The complement of political consumerism: Political producerism in the German organic food sector

In this chapter we will show that there is a direct link between political producerism and political consumerism, meaning that labels and especially the networks behind them enable consumers to make informed choices and to voice their political opinion. So far,academics often assessed labels from an economic point of view, for example adopting a game theoretic approach or dealing with the problem of asymmetric information in the food market (Golan, Kuchler, Mitchell, 2009; McCluskey, 2000; Guthman, 2006). Other academics such as Hébert (2010) argue that food labels are mainly established to cater to the economy of qualities, referring to the creation of luxury niche-market goods. In contrast to these accounts and to other accounts of authors such as Vogl, Kilcher & Schmidt (2005) and McMahon (2005), we believe that producers and retailers indeed are important agents in politics of food labelling. Rather than merely following the demands of the market, we will show that producers and retailers who engage in political producerism mainly act according to their own beliefs and standards

Preface and acknowledgements

This collection is the outcome of a Maastricht Research Based Learning Project (MARBLE) that took place at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University in spring 2011. Under the guidance of Jens Lachmund (who is a lecturer at that faculty) a group of nine students worked on eight distinct case-studies on the culture and politics of product labelling