Re-embedding trust: unravelling the construction of modern diets

Abstract

Recent controversies surrounding the food industry and its contribution to diet-related illnesses provide fertile ground for re-examining where power lies in food systems. A review of the literature reveals a wide range of powerful actors, contradictory assessments about consumer power and numerous examples of producers and medical authorities expending significant effort to shape the criteria by which consumers exercise choice. Expertise from the fields of marketing, advertising, psychology and nutrition science has been marshalled for close to a century to create commodity contexts that are sympathetic to mass-produced foods. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, a new dynamic entered the equation: the battle between technical rationality and reflexive consumers. Consumers are questioning the credentials of foods and those who promote them and, simultaneously, are seeking hope and help from the food system. As a result, health claims have become a most important ingredient in the fight for competitive advantage. This paper describes how the re-embedding of trust in a food supply dominated by corporations is being attempted through the nutritionalization of the food supply. On the basis of two studies, the authors identify the actors, processes, ideological basis and points of resistance that comprise what they are terming an emergent ‘diets-making complex’ (DMC). By intensifying the influence of science and nutritional claims in dietary discourse, the DMC has the potential to circumscribe policy options about food and health, because appeals to individual health are obscuring a social view of the food supply.

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the contribution by Colin Sindall to the idea of the ‘diets-making complex’ and to the early theoretical development of this paper. We also wish to thank Dr Colin Butler for making helpful suggestions to an earlier draft.