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of cultural geography and its debates about the politics of consumption, as well as in the

trans-disciplinary forum of the Follow the Things website (followthethings n.d.). The website

is an online imitation shopping site and platform for following projects. It has a clear political

mission: to make visible and question who makes the things that we buy, to expose the social,

political, and environmental costs of these products, and to ask how they arrive in our

shopping trolley. For Cook et al., following is a mode of researching food commodities and

systems, as a way to ‘get inside networks, go with the flows and look to connect’ (2006, p.

659). Not only for the sake of uncovering networks but because these studies often reveal so

much more and involve ‘bigger stories of dominance, exploitation, “civilization”,

imperialism, racism, anti-unionism, gender discrimination, emotional and physical harm, to

say the least’ (2006, p. 659). Appadurai has suggested even if:

...things have no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions,
and motivations endow them with...this formal truth does not illuminate the
concrete, historical circulation of things. For that we have to follow things
themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their
trajectories. (1986, p. 5)

Many food following projects involve multisite ethnographic study of key points

along a supply network (producers, consumers, retailers), opening them up to consider

historical, biological, economic, political and socio-cultural aspects. Cook et al. ask us to

imagine picking up an item and hearing the people who had helped in its making, tell their

story (2006, p. 655). For Benson and Fischer a broccoli consumed in California and

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produced in Guatemala becomes a thing to follow (2006) . They argue that the global
broccoli trade consists of desires – of Western consumers to eat healthy foods as well as

desires for Mayan farmers to get ahead economically (Benson & Fischer 2006, p. 800). They

suggest that such desires ‘simultaneously subvert and sustain the hegemonic constellations

that anchor crucial nodes in the international broccoli trade’ (Benson & Fischer 2006, p. 800).

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