalization that generally draws the critical ire of consumer activists and academic critics. CSA is positioned as a corrective for the grobalization of nothing with respect to food and our discussion accordingly focuses on that dimension. 4. As Ritzer and Stillman (2001a) explain, the new means of consumption and cathedrals of consumption are interchangeable conceptions except that the former highlights Marxian implications, structurally analogous to the means of production, whereas the latter highlights Weberian ideas related to the dialectic relationship between rationalization and enchantment.

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References Arnould, Eric J. and Price, Linda L. (2000) ‘Authenticating Acts and Authoritative Performances: Questing for Self and Community’, in S. Rattneshwar, David Glen Mick and Cynthia Huffman (eds) The Why of Consumption, pp. 9–35. New York: Routledge. Arnould, Eric, Price, Linda L. and Otnes, Cele (1999) ‘Making Consumption Magic: A Study of White Water River Rafting’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 28: 33–68. Arnould, Eric, Price, Linda L. and Tierney, Patrick (1998) ‘Communicative Staging of the Wilderness Servicescape’, Services Industries Journal 18: 90–115. Belk, Russell W., Wallendorf, Melanie and Sherry, John F. (1989) ‘The Sacred and the Profane in Consumer Behavior: Theodicy on the Odyssey’, Journal of Consumer Research 16: 1–39. Borgmann, Albert (2000) ‘The Moral Complexion of Consumption’, Journal of Consumer Research 26: 418–22. Bryman, Alan (2004) The Disneyization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cheal, David J. (1988) The Gift Economy. New York: Routledge. Cohen, Maurie, Comrov, Aaron and Hoffner, Brian (2005) ‘The New Politics of Consumption: Sustainability in the American Marketplace’, Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy 1 (Spring): 58–76. Coleman, Eliot (2002) ‘Beyond Organic’, Mother Earth News 189. URL: http://www.motherearthnews.com/arc/5875. Connolly, William E. (1999) Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. De Graaf, John, Wann, David and Naylor, Thomas (2001) Affluenza:The AllConsuming Epidemic. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Dobscha, Susan and Ozanne, Julie L. (2001) ‘An Ecofeminist Analysis of Environmentally Sensitive Women Using Qualitative Methodology: The Emancipatory Potential of an Ecological Life’, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing 20: 201–14. Elgin, Duane (1998) Voluntary Simplicity:Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich. New York: Harper. Elias, Norbert (2000 [1939]) The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Blackwell. Fine, Gary and Hallett, Tim (2003) ‘Dust: A Study in Miniaturism’, The Sociological Quarterly 44: 1–16. Foucault, Michel (1984) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon. Friedman, Thomas (2005) The World Is Flat:A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Galbraith, John Kenneth (1958) The Affluent Society. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Ger, Güliz and Belk, Russell W. (1996) ‘I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke: Consumptionscapes of the Less Affluent World’, Journal of Consumer Policy 19(3): 271–304. Ger, Güliz and Yenicioglu, Baskin (2004) ‘Clean and Dirty: Playing with Boundaries of Consumers’ Safe Havens’, in Barbara E. Kahn and Mary Frances Luce (eds)

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Thompson and Coskuner-Balli / Enchanting ethical consumerism

Craig J. Thompson is the Churchill Professor of Marketing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Address: University of Wisconsin, 975 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53706, USA. [email: [email protected]] Gokcen Coskuner-Balli is a doctoral candidate in Marketing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Address: University of Wisconsin, 975 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53706, USA. [email: [email protected]]

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