Food, technology, and trust: an introduction

Trust is a fundamental prerequisite for human existence. Without trust we cannot leave our bed in the morning, although even staying in bed is risky because the bed, or even worse the roof, could collapse. Trust is thus a way of facing the fact that we have to live with a certain amount of risk. The modern understanding of risk presupposes accountably‐acting subjects or institutions that make decisions under conditions of uncertainty. This uncertainty is considered to be measurable and therefore controllable. ¹ However, during the twentieth century, an age of catastrophes as it was paradigmatically characterized, it was the experience of nuclear explosions that dramatically increased the sensitivity to potential hazards derived from achievements in science and engineering and therefore called for more and new research on risk. ² Reactor safety studies became a landmark in risk analysis and this type of study later achieved relevance in many more areas. ³ The post‐World War II interest in risk and risk analysis, however, did not decrease but heightened awareness of the prevalence and possible effect of hazards.

For risk to become acceptable in social and political life, though, one precondition has been required: trust. Anthony Giddens has stated that our experience of security rests upon a balance of trust and acceptable risk. ⁴ In recent decades, the food sector – the subject of this special issue – has been a site of an increasingly serious challenge and negotiation as to what constitutes such balance. Indeed, a mounting number of food‐related scandals, scares and recalls have resulted in a dramatic decrease in the public's trust in food, even though food has been increasingly regulated to ensure its safety.

Lack of trust in the safety of food represents an alarming situation for the late modern world because ensuring the safety of food is one of the basic tasks of human society. The key problem with trust in food results from what French sociologist Claude Fishler called the omnivore's paradox. ⁵ Omnivores have the freedom of choice, but the constraint of variety. The various nutrients required by our metabolism can only be obtained by consuming a wide range of foods. This, however, requires humans to differentiate between what is edible and what is not. In pre‐modern societies, the classification of foods was embedded in religious taboos, ritual meals and local cuisine. These practices strengthened the cohesion of local and religious communities and their identity, but the advent of modernity has changed the conditions for securing food safety. With the emergence of the nation‐state as the basic framework for politics and culture and with secularization in its wake, local communities and religion have lost much of their authority to guarantee the safety of foods. Thus, since the mid‐nineteenth century, and especially in the post‐World War I period, the identification of trustworthy food gradually shifted from smaller, regional or ethnic communities to the nation‐state, big business, and science. To be sure, this set of conditions is far from universal but bound to a specific modern context, namely that of the Western, industrialized, capitalist world. This is the stage upon which all our case studies have been performed.

This shift coincided with a growing distance between the field and the fork, stemming from the industrialization of the food system. Food items as well as the food chain changed radically. Imposing the logic of industry onto the business of farming transformed the produce of nature into industrial products. Industrialized food chains increasingly relied on the mechanization of natural reproduction, growth and decay in order to overcome the unpredictability and endless variety of natural growth as well as the dependence on meteorological and climatic constraints. Industrialization also enabled producers to circumvent the perishable nature of organic goods, and resulted in a consolidation of the food system into a closely interlinked system of production, processing, distribution and consumption. Since an increasing number of actors and institutions mediated between the field and the fork in order to produce, process, preserve and purchase a mechanized organic substance for human digestion, the process of ensuring that the provision of food was trustworthy and reliable had to change. State agencies, food providers on the market as well as consumers and their representatives, emerged as the three groups that had to collaborate in one way or another to make sure that food is safe and thus a reliable object of trust.

If we want to learn how trust has been built, lost and regained in relation to food we must first grapple with the concept of trust. The encyclopaedias of the eighteenth century already named different subjects and contexts of trust. The knowledge collectors in the age of Enlightenment singled out faith in God as the prevailing form of trust, but they also mentioned the trust of the patient in his or her doctor, the trust among merchants, the trust of soldiers in their general, and the trust of the faithful Catholics in their confessors. ⁶ Thus, enlightened philosophers thought of trust either in terms of faith or of social relationships. The latter concept went all the way back to Antiquity since the earliest social theorists already reflected on the trust‐dependency of social order. Later on, early modern authors of ethical writings pondered on the relationship between trust, truthfulness and social order. The problem was spelled out in greatest detail by the eighteenth century Scottish moral philosophers who saw the stability of social order as hinged on trusting that its members would keep their promises and speak the truth. Social scientists of the modern age continued to investigate the phenomenon of trust.

