You are what you eat: The narrative identity of organic food consumers

Abstract

Organic food is the fastest growing food category globally, and the Australian organic market has more than doubled since 2000 (Australian Trade and Investment Commission, 2022). With this rise to prominence, the organic food consumer has come into view as a subject of scholarly analysis and has often been examined through an identity lens. In this research, I interrogated how foodwork can be conceived of as identity work, particularly the ways that it constructs and expresses gendered identities, as well as raced and classed identities. I use narrative identity as a way of understanding identity construction. By bringing these literatures together I assembled a nuanced framework for understanding the construction of chosen identities through agential participation in foodwork routines, while also attending to the constraints and limitations of this participation for identity construction.

Through this analysis, I make three key contributions to literature. First, I contribute to our understanding of the link between agency and responsibility. In this study where the interviewees believed that they had agency, they also reported that they had a responsibility to make changes in alignment with their values. In demonstrating the relationship between agency and responsibility I am showing the way that individuals with agency may choose to constrain that agency.

Secondly, in examining the gendered dynamic of organic foodwork, I found that, for women, organic food consumption takes the traditional labour of care expected of the mother and widens the focus. For men, the inverse appeared to be true. In this way, I extend previous research on foodwork and gender (Som Castellano, 2016) by demonstrating the ways in which the family, taking on additional foodwork, offers a more equal division of the labour, as the foodwork becomes a shared family project.

Finally, my findings about foodwork have demonstrated the relationship between narratives and routines in the construction of the organic consumer. It was not only in their approaches, opinions, and perspectives that my respondents constructed their identity; their actual choices substantively structured their time and changed their experience of self.