ABSTRACT
What are the materialities of quality in agro-food networks? What are the materialities of ethical consumption in the specific context of food? In other words, how do quality and ethical consumption work and how are they practiced in terms of their cultural material politics of food? This chapter explores these questions in relation to the shifting materialities that arise as a result of the main-streaming of fair trade networks. The material effects of the move of fair trade to a quality product and of the increase in market share for fair trade as ethical consumers bought into it, should perhaps be seen as good things: more sales mean that more development is being funded and supported in fair trade producer communities throughout the world. As we saw in the last chapter, these changes have muddied the semiotics surrounding fair trade. Furthermore, how ever, as this chapter argues, this quality turn and mainstreaming have also triggered significant shifts in the materialities of the processes that bring fair trade products to the market, in the UK in particular, and make them available to the ethical consumers who support, choose, buy, and consume these products (cf. Barnett et al. 2005).