At the turn of the last century, the German cultural sociologist Georg Simmel provided a most elaborate framework of concepts on trust. He used the term confidence synonymously with trust. To describe the nature of confidence/trust, Simmel referred to faith and knowledge. He explained trust as a kind of universal faith in the enduring conditions of human existence as well as a specific balance between knowing and not knowing. Especially the latter part is of interest to us. ‘Confidence, as the hypothesis of future conduct, which is sure enough to become the basis of practical action, is, as hypothesis, a mediate condition between knowing and not knowing another person. … Whatever quantities of knowing and not knowing must commingle, in order to make possible the detailed practical decision based upon confidence, will be determined by the historic epoch, the ranges of interests, and the individuals.’ ⁷ Thus, Simmel's notion of trust has an essentially historical element as the appropriate balance between knowing and not knowing is fundamentally determined by the historical context. He further spelled out that in a given societal context, a customary distribution of knowledge would emerge and allow people to act based on a learned and experienced relation to knowing and trusting. Or to put it in his words: ‘The objectification of culture … has sharply differentiated the amounts of knowing and not knowing essential as the condition of confidence. The modern merchant who enters into a transaction with another, the scholar who undertakes an investigation with another, the leader of a political party who makes an agreement with the leader of another party with reference to an election, or the handling of a proposed bill – all these … know, with reference to their associates, precisely what it is necessary to know for the purposes of the relationship in question. The traditions and institutions, the force of public opinion, and the circumscription of the situation … are so fixed and reliable that one only needs to know certain externalities with reference to the other in order to have the confidence necessary for the associated action.’ ⁸ While the sociologist Simmel described a stabilized situation in order to understand the workings of trust, a historian would need to analyze how a given situation could emerge, persist and collapse. This is what our case studies are about.

Of course, many more sociologists have made noteworthy contributions to the understanding of trust. We will refer here to at least two more researchers who informed our thinking about trust. Niklas Luhmann analyzed trust as a mechanism for the reduction of social complexity. ⁹ We reduce complexity through trust when we make decisions that are consciously based on incomplete knowledge. For example we accept the advice of a friend about the best restaurant in a distant city we have never been before. While Luhmann took up many of Simmel's concepts, he put more emphasis on the relation of trust and risk and differentiated between trust and confidence. According to him, confidence is related to a positive expectation of future conduct, which is beyond our command or influence, based on lived experience and the hope that the familiar world will continue to exist in the same way. ¹⁰ In contrast with confidence, trust is related to systems. Trust assumes that systems work because they have inbuilt control mechanisms. ¹¹ Therefore, trust is closely connected with distrust, as the latter is a condition for the working of the former. Luhmann explained this further with regard to trust in systems of knowledge. Systems of knowledge are arrangements of communicative behaviour that should guarantee the compliance with certain rules when selecting and using premises of an utterance. When acquiring knowledge everybody trusts that the system has deeply inbuilt reliability controls and thus nobody needs to be personally acquainted with the producer of this knowledge. ¹² With inbuilt control mechanisms, systems institutionalize distrust in order to secure the trustworthiness of the system. We will see that food controls or procedures of approval for marketing food product innovations are such forms of institutionalized distrust.

Anthony Giddens also inspired our reflections on trust. He developed his concept of trust as an important element of his ideas on the consequences of modernity. For him, the dissociation between time and space and the development of disembedding mechanisms are important sources for the dynamism of modernity. One crucial disembedding mechanism is professional knowledge or expertise. We rely on the latter in our everyday lives when we drive a car or buy groceries in the supermarket. Trust is the most important precondition for the workings of disembedding mechanisms because trust conveys faith in the rightness of principles that we are not aware of. ¹³ Trust is connected to the task of minimizing danger. The minimum danger is the acceptable risk that we take into account when we make a decision. We feel secure enough to make a decision provided that we can trust that potential dangers are known and that the risks are acceptably low. We consume food on a daily basis although we have just a partial knowledge about its origin and the way it was produced. So, in our food consumption, we need to trust the safety of food or at least assume that the risk of contracting a food‐borne disease is acceptably low. This is what Giddens meant when he defined safety as a balance between trust and acceptable risk. ¹⁴ But how do we build trust? Giddens highlighted points of access where laypersons meet experts or other representatives of abstract systems. At these points of access, the faceless relations to abstract systems are suddenly transformed into face‐to‐face connections between people of flesh and blood. Here trust can be built based on an embodied performance of trustworthiness by the representatives of abstract systems. ¹⁵ Food marketers use such points of access when they send demonstrators of new food products to public food markets or to private households to promote their adoption.

