ABSTRACT
This chapter emerges from our concern with exploring how commodity culture, and in particular that commodity culture associated with foods, is intertwined with the production, circulation and usage of geographical knowledge (Cook and Crang 1996). This has been the focus for a two-year, multi-locale, multi-method study of food retailing and consumption in North London, through which we have looked closely at the ways in which knowledges of foods and their geographies are drawn upon by, produced by, and contested between consumers, retailers and manufacturers. Practically, our own knowledges about these processes have been primarily constructed out of corporate interviews with retailing, manufacturing and associated food industry workers in four product sectors — spices, pasta, bread and chicken — and semi-structured interview series with twelve households of north London consumers — based around activities such as an accompanied shopping trip, household food inventories and food diaries. Elsewhere, we have begun to write through this material from the perspective of these consumers as they engage with increasingly globalised systems of provision, outlining both the ambivalent structuring of consumer knowledge of food origins around both a ‘need to know and an impulse to forget’ (Cook et al. 1998) and more particularly discussing the kinds of imaginative geographies being mobilised within food consumption (Cook et al. 1999a). Here, we want to complement this focus on consumer knowledges through an attention to commercial knowledges, or as Frank Mort terms them, ‘commercial epistemologies’ (Mort 1996: 89). More specifically, we will be outlining the knowledge economies of what in the food trade is termed ‘Category Management’ (hereafter referred to as ‘CM’). 2
