While innovations have fostered the mass production of food at low costs, there are externalities or side effects associated with high-volume food processing. We focus on foodborne illness linked to two commodities: ground beef and bagged salad greens. In our analysis, we draw from the concepts of risk, reflexive modernization, and techniques of ethical neutralization. For each commodity, we find that systems organized for industrial goals overlook how production models foster cross-contamination and widespread outbreaks. Responses to outbreaks tend to rely (...) on technological fixes, which do not constitute the reflexive change needed to holistically and effectively address foodborne illness in the long term. We contend that powerful anti-reflexivity movements resist calls for reform and successfully maintain industrial goals and organization. Actions that thwart changes in agrifood systems to better protect consumers are unethical, yet they continue to be successful. We argue that specific techniques of ethical neutralization play an important part in their success. Research on anti-reflexivity and techniques of neutralization will serve to further expose the ethical issues associated with the industrial agrifood system and foster new guiding principles and organizational designs for food production. (shrink)

With “consumer demand” credited with driving major changes in the food industry related to food quality, safety, environmental, and social concerns, the contemporary politics of food has become characterized by a variety of attempts to redefine food consumption as an expression of citizenship that speaks of collective rights and responsibilities. Neoliberal political orthodoxy constructs such citizenship in terms of the ability of individuals to monitor and regulate their own behavior as entrepreneurs and as consumers. By contrast, many proponents of alternative (...) food networks promote the idea that food citizenship is expressed through participation in social arrangements based on solidarity and coordinated action rather than on contractual and commoditized relationships between so-called “producers” and “consumers.” This paper thus focuses its analysis on the strategies used to mobilize people as consumers of particular products and the ways, in turn, in which people use their consumption choices as expressions of social agency or citizenship. In particular, the paper examines how the marketing, pricing, and distribution of foods interact with food standards to enable and constrain specific expressions of food citizenship. It is argued that narrow and stereotypical constructions of the “ethical consumer” help to limit the access of particular people and environmental values, such as biodiversity, to the ethical marketplace. (shrink)

Topics related to ethical issues in agricultural production, particularly farm animal welfare, are increasingly featured in mainstream news media. Media representations of farm animal welfare issues are important because the media is a significant source of information, but also because the way that the issues are represented, or framed, defines these issues in particular ways, suggests causes or solutions, and provides moral evaluations. As such, analysis of media frames can reveal how issues are being made public and identify the cues (...) that audiences are given to help them make sense of complex ethical issues. Previous research on media frames and animal welfare has tended to focus on single issues or events; however we sought to identify whether media frames extended across different farm animal welfare-related issues to investigate whether there is any commonality between issues. We analysed articles published in the mainstream press in Australia between 2014 and 2016 related to farm animal welfare, and identified two dominant frames: that governments and the farm animal production industries cannot be trusted to ensure good farm animal welfare; and that consumers can act to improve animal welfare through ethical consumption. These frames have implications for how the Australian public interpret and understand the roles and responsibilities of different actors in the food production system. This research also contributes to discussion about the role of the media in shaping public opinion about ethical issues in agriculture and how, in turn, the media landscape itself is being shaped by consumer attitudes. (shrink)

Research on the nutrition transition often treats dietary changes as an outcome of increased trade and urban living. The Northern Food Crisis presents a puzzle since it involves hunger and changing diets, but coincides with a European ban on trade in seal products. I look to insights from economic sociology and decolonizing scholarship to make sense of the ban on seal products and its impacts. I examine how trade arrangements enact power imbalances in ways that are not always obvious. I (...) explain how the ban’s exemption for Inuit-produced seal goods explicitly aims to protect Inuit from the harshness of capitalism and preserve their traditions. In this respect, the Northern Food Crisis is an embodiment of European visions of who Inuit are expected to be and how they are supposed to act in the global economy. (shrink)

The Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society and the journal _Agriculture and Human Values_ provided a crucial intellectual space for the early transdisciplinary critique of the industrial agrifood system. This paper describes that process and presents the concept of “The Doctors of Agrifood Studies” as a metaphor for the key role critical agrifood social scientists played in documenting the unsustainability of conventional agriculture and working to create an alternative, ethical, sustainable agrifood system. After the introduction, the paper details the “Critical (...) Turn” in agrifood studies, followed by a reconsideration of my “Four Questions” framework, focusing on the current tension between the food security and food sovereignty discourses and movements. (shrink)