Susanne Freidberg
Biographic Data
| ID | 92257 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susanne Freidberg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susanne |
| FAMILY NAME | Freidberg |
| SIGNATURE | FREIDBERG S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Dartmouth College |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5916-8519 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 423 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Champions of the soil
The popular documentary Kiss the Ground (2020) and its sequel Common Ground (2023) both portray regenerative agriculture as a “simple solution” to climate change, chronic disease, and other planetary crises. Following in a long tradition of advocacy media, the environmentalists behind both films enlisted a host of celebrities to convince audiences that restoring soil health through regenerative agriculture was a cause urgent enough to transcend p…
Relationships of regeneration in Great Plains commodity agriculture
Cultivating intellectual community in academia
Scholarship flourishes in inclusive environments where open deliberations and generative feedback expand both individual and collective thinking. Many researchers, however, have limited access to such settings, and most conventional academic conferences fall short of promises to provide them. We have written this Field Report to share our methods for cultivating a vibrant intellectual community within the Science and Technology Studies Food and A…
Social science – STEM collaborations in agriculture, food and beyond
Interdisciplinary research needs innovation. As an action-oriented intervention, this Manifesto begins from the authors' experiences as social scientists working within interdisciplinary science and technology collaborations in agriculture and food. We draw from these experiences to: 1) explain what social scientists contribute to interdisciplinary agri-food tech collaborations; (2) describe barriers to substantive and meaningful collaboration; a…
Metrics and Mētis
Unable to Determine
Metrics have long served as tools for governing at a distance. In the food industry, major manufacturers have embraced metrics as tools to govern the sustainability of the farms producing their commodity raw materials. This metrical turn has been influenced but also complicated by agricultural datafication, that is, the increasing quantities of data generated on and about farms. Despite the sheer abundance of data that companies might use to meas…
Assembled but unrehearsed
In recent years, many of the companies collectively known as 'Big Food' have undertaken efforts to assess and improve agricultural sustainability, both within their own supply chains and as members of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs). Taking up Friedmann's call for closer attention to corporate sustainability practices, this paper finds that companies are doing more than they advertise, but making slower progress than originally hoped. Up to …
Other Geographies
Big Food and Little Data
This article refers to:Big Food and Little Data: The Slow Harvest of Corporate Food Supply Chain Sustainability Initiatives
Trading in the secretive commodity
Over the past century and a half, a handful of transnational corporations have built fortunes trading commodity crops such as corn, soy and wheat. Graded and standardized, these commodities are considered uniform and therefore fungible; information about their origins need not accompany them to market. But in recent years major food brands, as part of broader 'sustainable sourcing' commitments, have begun to ask about the places and practices tha…
Moral economies and the cold chain
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the spread of what we now know as the cold chain sparked controversy in both Europe and North America. This article examines popular distrust of early refrigerated transport and storage in light of larger debates about how best to procure good food at a fair price. Expanding on E. P. Thompson's concept of moral economy, the article shows that refrigeration proved controversial not simply becau…
Footprint technopolitics
Calculating sustainability in supply chain capitalism
This paper examines the recent rise of life cycle assessment (LCA) as a supply chain governance tool. Many big brand retailers and manufacturers, as well as a number of governments, see LCA as a potentially valuable means to measure, communicate and thereby improve the ‘sustainability’ of material goods. The paper's arguments are threefold. First, the appeal of LCA's quantitative and seeming holistic methods must be understood in light of certain…
Fresh
Ambiguous Appetites
Debates about the tasteful date back to ancient times, and stretch far beyond the kitchen. Not only do such debates reflect the ambiguity of the term “taste” itself, they also tell us much about different eras' anxieties and social hierarchies. From the creators of a cuisine based on le goût naturel in the eighteenth century to the advocates of “real” food in the twenty-first century, arbitrators of culinary taste have long celebrated the fresh, …
Alternative food in the global south
Freshness from Afar
The late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries saw both increasing trade in perishable foods and the expansion of European overseas empires. This article argues that these seemingly unrelated developments were in fact connected. It also shows how modern meanings of freshness in food took shape during this period, and were influenced by some of the same ideologies and anxieties that informed the imperial project
Commentary
Globalization and Restructuring of African Commodity Flows – Edited by Niels Fold and Marianne Nylandsted Larsen
The Triumph of the Egg
On 11 December 1912, Philadelphians encountered an extraordinary sight in their city's streets. Groups of prominent society women-'famous beauties and matrons ... known all over the continent'-were selling eggs all over town. These eggs differed from those we buy today in that most had been in storage since April. Housewives nonetheless flocked to buy them, because they cost only 24 cents a dozen, much less than other April eggs. The sellers, the…
Supermarkets and imperial knowledge
