The Consumption of Food between Risk of Individualism and Political Participation The Consumption of Food between Risk of Individualism and Political Participation (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Consumption of Food between Risk of Individualism and Political Participation
Italian Sociological Review, 2015
Nowadays, we all live in a globalised world, a scenery where the control on their own daily experience is getting more and more evanescent. In this variable and dangerous scenery, food is becoming a source of incertitude and danger, too. A lot of people, as consumers, perceive that their relationship of trust with food producers is cracked, so the watchword is now “to distrust”. But totally opposite sign processes live alongside these processes and these political fractures. Crisis of politics, meant in the traditional sense, in fact, if one side has alienated many people from political life, it has also changed the forms of participation. In fact, many people have started to vocalize their dissent through channels very different from the traditional ones. Consumption choices are included between them. In this essay we focused our attention on food consumption choices, and specially on biological food consumption, which shows that the relationship between man and environment is comp...
Food in Society: Economy, Culture, Geography, 2001
ISBN 0 340 72003 4 (hbk); 0 340 72004 2 (pbk) http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780340720042/
Food and Politics in the Modern Age
Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2012
It is unusual to think of food as being political. And yet, it is just as rare for a modern food system not to have its origins in national and international politics. Often, the politics of food is most visible in the debates and decisions made within offi cial institutions of government. Farm subsidies, for example, are thrashed out in the halls of national and regional legislatures. Federal, state, and local institutions oversee food safety and food standards. Enormous international agencies structure the loan and trade agreements that govern world commerce. Politics, in the narrowest defi nition, consists of precisely these institutions, the decisions made within them, and the rules, laws, and norms that govern social and economic interactions. 1 But the politics of food in the modern age is hardly confi ned to such institutions. Political clashes over food also arise in everyday life. The inconspicuous and often unrecognized decisions and activities that constitute everyday life also constitute a kind of politics. 2 At times, political differences about food may arise from collisions in values, customs, religious beliefs, and social priorities. Considered in this light, the politics of food is ubiquitous in the modern world.
Ethics and the politics of food
International Journal of Food Microbiology, 2007
In spite of sophisticated technological and scientific developments in food production and nutrition, efficient means of food distribution, and unprecedented availability of food in some parts of the world, food is contested like never before. Some consumers are concerned about food safety and ethics related to the food they buy, others are concerned because their means of livelihood hardly allows them to take on the role of consumers at all. Others still, lack the opportunity to be active co-participants in the governance and shaping of the local and global food system, and thus, feel disenfranchised. It is a paradox that amidst technological achievements, economic welfare, and global politics, the right to safe and healthy food for all remains so difficult to secure. Yet, this is precisely the case in the world today. ''The ethics and the politics of food'' was the title of the 6th conference of the European Society for Agricultural and Food Ethics (EurSafe), held in Oslo in June 2006. This special issue presents a selection of papers that were presented there. The original versions of these papers were printed in the Congress preprints. The current versions have been reviewed, revised, and expanded. One important lesson from the conference is that issues related to the ethics and the politics of food do not belong to a single discipline, but cut across the boundaries between philosophy, social sciences, and the natural sciences. What starts out as a concern about food risk and safety soon moves to important discussions in ethics, politics, and cultural values. Another important lesson is that food itself transcends boundaries between realms of modern society such as between production and consumption, science, technology, and politics, and nature and culture. This special issue reflects the transcendent, trans-disciplinary, and global character of this emerging field. Selecting the following set of articles, we have sought to capture some of the variety of empirical topics and analytic approaches that characterizes the contributions to the conference. Empirically, one can study the ethics and politics of food from the points of view of consumption, primary production, industrial production, policy making and regulation, or global organizations. Pressing issues of concern include proper land use, animal welfare, genetic modification
Introduction: Consumer and Consumed
2017
