A new aesthetic of food?: Relational reflexivity in the ‘alternative’ food movement

In recent times, an apparent contradiction between high levels of output and improved food quality has arisen within the food sector. The development of mass food markets, alongside ‘Fordist’ methods of production and their associated economies of scale, has generated unprecedented abundance (Montanari 1994). Yet, at the same time, industrialisation processes have resulted, seemingly, in greater and greater product standardisation, so that differing foods are rendered more alike in terms of their manufactured content. This process of standardisation affects not just production, processing and retailing, but eating itself, so that meals now carry their industrial properties into the stomachs of