Supermarkets employ codes of standards to assure the uniform safety, quality and `ethical' content of their food products. These standards represent a form of epistemic knowledge, intended to override the kinds of practical, local knowledge long employed in food production and trade. This form of food governance by standards bears a striking resemblance to other forms of imperial governance. This article explores the historical parallels and inhe…
Zambia
For many years, urban planners’ description of the Zambian capital Lusaka as a “garden city” seemed a cruel and even preposterous misnomer. Potholed and polluted, the city was more colloquially described as a pit. Indeed, parts of town rang with the sounds of a quarry, though the country’s main mineral wealth lay several hours drive to the north. Lusaka’s roadside rockbreakers, men and women who hammered limestone into gravel, epitomized to forei…
French Beans and Food Scares
From mad cows to McDonaldization to genetically modified maize, European food scares and controversies at the turn of the millennium provoked anxieties about the perils hidden in an increasingly industrialized, internationalized food supply. These food fears have cast a shadow as long as Africa, where farmers struggle to meet European demand for the certifiably clean green bean. But the trade in fresh foods between Africa and Europe is hardly uni…
Converging Networks and Clashing Stories
The debate over agricultural biotechnology in South Africa is not only polarized, but also complicated by the increasingly blurry boundaries of food governance. This was particularly apparent during the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), held in Johannesburg in August 2002. This article explores how the politics and policies surrounding genetic modification (GM) in South Africa have taken shape within a range of overlapping transnati…
The Ethical Complex of Corporate Food Power
In this paper I explore how nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the popular media in Britain have been able to pressure Britain's top supermarkets to undertake 'ethical' reforms of their global supply chains. I argue that, although the 'ethical complex' of British supermarkets is the product of unique historical and geographic circumstances, it also testifies to the capacity of agro-food activists to amplify their influence through the popul…
Cleaning up down South
Supermarkets in Great Britain have joined the country's Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) in order to demonstrate their commitment to social welfare and environmental standards in their supply chains. They have been particularly concerned to enforce ethical as well as food safety standards in the African horticultural industry, which has historically depended on cheap labour to produce high-value vegetables. The supermarkets' 'ethical turn' appear…
The Ethical Complex of Corporate Food Power
In this paper I explore how nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the popular media in Britain have been able to pressure Britain's top supermarkets to undertake 'ethical' reforms of their global supply chains. I argue that, although the 'ethical complex' of British supermarkets is the product of unique historical and geographic circumstances, it also testifies to the capacity of agro-food activists to amplify their influence through the popul…
Footprint technopolitics
Calculating sustainability in supply chain capitalism
This paper examines the recent rise of life cycle assessment (LCA) as a supply chain governance tool. Many big brand retailers and manufacturers, as well as a number of governments, see LCA as a potentially valuable means to measure, communicate and thereby improve the ‘sustainability’ of material goods. The paper's arguments are threefold. First, the appeal of LCA's quantitative and seeming holistic methods must be understood in light of certain…
Supermarkets and imperial knowledge
Supermarkets employ codes of standards to assure the uniform safety, quality and `ethical' content of their food products. These standards represent a form of epistemic knowledge, intended to override the kinds of practical, local knowledge long employed in food production and trade. This form of food governance by standards bears a striking resemblance to other forms of imperial governance. This article explores the historical parallels and inhe…
On the trail of the global green bean
The need to demystify and 'ground' globalization has spurred many calls for multi-site fieldwork. This article discusses how such fieldwork was used to examine the contemporary restructuring of fresh food commodity chains between Africa and Europe, at a time of increasing European concerns about food safety and quality. Drawing on convention theory and actor-network theory for conceptual guidance, qualitative fieldwork was conducted at sites of p…
Big Food and Little Data
This article refers to:Big Food and Little Data: The Slow Harvest of Corporate Food Supply Chain Sustainability Initiatives
Culture, conventions and colonial constructs of rurality in south–north horticultural trades
Gardening on the Edge
Political ecology has done much to disassemble the dominant narratives used to define, explain, and manage environmental degradation in Africa. However, it has not seriously challenged a core assumption of these narratives: that the “natural” environment (that is, the environment containing natural resources) is the rural. This article argues for a critical analysis of human-environment relations in and around Africa’s cities, not simply because …
Trading in the secretive commodity
Over the past century and a half, a handful of transnational corporations have built fortunes trading commodity crops such as corn, soy and wheat. Graded and standardized, these commodities are considered uniform and therefore fungible; information about their origins need not accompany them to market. But in recent years major food brands, as part of broader 'sustainable sourcing' commitments, have begun to ask about the places and practices tha…
French beans for the masses
Alternative food in the global south
Assembled but unrehearsed
In recent years, many of the companies collectively known as 'Big Food' have undertaken efforts to assess and improve agricultural sustainability, both within their own supply chains and as members of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs). Taking up Friedmann's call for closer attention to corporate sustainability practices, this paper finds that companies are doing more than they advertise, but making slower progress than originally hoped. Up to …
