Interpretation of food risks by mothers of kindergarten children in St.Petersburg, Russia, and their strategies of risk handling

This study discusses different types of food risks and different strategies of risk handling as conceived by mothers of kindergarten children in Russia. The research includes an analysis of Internet forum discussions and semi-structured interviews; it mainly used data from well-educated, middle-class, and married women from St. Petersburg and Moscow. Three groups of food risks have derived from the analysis of the empirical data: risks stemmed from the non-observance of sanitary and other rules, risks from products coveted by children, and “invisible” risks. The second group of risks, the food obsessions of the children, was the one which the mothers were mainly concerned with and most actively tried to manage. Consequently, a broad range of their strategies became apparent, varying from denial and patience to the shaping of collective action groups. The strategies are formulated into three large groups: resistance, non-resistance, and adaptation. Generally mothers mainly dealt with the second group of food risks and adaptation was the preferred strategy

Production, Distribution and Consumption in St. Petersburg: Favourable Environment for Development of Short Food Supply Chains? (in Russian language)

Currently in developed countries there is growth of initiatives which are aimed to reconnect farmers and consumers whose relationships in the last century became as distant and detached as they had never been before (due to industrial food production, centralization of the market, etc.). The state-of-art and recent trends in agricultural production, distribution and consumption in Russia, and St. Petersburg in particular, are analyzed in the article (mainly from the prospective of supply and demand for local products). The aim of the paper is to understand whether the current conditions are favorable towards development of such reconnection initiatives, which in the western literature are most frequently referred to as “short food supply chains” (or “alternative food networks”)