Food and Choice (original) (raw)
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Caveat Emptor! The Rhetoric of Choice in Food Politics
This project is about a form of corporate predation that entails both policy influence and cultural legitimation. Neoliberal explanations of the inability of citizens to thrive in the current socio-economic condition typically rest on a combination of victim-blaming and appeals to the individualistic rhetoric that assumes we all enjoy equality of opportunity and freedom of choice. It is common for corporate lobbyists, and politicians under their influence, to argue against consumer protection on the grounds that such efforts are paternalistic, and that they therefore undermine consumer sovereignty. By this logic, illnesses that are highly correlated to diet are problems that consumers can avoid, and it is not the duty of food companies or government to prevent consumers from making "bad choices. " Implicit in this moralistic narrative is that consumers have sufficient knowledge about the alternatives to enable them to make "good choices. " Major food lobbies use their political influence to oppose government regulations of food, based on the reasoning that consumers deserve the right to choose. Food industry groups also will sometimes invest heavily to prevent legal requirements to disclose information that might enable consumers to make informed choices, creating a predatory doublebind. In this essay, I discuss how the rhetoric of choice is employed by the food industry, how it is formulated within the political context of the United States, and how that rhetoric poses threats to food systems globally.
"There is no love sincerer than the love of food." It is true that we can't live without the nourishment of food. It is equally true that food can comfort a man or woman in distress. There is a special connection between man and the satisfaction of taste and level of satiety that brings about harmony in a man's life. People around the world are in craze when it comes to satiating their taste buds. Many TV shows, local and international, represents how much people are delighted when it comes to eating. In the Philippines, we have Biyahe Ni Drew, Jessica Soho, and, Motorcycle Diaries where the different popular delicacies of the provinces in our country are shown and showcased and, best of all, eaten by the host. Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown and Luke Nguyen's TLC TV Show, and many more are just some of the well-known personalities discovering food cultures and tastes all over the world. These shows, as well as other social media shows, does not only feature the love for eating but also the different types of food from a variety of culture from their own locality and from the other parts of the planet.
Food Choice in an Interdisciplinary Context
Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2006
Reform of agricultural policies, notably the continuing elimination of production-enhancing subsidies, makes it possible for policies to respond to social issues such as the rural environment and health in future. In this paper, we draw on a Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) research project which is examining the potential for the development of healthy food chains and the implications for human health and the environment. One of the key issues to be addressed is consumers’ willingness to pay for the nutritionally enhanced food products from these new chains, but it is evident that only a partial understanding can be gained from a traditional economics approach. In the paper, we discuss how economists are beginning to incorporate views from other disciplines into their models of consumer choice.
The Multifaceted Dimensions of Food Choice and Nutrition
Nutrients, 2020
The Special Issue “Food Choice and Nutrition” deals with the relationship between the food choices of different population groups or consumer segments and its impact on the nutritional status, improvement of dietary quality, food and nutrition-related behaviour, food preferences, taste education, sensory characteristics of foods and their role in consumer choice, etc [...]
Writing a menu: the politics of food choice
Text, 2010
This paper explores the cultural frameworks for the choices we make about what we eat, drawing on a range of contemporary theories including Pierre Bourdieu's work on distinction, Claude Lévi-Strauss' on the constitutive nature of food choices, and Michel Foucault's notion that food and its selection is a matter of the care of the self, and hence carries an ethical imperative. Reading writers on food and our relationship to food-from Socrates to Princess Diana-I discuss the processes of selection involved in the production of a menu that, albeit unconsciously, operates as a system of distinction and individuation.
What Shall We Eat? An Ethical Framework for Well-Grounded Food Choices
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 2020
In production and consumption of food, several ethical values are at stake for different affected parties and value conflicts in relation to food choices are frequent. The aim of this article was to present an ethical framework for well-grounded decisions on production and consumption of food, guided by the following questions: Which are the affected parties in relation to production and consumption of food? What ethical values are at stake for these parties? How can conflicts between the identified values be handled from different ethical perspectives? Four affected parties, relevant for both production and consumption of food, were identified, namelyanimals, nature, producersandconsumers.Working form a bottom-up perspective, several values for these parties were identified and discussed. For animals:welfare, not being exposed to painandnatural behavior; for nature:low negative impact on the environmentandsustainable climate; for producers:fair salariesandsafe working conditions; a...
Determinants in the modern choice of food
Journal of Consumer Studies and Home Economics, 1986
This paper is the first attempt to integrate contemporary discussions on the choice, role and significance of food in people's everyday lives. It goes beyond the purely economic-quantitative dimensions of food and relates them to the income factor. It is a revised version of a paper which first appeared in Finnish in Discussion Papers No. 33 published by the Labour Institute for Economic Research, Helsinki.
Journal of Consumer Ethics, 2018
Welcome to this special issue of Journal of Consumer Ethics themed around Food and Ethical Consumption which has been my pleasure to edit. Having studied food and ethical consumption for almost 30 years – covering issues related to fairtrade food brands (Szmigin et al., 2007); farmers markets (McEachern et al., 2010), convenience and family food consumption (Carrigan and Szmigin, 2006), sustainable tourist food consumption (Carrigan et al., 2017), and most recently the role of generativity and family food sustainability (Athwal et al., 2018) – it is apparent that there is signifcant interest and growing concern among researchers and campaigners about how we produce and consume food, particularly in industrialised countries. Ideas about the ethics of food and consumption are contested, and ofen controversial, but they are also important to everyone. What we eat shapes our physical and emotional selves, and consumers or ‘citizens’ play multiple roles in our global food systems (Cura, 2017). Our food choices and understanding of food systems emerge from a complex landscape that includes what constitutes ‘good food’, where it comes from, what we should be eating, how to prepare and share it, and the politics of hunger, eating, getting, growing and wasting food (Goodman et al., 2017; Paddock, 2017; Evans et al., 2017).