All of the above‐mentioned authors have extensively explored trust as the cement of social order, but concurrently it is also the cement of the cognitive order. ¹⁶ As Steven Shapin points out, we trust in researchers, educators and their sources when we appropriate new knowledge. We take much of our empirical knowledge for granted on the basis of the trustworthiness of the sources we have relied on, and the notion of plausible knowledge can be thought of as institutionalized trust. ¹⁷ Shapin concludes that trust forms the moral bond of science. ¹⁸ Thus, it is not just the relationship between experts and laypersons that is built on trust. Similarly, the relations within science‐based expert systems also depend on trust. But trust as the moral bond of science is effective only when it allows us to reach a consensus for the sake of attaining scientific truth. To this end, trust as the cement of the cognitive order was accompanied by a new epistemological virtue. This is what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison call mechanical objectivity or structural objectivity respectively as the more pronounced version of the twentieth century. ¹⁹ It implied making knowledge impersonal and proved to be most successful when resorting to quantification. As the latter is based on the potential of numbers to frame knowledge in a universal language – Porter concludes – ‘quantification is preeminent among the means by which science has been constructed as a global network rather than merely a collection of local research communities.’ ²⁰ At the same time when quantification works as a strategy to achieve objectivity it also operates as a technology of trust. It is an anonymous and institutional form of trust based on the authority of rules about how to use numbers. Quantification, for example, also proves a cornerstone of food labelling and controlling with their reliance on average nutrient percentages or acceptable levels of (potentially toxic) additives. Thus, social theories and the history of science provide a broad array of notions on trust.

In order to historicize the idea of trust, the concept of trust regimes is a useful starting point. Sassatelli and Scott introduced the idea of trust regimes as they attempted to understand national differences in confidence‐building strategies related to food. ²¹ Differentiating between an embedded and thus more particularistic and personalized regime and a disembedded and thus more universalistic and institutionalized regime, they defined trust regimes via structural characteristics. We, however, want to broaden the notion of regimes – by adopting a historical perspective. Regimes here are broadly understood as historically specific sets of conditions that constitute a social pattern or an institution, which again are prone to evolve with changing conditions. A historical perspective reveals a broader array of trust regimes. For example, the authors of the case study on Norwegian chocolate in this issue discovered and explored at least three different trust regimes, the confectioners' regime, the engineering regime and the marketing regime. In contrast, the Heinz company relied on a premodern trust regime that was based on Christianity as Petrick's study has shown, and central to Spiekermann's and Zachmann's cases are science‐based trust regimes.

The collection of articles in this special issue explores the complex relationship between food, technology, and trust. We want to examine how trust is built, maintained or challenged within industrialized food systems. Therefore, we will explore trust as created and negotiated through historically contingent processes and investigate how various actors and institutions have perceived food safety and sought to materialize it accordingly. We will literally follow the ways in which food came to be deemed safe and trustworthy since we assume that a broad range of actors such as manufacturers, engineers, marketers, food retailers, housewives or other consumer representatives, state health officials, doctors, scientists from a broad range of disciplines such as food chemistry, veterinary medicine, physiology and some others as well as politicians, educators and the military were involved in some way in building trust in food. It was open discussions, negotiations and controversies as well as the production of norms, policies and policy instruments, such as technologies, that contributed to the building of trust. By historicizing the concept of trust, by exploring the many‐faceted processes that contributed to trust in different countries and at different periods, we will examine what trust meant to the various actors involved and how it was constituted in relation to food. Finally, with regard to the actors, we want to know whether the determining agency within evolving trust regimes shifted from producers to mediators and to consumers. This agency shift hypothesis is plausible because modern information and communication technologies as well as logistics facilitated a redirection in the balance of power along the food and goods supply chains at the end of the twentieth century. ²²

