Don’t Count on Kiwis at a Kiwi Farmers’ Market: Communicating Intersections of Globalization and Local Food at Aotearoa New Zealand Farmers’ Markets

The main question driving this study seeks to understand how New Zealand farmers’ markets represent and engage with global and local issues in relation to food production, distribution, and consumption. Under this question, three sub-questions seek to understand the discourses present at the markets, how these discourses insect with globalization and local food, and how this intersection works to organize contemporary farmers’ markets. The findings for this dissertation are divided into three chapters. The first findings chapter lays out the discourses present in the data. These discourses are largely related to food producer sovereignty. The second findings chapter looks at the intersection of global and local discourses in the data. The theme of this chapter centers on the term authenticity. Authenticity is important to farmers’ markets as it shows the local ethos they adamantly purport. However, authenticity at the farmers’ market can be flexible, for example, to the extent that if a certain percentage of produce is imported into the farmers’ market the market can still claim to be local. The third findings chapter seeks to understand how these intersecting discourses are communicatively enacted to organize these markets. The theme of this chapter starts with the theme of incubation. While the contemporary farmers’ market is popularly thought of as an antithesis to the global industrial food production system, the food producers do not necessarily want to be excluded from this system. In conclusion, while New Zealand farmers’ markets are the subjects being studied in this dissertation, this is not a dissertation about farmers’ markets. Rather, this dissertation seeks to use globalization theories to understand how globalization is communicated. Moreover, this study shows, in specific ways, how an organization that sees itself as separate from globalization communicates its engagement in globalization. Indeed, the ways this engagement is communicated is necessarily complicated, complex, and creative