ABSTRACT
This chapter considers retailers’ and manufacturers’ adoption of the language of the ‘alternative’ as an example of a potential ‘end point’ in the mainstreaming of alternative food politics. Supermarkets’ increasing domination of food retail has become a key locus of concern about the impacts of industrialised foodways in the US, the UK, Australia and elsewhere. The rise of celebrity-branded private labels, then, forms part of a broader strategy to redefine private labels not as cheap imitations of branded products, but as spaces of innovation and novelty, as means by which to reshape supermarket brand identities, and as sites of progressive food politics. The rise of popular food media has also seen an increasing number of celebrity chefs, television cooking shows, cookbooks, and other media encouraging consumers to source their food from people they know, rather than rely on the anonymous products that come, in the words of one celebrity chef, ‘wrapped in plastic from the supermarket’.