The papers that make up this collection were already long in development when the European 'horsemeat scandal' in early 2013 threatened to derail still further what fragile trust there remained in food producers and retailers. 1 This scandal entailed the discovery that horsemeat was being passed off in branded ready-made meals and processed foods as other types of more culturally acceptable meat, beef in particular (Lawrence 2013). But earlier animal foodrelated crisesfrom the discovery of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle in the 1980s, to the widespread contamination of powdered milk with melamine in China that came to light in 2008had already made it abundantly plain that, in the context of industrialising and globalising food supply systems, the animals we eat do not simply sustain our bodies or satisfy our culinary tastes but, in doing so, come profoundly to reshape social, economic and ecological relations and cultural understandings of edibility, taste and health. Connections between humans and animals-as-food are not simply one-way relationships between consumer and consumed, but involve a more complex set of relations concerned, among other things, with ecological change, world markets and local economic conditions, health and food safety, labour relations, and changing cultural values. For example, growing meat consumption has been described as part of a wider, increasingly globalised 'nutrition transition' away from diets rich in fibres and complex carbohydrates, a transition associated with emergent health concerns including rises in obesity, type II diabetes, gastrointestinal disorders, cardiovascular illnesses and certain cancers (Popkin
The green political food consumer
Anthropology of food
This paper reviews the current literature on political and ethical consumers, and relates it to the topic of sustainable food consumption. A first aim is to problematise a somewhat simplistic view of the political and ethical consumer found in the literature. The paper sheds light on some of the dilemmas that confront green political consumers. We indicate that most existing studies say very little about consumers' thoughts, assumptions, and reflections about green consumerism in general, and about green consumerist tools, such as green labels, more specifically. Based on a literature review, we draw a picture of the typical concerned consumer as reflective, uncertain and ambivalent. This is connected to a second aim of the paper: to discuss a gap or mismatch between the production side and consumption side of green (food) labels. We conclude the paper by suggesting that green and ethical information schemes could become much more in line with the reflective nature of green, political consumers. We relate this discussion to concepts such as sub-politics and meta-politics. Le consommateur politique vert-une analyse critique de la recherché et des politiques en cours Cet article dresse un panorama de la littérature actuelle concernant les consommateurs éthiques et militants, en faisant le lien avec le thème d'une consommation alimentaire durable. Un premier objectif est de problématiser la vision quelque peu simpliste que présente la littérature. L'article met en lumière quelques uns des dilemmes auxquels font face les consommateurs militants « verts » en soulignant combien les études existantes disent peu sur les pensées, les certitudes et les réflexions de ces consommateurs quant à la consommation « verte » en général, et sur les outils de consommations tels que les labels bio tout particulièrement. Sur ces bases, nous dessinons le portrait d'un consommateur militant typique, réflexif, indécis et ambivalent. Le deuxième objectif de cet article est de mettre en valeur le fossé creusé entre la production et la consommation en ce qui concerne les labels bio. Nous suggérons en conclusion que les programmes d'informations éthiques et verts devraient être pensés davantage en adéquation avec la nature réflexive des consommateurs verts et militants. Cet article repose sur les concepts de sub-politique et de métapolitique.
Food, and the Unsettling of the Human Condition (2017)
Arena Journal, 2017
For all the importance of food, and for all of the theorists, practitioners and activists who have suggested that the planet faces a generalised and interconnected set of food crises, the widely shared popular sense in the global North is one of occasional spiked dismay and relative general comfort. On the one hand, close to home, good food is treated as a personal and individual choice — I/we/they need to eat less sugar and junk food. Beyond a certain moral and to an extent class-driven imperative to ‘make healthy choices’ concerning food with regard to one’s individual nutritional status, the foods one eats and their provenance have in many privileged centres of the North become deeply intertwined with questions of individual and collective identities and, in some instances, politics. On the other hand, in relation to the rest of the world, it is acknowledged episodically that in faraway places there exist zones of food insecurity brought on by droughts, hurricanes, or war. Inevitably such intrusions into the popular Northern consciousness are accompanied by fund-raising drives among aid agencies entrusted with the responsibility of ‘providing food to the poor’. The present article builds on the work of critical and engaged theorists in the task of taking this critique to a food-systems level. Our argument is simple: food is basic to living across all the domains of social life — ecology, economics, politics and culture — and this existential foundation is becoming profoundly unsettled by global capitalism, techno-science and digital mediatism, all intersecting in a world of swirling images, hyperbole and capital.
Why should we care? Two experiences in the politics of food and food research
Ethnologia Polona
The aim of this article is to analyse the political aspects of food and their significance as an object of study. The first author of the article has studied Polish society as an insider, while the other author had previously conducted research in other countries and three years ago started exploring Poland and Polish gastronomy, finding himself in the role of outsider. Both scholars have been recently working together. The power relations between the societies and the academic worlds from which they come from turned out to be crucial to the research dynamics and became one of the paper’s key interests. Three main topics provide the structure of the collaborative paper: 1) the question of the authors’ positionality; 2) food as a phenomenon that is intrinsically political, and the legitimacy issues related to its study within academia and to scholars’ engagement outside it; and 3) the power and inequality dimensions of food research. The authors agree that inextricable connection of ...