With these questions, we are opening a new area of investigation. To be sure, the relationship between technology and food has already come under close scrutiny in recent decades when historians of technology started to delve into the industrialization of organisms and food chains in order to understand the origins and dynamics of the so‐called New Food Economy and the Third Agricultural Revolution. ²³ Historians of technology analyzed the transition of agriculture from a provider of energy based on the bio‐conversion of sunlight to a consumer of energy stored in fossil resources. ²⁴ They closely followed the transformation of food chains into increasingly interconnected technical systems that erased traditional distinctions and boundaries between the countryside and the city, agriculture and industry and also between organic produce and mechanically manufactured artefacts. ²⁵ A German philosopher coined the term ‘biofacts’ in order to characterize living beings as hybrids when they are no longer autonomous in their evolution and growth. ²⁶ Do we not produce and consume such ‘biofacts’ on an ever increasing scale, such as for example, industrialized chickens, genetically modified tomatoes or farm‐raised salmon? ²⁷ Many studies have shown how the logic of nature with its inbuilt endless variety was superseded by the engineering logic of the one best way that informed the breeding concept for dairy cows or laying hens as single‐purpose‐animals. ²⁸ Besides farming and breeding, food manufacturing and retailing have also attracted increasing scholarly attention. These studies reveal a growing influence of manufacturers and retailers on the organization of systems of food provisioning with the effect of degrading farmers to contractors of manufacturers or retailers. ²⁹ This reorganized system, which food economist Jane Kinsey has called the ‘New Food Economy,’ featured knowledge and information as decisive criteria for the various actors' success in food chains, such as farmers, their suppliers, food industrialists, retailers, and consumers. It furthermore enhanced the importance and influence of food processing and distribution as connecting joints in the food chain and thus advanced food marketing to a major activity in the system. ³⁰ The New Food Economy facilitated an increasing distance between the field and the fork and therefore severed the local, regional, and national dimensions of food‐chains from their material origins. All these above‐mentioned changes, which have meanwhile come under the close scrutiny of historians of technology, have transformed trust into a major issue for the workings of modern food systems. The relationship between food and trust has also generated increasing interest in historical, social and cultural food studies in order to better understand the paradoxes of late modern food systems as they strove to increase trust via stricter regulations. However, this goal has only been partly and very unevenly achieved and most efforts have instead resulted in increased distrust. ³¹ What is new in the proposed special issue is our view of the tripartite relationship between food, technology, and trust, and our effort to understand how technologies have both strengthened and challenged our trust in food.

Gabriella Petrick tells us the story of the Pittsburgh entrepreneur Heinz, a producer of industrial food who relied on a premodern trust regime for boosting his product innovation in the last four decades prior to World War I. In the same way as people in traditional societies sublimated their fears about the uncertainty of everyday life through faith in God, Heinz marketed his products under the brand of applied Christianity. Based on his religious convictions, he forged a moral contract with the consumers of his products. Thus, for him, Christianity worked as a central motivating force in making and selling pure foods. The purity and thus trustworthiness of his products was established on several levels – within production through a paternalistic management of employees according to an ideal of purity, on the market through sales personnel who did not just sell Heinz products but also the ideal of a religiously based purity and, finally, at the threshold of private homes through demonstrators who translated the meaning of Heinz commodities, i.e. purity, to consumers. Whereas Heinz referred to a traditional value system to imbue his products with meaning and thus build trust, his methods proved thoroughly modern. Modern food processing machinery, mass production, standardization, industrial packaging and labeling were implemented under the banner of applied Christianity. He thus built faith in his product, his company and his employees. During a period of growing uncertainty and with the threat of not being able to keep pace with all the changes entailed by industrialization, urbanization, migration as well as the destabilization of an established social and gender order, the reference to a vanishing value system worked well for building trust in industrial food.

