76 The Global Food System
distribution and consumption. We do not argue here that institutional approaches to
the politics of food are irrelevant, nor that the issues of need, access, nutrition policies
and global inequalities are less important today than they were a generation ago (see
Pottier, 1999; Hart, 2001). Rather, we argue that contemporary issues require that
our notion of the politics of food is expanded to fields and arenas not traditionally
thought of as ‘political’. Accordingly, our aim is to draw attention to some of the less
obvious ways in which food is politicized. Most contributions to this book are inspired
by anthropological perspectives on food and eating, and many apply an ethnographic
approach. Yet, this book is not strictly anthropological, as it draws on insights and
methods that are central also to other disciplines in the humanities and social sci-
ences, most notably linguistics, political science, history and sociology.
To indicate that the politics of food takes place both inside and outside the
arenas normally designated as political is to draw attention to controversy, hegem-
ony, resistance and conflicts of interest that underlie both the structuring of food
choice and the structuring of public and media agendas. But it also implies draw-
ing attention to how food itself has become a political object. These issues are
elaborated in the introduction. But first, let us briefly recapitulate some events that
have changed the way we think about the food we eat.
What Happened? Transformations of Substance and Scale
A notion of risk has been introduced. When in 1996 a UK laboratory demon-
strated the suspected link between BSE in British cows and the rare and mortal
brain disease in humans called vCJD (a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease), the
event provoked chain reactions all over the world. Apart from making headlines in
most European newspapers and causing a worldwide ban on British beef, the event
epitomizes what, in hindsight, may be seen as the emergence of both a new aware-
ness of risk and an increased distrust in political institutions as key issues in public
debates about food in Europe, and subsequently also in the US.^1 The case of BSE
in Britain demonstrated for many that government officials could not be trusted
(a picture of the then UK Minister of Agriculture feeding his daughter a beefbur-
ger to prove its safety was circulated widely across Europe). It also exposed how the
beef industry, seeking to cut expenses, had used bovine meat in the production of
feed for bovine animals, thus transgressing the rule that, until then, had largely
remained unspoken, namely that herbivores should not be forced to feed on spe-
cies of their own kind – a type of cannibalism. This practice might never have
become public knowledge had it not been for the fact that temperatures used in
feed production were turned down (another cost-cutting measure), thus allowing
the prions causing BSE to migrate from contaminated carcasses to healthy cows and,
in turn, across species boundaries to human consumers (Franklin, 1999). In this way,
the case of BSE also became a vivid illustration of commercial greed, of inept food-
safety authorities, untrustworthy politicians and a nature that, according to media