From the risk society to risk practice: organic food, embodiment and modernity in Sicily

Abstract

This article uses ethnography from the city of Palermo (Italy) to analyze organic food’s role in the culinary anxieties that characterize late modernity. Popular interpretations see the organic phenomenon as the product of a new kind of society in which some consumers regularly reflect on various sorts of environmental risk and how to avoid them. The article argues that this interpretation, while not without empirical grounding, is limited by the privileging of cognitive forms of knowledge over embodied ones in people’s relationship to food. Distinguishing between the risk society and risk practice, the article discusses the concomitant importance of forms of knowledge based on the body, the senses, and corporeal memory, showing how the cognitive and the embodied influence each other to form a local risk culture of organic foods.

Keywords:

• Organic food
• risk modernity
• reflexivity
• practice theory
• body
• senses
• memory
• Sicily
• Italy

Acknowledgments

Cindy Isenhour, Harry West and Richard Wilk offered helpful comments on an early version of this article, which also benefited from being presented at the SOAS Food Studies Centre. Further improvements came from Amy Bentley and the two anonymous reviewers at Food, Culture & Society.

Notes

1. It should be noted that opposition to GMOs is not universal. See Finucane and Holup (2005) for a useful review of psychosocial and cultural factors affecting the perception of GMOs.

2. Other consumers are reflexive but lack the resources to consume on that basis. See Meah and Watson (2013), some of whose respondents argue that morality is “a privilege of the rich.”

3. The continuing occurrence of food scandals reveals the process of erasure that feeds this invented tradition. In 2014, Italian salami packets with traces of the potentially lethal bacterium Escherichia coli were withdrawn from the market (RASFF (Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed) 2014). In 1986, twenty-one people were killed after drinking wine adulterated with methanol. In 1974, the authorities discovered pasta made with common, instead of durum, wheat (Helstosky 2004, 213). Even back in 1958, olive oil was being made with donkey fat colored with chlorophyll (Scarpellini 2014, 192).

4. The Mafia controls a large share of agricultural production and distribution in Sicily, and the contribution of criminal organizations to environmental disasters on Italian territory is notorious. I have left out these aspects of risk for reasons of space.

5. Solidarity purchase groups are a distinctively Italian version of short food supply chain similar to community-supported agriculture.

6. Women are known to have, on average, lower risk thresholds (Micheletti 2004).

7. The problems raised by alternative forms of consumption in terms of food justice have been extensively researched. See for example Alkon and Agyeman (2011).

8. The woman’s words and veiled sense of guilt resemble what Jackson (2015, 159) describes as “unapologetic apology … a public expression of regret [that] is followed by a rationalization which suggests that no apology is actually required.”

9. Research has shown that many consumers view labels’ “technical logic” (Jackson 2015, 157) with considerable skepticism. This is due to all sorts of reasons, from the changing nature of expert advice to the meddling of the “nanny state,” to the marketing pressure of large retailers (e.g., Meah 2014).

10. See the case of the National Nutrition Institute discussed by Helstosky (2004, 147).

11. The word poison appeared related to what MacKendrick (2010) calls “body burdens,” the total contaminant load that results from multiple harmful substances accumulating in one’s body.

12. Elsewhere (Orlando 2012) I have argued that a further element to consider would be class differentiation in the Bourdieusian sense, or what Paddock (2016) calls “distinctive practice.”

13. See the collection by Domingos, Sobral, and West (2014) for an exploration of the role of rural imaginaries in contemporary food culture.

14. Sutton was speaking during the SOAS Food Studies Centre Distinguished Lecture Series. The video of the lecture can be found at https://www.soas.ac.uk/foodstudies/forum/lectures/16mar2016-let-them-eat-stuffed-peppers-an-argument-of-images-on-the-role-of-food-in-understanding-ne.html (accessed January 6, 2017). I have written a blog post about the lecture here https://altfoodcrisis.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/let-them-eat-stuffed-peppers-david-sutton-on-food-and-neoliberal-austerity-in-greece/ (accessed February 18, 2017).