Rethinking the Marketplace

First steps to the book chapter as part of the Eat, Cook, Grow book.
The Place of the Market
We live in a digital, networked society where immaterial transactions frame many aspects of our everyday life. But in an internet of things our products and artefacts still have material presence; they have to be somewhere, they need to be physically displaced to arrive somewhere else, they cannot be easily duplicated and they have a life-cycle. As we grow increasingly accustomed to digital things this has an impact on how we relate to and interact with material objects. A critical characteristic of all things that we consume is that they need to travel from the place they are produced to the place in which they will be consumed, sometimes with some form of preparation process occuring in between. So, in order to eat an apple there needs to be a tree, a person who picks the apple, someone or something that transports the apple to where it will be prepared and then to the person who will eat it. This process may cover a simple few metres or may involve thousands of miles and many weeks. Since western industrialisation this process of the exchange of goods has typically been one which requires a market. The market is the structure through which goods are transferred from the producer to the consumer and typically this process involved many actors. However it involves not just an exchange of ownership and money, but also physical movement from its source to its consumption. The critical feature of such developments is that it created a disassociation between consumer and producer, between farmer and the urbanite. In the vast majority of cases the person who buys their food at a supermarket will never have had any contact with the source of the food, and in most instances will not even be aware of the country in which they food was produced. The consumer accepts the benefits of cheap, accessible and available food in the context of their urban life, without having to be involved in energy demanding distribution processes and highly regulated mono-culture farming. The market removes these issues from their control and provides the easy and homogenised interface to their experience of food.