An annual donation of $250 will be made to a small-scale organisation that is engaged in public good work. The gift recipient will be decided jointly by the Australasian Agrifood Research Network local organising committee and delegates of the annual conference.

Agrifood members have set up this gift in honour of our wonderful friend and colleague, Associate Professor Jane Dixon, who passed away in 2021, with partner Colin by her side. Jane was kind and generous, as well as an intensely brilliant scholar, and we remember her legacy through this gift.

Jane began her career in social work but soon developed a strong interest in social theory and sociology. Her early studies of the social aspects of health and well-being – particularly health inequalities – led to the publication of many papers and articles on health care. Three of her books: The Weight of Modernity; Health of People, Places and Planets; and, The Seven Deadly Sins of Obesity, drew attention to the threats to population health which are embedded in the structures and practices of consumerism, fuelled by the activities of the corporate food sector and by government policy. Each book provided important and original insights into diet and health in contemporary society. During her career Jane held an Associate Professorship with the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University, and a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship at the Centre for Food Policy, City University of London. She delivered policy advice on food security to the International Union on Health Promotion and Education, as well as providing technical assistance to the World Health Organisation.

But Jane’s real claim to fame, as far as Agrifood members are concerned, was her conceptual contribution to commodity chain analysis. In her book The Changing Chicken: Chooks, Cooks and Culinary Culture, published in 2002, Jane critiqued the then-dominant Commodity Systems Analysis – or CSA – developed in the 1980s by agri-food guru Bill Friedland. Jane’s insight was that while CSA provided an excellent framework for examining the ways commodities were transformed and acquired value, what it left out was the cultural economy. The cultural economy embraces the construction of meaning and of social identity. Jane called upon Weber, Bourdieu, Polanyi and other eminent social theorists to add a new and powerful cultural dimension to the otherwise structuralist and somewhat formulaic approach to the examination of commodity chains. The Changing Chicken has been described bymreviewers as ‘brilliant’ and an ‘excellent account of the relationship between food, food systems, and structures of power’. Former President of the International Rural Sociology Association, and long-time RC 40 member, Alessandro Bonanno wrote that her book ‘transcends political economy’ by investigating ‘the complex interplay of power relations among producers, retailers and consumers’. Bill Friedland, himself, described the book as ‘the most comprehensive commodity chain analysis I have seen’. Similarly, Jane’s earlier article on cultural economy published in Agriculture and Human Values was described as ‘one of the most useful methodological discussions in the food studies literature’.

Beginning with Agri-food 5 in Akaroa in 1997, Jane was a regular presenter at the yearly meetings of the Australasian Agri-food Research Network. She collaborated on grants and papers with a host of network members including Geoff Lawrence, David Burch, Ruth Beilin, Carol Richards, Phil McMichael, Hugh Campbell and Bill Pritchard and with many of her former students.

In Jane’s most recent work, she took her interest in the corporate power of supermarkets further, as part of a four year, interdisciplinary ARC research project, working with scholars in competition law and business history. Jane’s focus was on the role of the citizen-consumer in competition regulation and need for regulatory policy to be sensitive to the social – not just economic – effects of market concentration. Jane was always insightful and intellectually provocative, approaching everything she did with infectious good humour. She is greatly missed by her agri-food colleagues.