The Politics of Food: An Introduction 79in the debate in the wake of the first diagnosis of BSE in a cow in the US in 2003 (cf.
The Guardian, 12 January 2003; http://www.oie.int/eng/press/en_031224.htm)..)
The problem of safety and transparency is not new. It was the basis for the
creation of regulatory systems for food control established as early as the 19th
century. Yet, we argue that with more abstract relations^2 between producer and
consumer, a weakening of expert authority (Beck, 1992) and frequent exposures of
food ‘scandals’ in public media, consumers sense even more strongly the impossi-
bility of being ‘fully informed’. As a result of what is experienced by some as a
‘knowledge deficit’, the politicization of food is more than ever a selective process
of choosing to highlight one particular issue out of myriad potential candidates.
Since the list is almost endless, the question of which items to politicize becomes a
political issue in itself.
At the same time, food is always locally embedded. The cultural, social and
moral context for the provision and consumption of food is also a local context.
Such local contexts filter which food-related issues are to surface on the public
agenda, and provide a framework within which such issues are constructed, inter-
preted, discussed and solved. In other words, all novel developments, from the
impact of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) on the English countryside to new tech-
nologies of genetic engineering, are always understood in the light of relations and
distinctions that are significant in relation to a local and familiar framework. Thus,
the discovery of BSE in the Czech Republic resonated with the prominent ambiv-
alence about East–West boundaries in the post-Soviet states, while the French
campaign against GMO was absorbed in an anti-American, anti-globalization
movement and expressed through promotion of French Roquefort. Similarly, the
British debate about the ‘foot-and-mouth’ epidemic tapped into a pre-existing
framework of urban consumer guilt about the greedy capitalist exploitation of the
local countryside, while transnational anti-whaling campaigns draw upon Euro-
American notions of individualism and family values to evoke sympathy for the
whales. In this way, controversies that may appear at first to be part of a discourse
that some scholars refer to as ‘transcultural’ (Milton, 1996, p170) turn out to be
strongly embedded in values and distinctions that are, in fact, highly specific.
Thus, in an era of so-called globalization, when it comes to food, the boundaries
between local concerns and global affairs are not easily drawn.
Why Food?
Much of what has been said so far about transformed processes of production and
globalized systems of provision could have been said about a whole range of mate-
rial products, such as textiles, petroleum, hardwood, pharmaceuticals and more.
Yet, several features make food a unique phenomenon, more profoundly absorbed
in complex relations than any other product, and yet different from everything
else. What is so special about food?