How do producers imagine consumers? Connecting farm and fork through a cultural repertoire of consumer sovereignty
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The phenomena of meat production and consumption are related but often studied separately, funnelled into silos of agro‐food and consumer‐focussed research. This article aims to reconnect these spheres by asking: How do meat producers understand the role of consumers in the ethical meatscape? We draw from interviews and site visits with 74 actors engaged with the ethical meat system in Canada. We find that consumers loom large in the cultural imaginary of meat producers and are often framed as key drivers of food system change. We make a two‐pronged argument that explains the complex, embedded presence of consumers in meat producers’ cultural imaginary. Conceptually, we argue that producers draw from a cultural repertoire of consumer sovereignty that frames consumer choice as a foundational element of capitalist societies. Empirically, we argue that ethical meat producers’ direct relationships with consumers infuse producers’ work with meaning and emotional significance, and this works to reinforce a normative valuation of consumer sovereignty. This research contributes to scholarship interrogating the implications of consumer‐driven models of food system change.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it