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The Politics of Food: An Introduction
Marianne Elisabeth Lien
In recent years, food has emerged as a political topic par excellence. Capable of
connecting individual bodies to abstract communities and techno-scientific inno-
vations to moral concerns, food has become a highly charged and contested field.
Recent food scandals, such as the outbreak of BSE (bovine spongiform encepha-
lopathy) and the public debates over GMOs (genetically modified organisms) have
shattered the idea that ‘food is food’ as we always knew it, and have exposed fun-
damental dilemmas of modern food production related to risk and control. At the
same time, food is increasingly involved in controversies at a transnational level, in
relation to issues of access, dominance, trade and control in what is seen as a shared
global environment. Such controversies have placed food at the forefront of politi-
cal debates both within and between nationstates.
Not long ago, the term ‘Politics of Food’ would have drawn notice to a fairly
specific set of problems within a particular set of arenas. The politics of food would
have taken place within the domain of state bureaucracy. The term would have
denoted a range of issues such as food security, social inequality, nutrition policy
and agricultural policies. Focusing on the micro level, the politics of food could
also involve the gendered and unequal distribution of food and labour within the
household (Murcott, 1982; Charles and Kerr, 1988; Counihan, 1999). Going
beyond the level of the state, the term might have applied to the study of unfair
trade, the dominance of multinational corporations and food as a human right
(Eide et al, 1984). Most importantly, the term ‘politics of food’ would have focused
attention on the access to food at different levels of scale and the problems of
matching access to needs. In other words, seeing food as a source of nutrients, and
politics essentially as what political institutions did (or ought to have done), the
politics of food would have been located where the two came together.
Since then, the field has been extended in novel directions. In light of current
controversies, a purely institutional approach to food politics is, in itself, no longer
capable of capturing the vast array of connections that relate to food production,
Reprinted from Lien M E. ‘The politics of food: An introduction’, in Lien M E and Nerlich B (eds)
The Politics of Food, pp1–17 (Oxford: Berg Publishers, Copyright 2004). Reprinted by permission of
the publisher. All rights reserved.