Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK 350 Main Street, Malden, MA02148, USA Sociologia Ruralis, Volume 40, Number 3, July 2000 ©European Society for Rural Sociology ISSN 0038−0199 Reading the Space of the Farmers’ Market: A Preliminary Investigation from the UK Lewis Holloway and Moya Kneafsey S everal authors have recently noted that food markets are becoming more dif- ferentiated on the basis of socially constructed ‘quality’ criteria (Marsden 1998, Ilbery and Kneafsey 1998). In terms of agriculture, Allaire and Sylvander (1997) describe this as a shift from a ‘productivist logic’ to a ‘logic of quality.’ This shift is fuelled, in part, by the emergence of a growing ‘food elite’ (Hurst 1998) consisting of increasingly knowledgeable consumers who are seeking food products which can be bought direct from producers, or at least traced to their origin. They are con- cerned to know about the farming practices by which food is produced, the process- ing which food is subjected to, and the health and safety aspects of particular foods (Cook and Crang 1996). A host of books, magazine articles, cookery and gardening programmes is testament to this growing public interest in food preparation and consumption. Meanwhile, against a backdrop of falling incomes and farm collapse, British farmers are urging consumers to support them by ‘buying British.’ Their calls have become all the more insistent with the recent antagonistic relations with France brought about by the so-called ‘beef crisis.’ With some consumers boycot- ting French goods, and town centres even cancelling French-style markets, the act of consumption has been invested with increasingly political overtones. All of this is occurring within a context of the ‘risk society’ suggested by Beck (1992), in which people are increasingly aware that science is implicated in the production of new forms of risk (such as pollution or health threats) in areas like agriculture and food. Thus, the meanings attached to food might now include ‘it could be poisonous,’ or ‘bad for you.’ The increasing concern over food safety and quality, along with grow- ing consumer mistrust of official bodies and scientific knowledge (Macnaghten and Urry 1998), has led towards more ‘careful consumption’ (Marsden 1998) amongst certain sets of consumers. In order to reassure consumers, there has been a proliferation of retailer-initiated Quality Assurance Schemes (Morris and Young 1997, 2000) and institutional efforts that attempt to differentiate products according to standards of safety, hygiene and traceability. However, as such measures of quality become the norm, there is a need to find new ways of constructing and signifying quality. One pos- sibility is through the linking of products to particular places, or even particular