Horsemeat-gate

Abstract

Academic and lay debates about food variously articulate the ways in which contemporary food provisioning systems are inherently problematic and unstable. Drawing evidence from the seeming prevalence of adulteration scandals, moral panics and other food crises, these debates reproduce a set of entangled moral discourses about food, its consumption and production. Within these discourses, ideological lines are drawn, and particular types of consumers (typically poor and working class), particular types of producers (those that produce for the agri-industrial food complex) and particular types of retailers (typically “budget” and “corporate” supermarkets) are vilified as the loci of all that is supposedly wrong with food. Missing, however, is a more nuanced social and cultural reading that unpacks these discourses and analyses failings within food through multiple lenses such as class, social deprivation, and their multi-scaler geographical implications. Using the recent horsemeat scandals that dominated headlines in spring 2013, the purpose of this commentary is to unpack and disentangle these discourses of food. We argue that “what is wrong with food” is less related to its systems of provision, but rather more the ways its various agents are discursively cast and subsequently moralized as perpetrators of a globalized and industrial food system

Keywords:

• fraught food
• supply networks
• food safety
• neoliberalism
• agri-industrial food
• buying local
• food nationalism
• discursive formations

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emma-Jayne Abbots

Emma-Jayne Abbots is Lecturer in Anthropology at the School of Archaeology, History and Anthropology, University of Wales Trinity Saint David and a Research Associate at the SOAS Food Studies Centre, University of London. Her research interests center on the cultural politics and practices of consumption, with a particular interest in food and eating. She is the co-editor of Why We Eat, How We Eat: Contemporary Encounters Between Food and Bodies (Ashgate 2013). School of Archaeology, History and Anthropology, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter Ceredigion, SA48 7ED, UK ([email protected]).

Benjamin Coles

Benjamin Coles is a lecturer in Economic and Political Geography in the Department of Geography, University of Leicester. His research interests centre on place and placemaking, markets and the geographies of commodities, with particular interests in food. Department of Geography, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK ([email protected]).