This document discusses the cultural and economic valuation of chicken production and consumption in Australia over time. It traces how chickens transitioned from household production to industrialized farming and mass production to meet supermarket demand. Women have played key roles in chicken value chains as farm co-owners, processors, and especially as household managers who purchase chicken due to demands of modern life for cheap, convenient food options amid changing gender roles and time constraints. The cultural values added by supermarkets centered around making chicken cheap, convenient, with choices and a clean image.

1. Resetting the Australian table:
Nutrition-sensitive value chains through a gender lens
19 August 2015
Jane Dixon
The changing chicken: chooks, cooks and culinary culture

2. Women in value chains: OECD
 From household egg producers and occasional poultry
producer to a ‘global dictator’ as ‘consumption has
become the vanguard of history’ (Miller 1995: 1-9)
 ‘In the practices of consumption the commodity system
is exposed to the power of the consumer’ (Fiske 1991: 31)
 BUT, consumption as ‘housewifery’ (managing the
household moral economy) is mediated by her wages,
time left after earning, community-wide gender relations
and an absence of market place choice (Dixon 2002: Ch.2):
‘freed from the kitchen to be chained to the wheel’

3. Value dynamics
 Economic valuations: company/stockmarket value,
profits, payroll/wages, prices (what the market will bear)
 Cultural valuations: market-standards (competition,
risks), community norms, product brands, firm
reputation/status …
 Value dynamics involves taking cultural values as an
input/resource to add economic value + inserting
economic values to add cultural value – cultural and
economic circuits interweave (Lash and Urry 1994: Economies of
signs and space)

4. ‘The social life of things’
Where does this thing come from?
How does its life become more or
less valuable?
Who makes the value?
How does the thing’s value
change? (Appadurai 1996)
Useful for posing questions re. value-
adding processes

5. The social life of the Australian chicken,
or value dynamics
 1950s and 1960s: Bird breeding R&D, mass production
R&D, cool chains
 1970s: Grower organisation & labour relations
 1980s: Marketing and distribution- supermarket supply
chains
 1970s – 2000: Consumer involvement in value-adding
 1980s – onwards: Public and private regulation to
protect economic value for key actors and to protect
consumer health (Dixon 2002)

6. Cultural value adding of the 4Cs:
key role of supermarkets
 Cheap
 Convenient
 Choice
 Cleanliness

7. 2011
20111966
Labour force participation trends

8. ‘Acquiring a taste for the necessary’
‘one only has to ask the question which economists
strangely ignore, of the economic conditions of the
production of dispositions demanded by the economy,
ie … the question of the economic and social
determinants of tastes’ (Bourdieu 1984:101)
Cultural practices are ‘disciplined’ and ‘recuperated’ by
events in the economic sphere (Warde 2002)

9. Tempos of modern life
 Space-time compression – exposure to globalisation
through labour, commodity & financial markets, new
media, travel
 Female labour force participation upends domestic
routines (daily food provisioning & home cooking)
 A ‘culture of convenience’ (Ulijazsek 2007 ) = ‘The capacity to
shift, juggle and re-order episodes and events’ (Shove 2003,
p. 170)
 Urbanism overwhelms ruralism: novelty displaces habit
 Reflexive consumption: caring for self, others, non-
humans, the planet BUT CONTRADICTIONS

10. Cheap & healthy convenience
Health: the ‘heavy trend’
Share of the urban passenger
transport task: car dependent
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
1945
1955
1965
1975
1985
1995
2005
2015
Share(Proportion)
Car
Rail
Other
(incl. bus)
Adapted from
Bureau of Transport
Economics (1999)

12. Women in poultry value chains
An overwhelmingly high income country Anglo-centric
perspective
Women contribute to poultry value chains through being
poultry farm co-owners and process workers, but
principally as household managers, carers, consumers
and moral economy custodians