To Garden, to Market
This article traces the historical origins of a localized gender division of labor found in two villages on the edge of the city of Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. Through social-historical analysis, this article demonstrates that gender divisions of labor are not simply constructed in particular places; they are constructs located near or far from other places, and thus influenced by multidimensional interactions between those places. Specifically…
The Triumph of the Egg
On 11 December 1912, Philadelphians encountered an extraordinary sight in their city's streets. Groups of prominent society women-'famous beauties and matrons ... known all over the continent'-were selling eggs all over town. These eggs differed from those we buy today in that most had been in storage since April. Housewives nonetheless flocked to buy them, because they cost only 24 cents a dozen, much less than other April eggs. The sellers, the…
Converging Networks and Clashing Stories
The debate over agricultural biotechnology in South Africa is not only polarized, but also complicated by the increasingly blurry boundaries of food governance. This was particularly apparent during the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), held in Johannesburg in August 2002. This article explores how the politics and policies surrounding genetic modification (GM) in South Africa have taken shape within a range of overlapping transnati…
Commentary
Contacts, Contracts, and Green Bean Schemes
Soon after midnight in early January 1994, an Air Afrique cargo jet took off from the airport of Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso. It roared north over the sleeping city carrying 15 tons of première-qualité, extra-fine green beans bound for Paris. Within several hours, the beans would be unloaded and trucked to the sprawling wholesale docks of Rungis, on the outskirts of the French capital, and put up for sale to restaurant and supermarket buyers f…
Social science – STEM collaborations in agriculture, food and beyond
Interdisciplinary research needs innovation. As an action-oriented intervention, this Manifesto begins from the authors' experiences as social scientists working within interdisciplinary science and technology collaborations in agriculture and food. We draw from these experiences to: 1) explain what social scientists contribute to interdisciplinary agri-food tech collaborations; (2) describe barriers to substantive and meaningful collaboration; a…
Cultivating intellectual community in academia
Scholarship flourishes in inclusive environments where open deliberations and generative feedback expand both individual and collective thinking. Many researchers, however, have limited access to such settings, and most conventional academic conferences fall short of promises to provide them. We have written this Field Report to share our methods for cultivating a vibrant intellectual community within the Science and Technology Studies Food and A…
Metrics and Mētis
Unable to Determine
Metrics have long served as tools for governing at a distance. In the food industry, major manufacturers have embraced metrics as tools to govern the sustainability of the farms producing their commodity raw materials. This metrical turn has been influenced but also complicated by agricultural datafication, that is, the increasing quantities of data generated on and about farms. Despite the sheer abundance of data that companies might use to meas…
Moral economies and the cold chain
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the spread of what we now know as the cold chain sparked controversy in both Europe and North America. This article examines popular distrust of early refrigerated transport and storage in light of larger debates about how best to procure good food at a fair price. Expanding on E. P. Thompson's concept of moral economy, the article shows that refrigeration proved controversial not simply becau…
Freshness from Afar
The late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries saw both increasing trade in perishable foods and the expansion of European overseas empires. This article argues that these seemingly unrelated developments were in fact connected. It also shows how modern meanings of freshness in food took shape during this period, and were influenced by some of the same ideologies and anxieties that informed the imperial project
Refashioning Nature
Introduction I. Food into Freezers: Women into Factories II. The Passing of Rural Society III. The Origins of the Modern Agri-Food System IV. Internationalisation and the Third World Food System V. Engineering Life: Agri-Biotechnologies and the Food System VI. The Food System and the Environment VII. Conclusion: Counter Revolution Bibliography
A Business of Women
Contacts, Contracts, and Green Bean Schemes
Soon after midnight in early January 1994, an Air Afrique cargo jet took off from the airport of Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso. It roared north over the sleeping city carrying 15 tons of première-qualité, extra-fine green beans bound for Paris. Within several hours, the beans would be unloaded and trucked to the sprawling wholesale docks of Rungis, on the outskirts of the French capital, and put up for sale to restaurant and supermarket buyers f…
To Garden, to Market
This article traces the historical origins of a localized gender division of labor found in two villages on the edge of the city of Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. Through social-historical analysis, this article demonstrates that gender divisions of labor are not simply constructed in particular places; they are constructs located near or far from other places, and thus influenced by multidimensional interactions between those places. Specifically…
Gardening on the Edge
Political ecology has done much to disassemble the dominant narratives used to define, explain, and manage environmental degradation in Africa. However, it has not seriously challenged a core assumption of these narratives: that the “natural” environment (that is, the environment containing natural resources) is the rural. This article argues for a critical analysis of human-environment relations in and around Africa’s cities, not simply because …
