ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the conceptualisation of 'consumption' in both the production-focussed rural sociology and consumption-focussed sociology of food literatures. It discusses these in the context of a small pilot study into food consumption and regional identities conducted in Rockhampton - Australia's self-proclaimed 'Beef Capital' - with particular emphasis on the ways in which the gendering of foods shapes consumption and production practices. Women's domestic labour was thus commoditised and converted into an arena of accumulation, shifting the focus of the home from a site of production to a site of consumption. The consumption-focussed theorists suggest that the most sociologically significant moment in the consumption of food lies in its appropriation into the human body, rather than its exchange as a commoditised good. Ambivalencies around meat consumption also took on gendered dimensions, although there was little obvious evidence of the sort of revulsion or unease reported by other studies about the origins of meat.
