Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 163 Document Number: D11657
Notes:
16 pages., Paper presented at the 2019 conference of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, February 12-15, 2019, Melbourne, Australia., Reports on an online survey among consumers in three Chinese cities. Analyses indicated that the New Retail e-commerce mode of food consumption was significantly associated with food choice motives such as taste appeal, quality concerns, others' reviews, discount, gender, household size, age, income, occupation and marital status. Live aquatic product and fresh fruit were the most frequently consumed food categories with the New Retail mode of the consumers.
15 pages, Trust is often an assumed outcome of participation in Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) as they directly connect producers with consumers. It is based on this potential for trust “between producers and consumers” that AFNs have emerged as a significant field of food studies analysis as it also suggests a capacity for AFNs to foster associated embedded qualities, like ‘morality’, ‘social justice’, ‘ecology’ and ‘equity’. These positive benefits of AFNs, however, cannot be taken for granted as trust is not necessarily an outcome of AFN participation. Using Chinese case studies of AFNs, which are characterised by a distinct form of trust pressure—consumers who are particularly cynical about small scale farmers, food safety and the organic credentials of producers—this paper highlights how the dynamics of trust are in constant flux between producers and consumers. I suggest that it is the careful construction of the aesthetic and multi-sensory qualities of food, which is often celebrated via social media, that human centred relations in Chinese AFNs are mediated. This leads to two key conclusions: first, that the key variable for establishing trust is satisfying the consumer’s desire for safe (i.e. "fresh") food; and second, the materiality of the food and the perception of foods materiality (especially through social media), must both be actively constructed by the farmer to fit the consumer’s ideal of freshness.
