Rationale and Aims

Rationale

Food safety and security are high priority issues throughout Europe at present, the subject of intense government concern, public interest, media speculation and academic scrutiny. With few exceptions, however, academic research on food has been fragmented with too little interaction between food scientists, health researchers and social scientists. This project builds on the success of a recently completed research programme (Changing Families, Changing Food, 2005-8) which brought together an inter-disciplinary team of over 40 researchers from the food, health and social sciences to address the complex relationships between families and food which lie at the heart of current concerns about food safety and public health.

Aims

The CONANX project aims to take forward the findings of that programme regarding the socially embedded nature of contemporary food choice and to make a step change in our understanding of contemporary consumer anxiety through a focused and concerted programme of research on the political and moral economies of food. The project focuses on consumer anxieties about food at a range of geographic scales, from the global scale of international food markets to the domestic scale of individual households. The project is designed to lead to a major advance in our understanding of contemporary anxieties around food, with tangible effects on government policy and public health.

Political and moral economies of food

While much work has been done to establish the political-economy of the global agri-food system (well summarised by Morgan et al´s Worlds of Food, 2006), relatively little work has been devoted to understanding the social and cultural meanings that consumers invest in food and their commercial and political implications.

Our previous research (`Manufacturing meaning along the food commodity chain´, ESRC, 2003-7) has established that the meanings of food have direct commercial implications, even where these meanings are based on equivocal evidence (about the safety of GM foods, for example, or the health benefits of organic food). These meanings need to be better understood if they are to be incorporated into more effective and better targeted guidance on public health.

In our current research we argue that these issues are best addressed through combining a political-economy of food with a `moral economy´ approach which challenges the conventional dualism of morality and markets. This approach is outlined in more detail in the attached paper on `Moral economies of food and geographies of responsibility´ (Jackson et al. 2009).