On the trail of the global green bean
The need to demystify and 'ground' globalization has spurred many calls for multi-site fieldwork. This article discusses how such fieldwork was used to examine the contemporary restructuring of fresh food commodity chains between Africa and Europe, at a time of increasing European concerns about food safety and quality. Drawing on convention theory and actor-network theory for conceptual guidance, qualitative fieldwork was conducted at sites of p…
Food in Society
Culture, conventions and colonial constructs of rurality in south–north horticultural trades
French beans for the masses
Cleaning up down South
Supermarkets in Great Britain have joined the country's Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) in order to demonstrate their commitment to social welfare and environmental standards in their supply chains. They have been particularly concerned to enforce ethical as well as food safety standards in the African horticultural industry, which has historically depended on cheap labour to produce high-value vegetables. The supermarkets' 'ethical turn' appear…
Zambia
For many years, urban planners’ description of the Zambian capital Lusaka as a “garden city” seemed a cruel and even preposterous misnomer. Potholed and polluted, the city was more colloquially described as a pit. Indeed, parts of town rang with the sounds of a quarry, though the country’s main mineral wealth lay several hours drive to the north. Lusaka’s roadside rockbreakers, men and women who hammered limestone into gravel, epitomized to forei…
French Beans and Food Scares
From mad cows to McDonaldization to genetically modified maize, European food scares and controversies at the turn of the millennium provoked anxieties about the perils hidden in an increasingly industrialized, internationalized food supply. These food fears have cast a shadow as long as Africa, where farmers struggle to meet European demand for the certifiably clean green bean. But the trade in fresh foods between Africa and Europe is hardly uni…
Converging Networks and Clashing Stories
The debate over agricultural biotechnology in South Africa is not only polarized, but also complicated by the increasingly blurry boundaries of food governance. This was particularly apparent during the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), held in Johannesburg in August 2002. This article explores how the politics and policies surrounding genetic modification (GM) in South Africa have taken shape within a range of overlapping transnati…
The Ethical Complex of Corporate Food Power
In this paper I explore how nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the popular media in Britain have been able to pressure Britain's top supermarkets to undertake 'ethical' reforms of their global supply chains. I argue that, although the 'ethical complex' of British supermarkets is the product of unique historical and geographic circumstances, it also testifies to the capacity of agro-food activists to amplify their influence through the popul…
Supermarkets and imperial knowledge
Supermarkets employ codes of standards to assure the uniform safety, quality and `ethical' content of their food products. These standards represent a form of epistemic knowledge, intended to override the kinds of practical, local knowledge long employed in food production and trade. This form of food governance by standards bears a striking resemblance to other forms of imperial governance. This article explores the historical parallels and inhe…
The Triumph of the Egg
On 11 December 1912, Philadelphians encountered an extraordinary sight in their city's streets. Groups of prominent society women-'famous beauties and matrons ... known all over the continent'-were selling eggs all over town. These eggs differed from those we buy today in that most had been in storage since April. Housewives nonetheless flocked to buy them, because they cost only 24 cents a dozen, much less than other April eggs. The sellers, the…
Globalization and Restructuring of African Commodity Flows – Edited by Niels Fold and Marianne Nylandsted Larsen
Fresh
Ambiguous Appetites
Debates about the tasteful date back to ancient times, and stretch far beyond the kitchen. Not only do such debates reflect the ambiguity of the term “taste” itself, they also tell us much about different eras' anxieties and social hierarchies. From the creators of a cuisine based on le goût naturel in the eighteenth century to the advocates of “real” food in the twenty-first century, arbitrators of culinary taste have long celebrated the fresh, …
Alternative food in the global south
Freshness from Afar
The late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries saw both increasing trade in perishable foods and the expansion of European overseas empires. This article argues that these seemingly unrelated developments were in fact connected. It also shows how modern meanings of freshness in food took shape during this period, and were influenced by some of the same ideologies and anxieties that informed the imperial project
Commentary
Calculating sustainability in supply chain capitalism
This paper examines the recent rise of life cycle assessment (LCA) as a supply chain governance tool. Many big brand retailers and manufacturers, as well as a number of governments, see LCA as a potentially valuable means to measure, communicate and thereby improve the ‘sustainability’ of material goods. The paper's arguments are threefold. First, the appeal of LCA's quantitative and seeming holistic methods must be understood in light of certain…
Footprint technopolitics
Moral economies and the cold chain
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the spread of what we now know as the cold chain sparked controversy in both Europe and North America. This article examines popular distrust of early refrigerated transport and storage in light of larger debates about how best to procure good food at a fair price. Expanding on E. P. Thompson's concept of moral economy, the article shows that refrigeration proved controversial not simply becau…
Economics (22 works) · Political science (20 works) · Business (19 works) · Geography (15 works) · Organic Food and Agriculture (15 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Agriculture (10 works) · Economy (10 works) · Law (10 works)