Desires, sorted: Massive modern packing lines in an era of affective food markets

Abstract Modern apple packing lines swiftly and precisely sort large quantities of apples along an ever-increasing array of physiological standards. The metrics of those standards can be altered quickly to accommodate demands from different market niches, so that the apples appearing on a retail shelf may be highly consistent with each other while differing from the apples that appear on the shelves of a neighboring retailer, even when the apples are the same variety, emerging from the same region, and possibly from the same orchard. This paper discusses how modern packing lines facilitate the production of symbolic food aesthetics and affective retail spaces. These packing lines both reflect and reproduce metrics of quality that guide the ethics attached to apples and craft the desires attached to foods. As retailers purchase apples according to an increasingly narrow set of specifications—a specific level of redness, a window of size, degrees of blemish—those that appear on the shelf gain increasing symbolic coherence. Drawing on work on aesthetics and affect, and linking the politics of appearance with supermarket power, I argue that this internal homogeneity in the apple bin mutes politics within retail spaces while increasing its salience between retail spaces.