Food provisioning—from supermarket to producer:understanding the articulation of different suppliers

This special issue of theReview of Agricultural, Food and EnvironmentalStudiessets out to describe the social logics that enable consumers to manage theirrestrictions and resources, leading them to multimodal provisioning practices. Althoughit has become common to make use of multiple suppliers for food provisioning, theseplaces of commodification differ depending on each person’s restrictions. The fivearticles in this issue make important contributions on this point. In the first section ofthis introduction, we examine the way in which consumers mobilise these differentsuppliers, integrating different practices to authenticate foods. In the second section, welook at the complementarity of the disciplines and methods of this issue’sauthors,whoshare the same comprehensive approach. They pay special attention not only to themeaning consumers give to their provisioning but also to its material aspects, which weanalyse in the third section. Lastly, we return to the way in which all these studiesincorporate politics, economics and social aspects when analysing the commodificationand decommodification occurring in today’s food provisioning.