Abstract
Food systems are of increasing interest in both research and policy communities. Surveys of post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) show high rates of food self-provisioning. These practices have been explained in terms of being ‘coping strategies of the poor’. Alber and Kohler’s ‘Informal Food Production in the Enlarged European Union’ (2008) offers a prominent account of this argument, supported by quantitative data. However, evidence from our case study of food self-provisioning in one CEE state–Czechia–contradicts their findings. Newly commissioned survey data, as well as a fresh look at the data they were working from, demonstrate that rather than being motivated by poverty, these widespread practices serve as a hobby and as a way of accessing ‘healthy food’. With food self-provisioning becoming an increasingly prominent subject in advanced industrial countries, in terms of both health and environmental policy, we propose that much greater care is taken in researching and interpreting the reasons for differences in food systems. Our findings are that environmentally sustainable and healthy self-provisioning in Czechia is motivated by a range of reasons, and practised by a significant proportion of the population across all social groups. This conclusion questions linear narratives of progress that figure ‘western’ practices as advanced or complete or automatically desirable, and contributes in a modest way to a decentring of narratives of progress.
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Notes
Statistical significance of the group differences were tested by Tamhane Post Doc Test (Analysis of Variance, procedure ONEWAY from SPSS 15.0 statistical package). Differences referred as “statistically significant” in the text are significant at p<0.05 significance level.
In the footnote attached to the second sentence they further explain that the test implication b) is valid “at least if we assume leisure time and the time cost of various recreational activities to be evenly distributed”.
Data were collected by the Public Opinion Research Centre of the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of sciences of the Czech Republic (CVVM). Number of respondents: N = 1,024. Sampling method: quota sampling. Data are available through Sociological Data Archive of the Institute of Sociology (http://archiv.soc.cas.cz/en/ ).
To compare incomes of households of different sizes and compositions we divided total household incomes by household size measured by ‘OECD-modified equivalence scale’ that assigns a value of 1 to the household head, value of 0.5 to each additional adult member and value of 0.3 to each child.
Following Alber and Kohler we concentrate primarily on modeling the effect of income of food self-provisioning. The other independent variables serve us as only the control variables. In this article we are not interested in determining which independent variables are the most influential predictors of whether people are food self-provisioners or not. That is why we do not display full range of potential model results.
Significantly positive value of unstandardised regression coefficient indicates increased likelihood of food self-provisioning in given category of respondents with respect to the reference category. Significantly negative value of unstandardised regression coefficient indicates decreased likelihood of food self-provisioning in given category of respondents with respect to the reference category.
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Data Sources
Česká národní banka (Czech National Bank) (2011). Kurzy devizového trhu–měsíční kumulované průměry. Praha: Česká národní banka.
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Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Jiří Vinopal for advice concerning the construction of the Czech national survey questionnaire and the Public Opinion Research Centre (CVVM) in Prague for conducting the survey. We gratefully acknowledge research funding support from the Open University’s OpenSpace Research Centre, as well as from the Czech Science Foundation via grant No. 404/10/0521, entitled ‘Environmental Values, Beliefs and Behavior in the Czech Republic in Historical and International Perspective’.
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Jehlička, P., Kostelecký, T. & Smith, J. Food Self-Provisioning in Czechia: Beyond Coping Strategy of the Poor: A Response to Alber and Kohler’s ‘Informal Food Production in the Enlarged European Union’ (2008). Soc Indic Res 111, 219–234 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-012-0001-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-012-0001-4