At the same time that Heinz managed to derive trust from traditional values, nation‐states on both sides of the Atlantic mobilized science in order to ground trust in modern systems of food provisioning. Uwe Spiekermann thus investigates how national legislators strove to establish an infrastructure of food control through enforcing nationwide food laws that were to supersede local regulations. As the increasing industrialization of food systems led to a spatio‐temporal extension of food chains and as an increasing number of new food manufacturers introduced a whole range of product innovations on the market, traditional ways of assessing the quality of foods failed. Complaints about food adulteration began to make headlines in the press. These complaints were too often read as protests against consumer fraud while the public debate over food adulteration expressed first and foremost concern about rapidly changing food products and a desire to regain transparency on the food market. State‐controlled food quality, however, was initially in the interest of producers because they needed trust in the reliability of markets in order to risk investments and innovations. Food laws, however, provided just the framework for controls but they had to be supplemented with food standards as benchmarks for proving food quality. Spiekermann convincingly shows that it was scientists working in the newly established field of food chemistry who promoted their approach of analyzing food as a compound of nutrients in order to enforce food standards. With the nutrients paradigm, food chemists could use the quantification tool as a technology of trust because numbers (percentages of nutrients used to define food quality) lent the appeal of objectivity to the established standards. The science‐based trust regime, however, succeeded at different paces and to various degrees in the nations that Spiekermann covers in his investigation. Nevertheless, besides the increasing appeal of science and quantification, the trust regimes in these case studies shared a second common feature. It was first and foremost producer‐driven whereas more consumer‐based food reform movements did not get a say in the establishment of the scientifically grounded and legally anchored trust regime at the turn of the last century.

With food standards and institutionalized food quality controls, the science‐based trust regime gained a foothold in national food legislation, but the accelerating pace of food product and process innovations posed new challenges to the question of how to prove the trustworthiness of new food products. It was the rapidly increasing use of food additives together with heightened health concerns resulting from new knowledge on cancer‐causing or toxic substances that prompted food legislators in the USA, in Germany and elsewhere to modify existing trust regimes. The food additives amendments of the 1950s codified procedures of approval that required food producers to prove the safety of new food additives prior to marketing. Thus legislators deemed all new additives to be unsafe unless the producers had given evidence to the contrary. In doing so, they institutionalized distrust in order to strengthen the trustworthiness of established industrialized food chains.

This changing trust regime was to have a tremendous effect when, against the backdrop of the Cold War, protagonists in many countries sought to develop food irradiation as a new food safety technology. Karin Zachmann narrates the story of how US and German as well as international actors wanted to capitalize on the widely perceived blessing of the atom when they tried to put it to use for food preservation. However, after the food additives regulators determined to treat irradiation as if it were an additive, legislators forbade food irradiation across the board. At the same time, they offered approvals for irradiating specific food items if the applicants could prove the harmlessness of the treatment. To this end, the activists of national food irradiation programs, with the help of international institutions such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the World Health Organization (WHO), developed the concept of wholesomeness and set up wholesomeness studies in order to develop appropriate data for proving the safety of irradiated food. Zachmann explores how the food additives approach clashed with the science‐based trust regime and resulted in abandoning the additives procedure in favour of the process approach. Defining food irradiation as a process allowed for the introduction of a dose limit for food irradiation and thus sought to maintain the science‐based trust regime – a regime built on the premise of trust in numbers and the concept of limits to bodies' self‐detoxifying potential. While the international players IAEA, FAO and WHO hoped to build trust in irradiated foods by drawing a clear dividing line between a harmless and a more risky amount of irradiation, national legislators noticeably differed in their reactions to the internationally recommended safety standard. Because guaranteeing food safety continued to be an important task of the nation state, national legislators made their own comparisons between benefits and risks. Therefore, the account of food irradiation history during the Cold War reveals the contested character of the science‐based trust regime as well as the many different actors who negotiated and occasionally changed prevailing trust regimes.

The last case study in our special issue puts a collapsing trust regime centre stage and deals with the question of how trust was built and how it could be rebuilt after it had collapsed. Similarly to our first story, the last one also frames its explorations on trust‐building processes within the experience of a specific company. Based on the history of a brand of Norwegian chocolate – the Stratos chocolate bar, Stig Kvaal and Per Østby uncover the succession of three different, context‐dependent trust regimes that were used by Trondheim's candy company Nidar to ensure the safety of their products. The confectionary system, as the oldest established network, rested on close ties between the company, its workers and the consumers. Confectioners as product innovators proved to be as important as city health regulations and as the paternalism of the manufacturer in the building of trust. Since the 1930s, however, the more locally bound trust regime was extended by national players. Engineers took the lead when they introduced new technologies that had been developed at the national level or transferred from abroad as, for example, from the USA in the wake of the Marshall Plan. National health legislation set up laws to supervise the hygienic conditions of manufacturing. Furthermore, the company set up a Board of Housewives as a test panel for new products, but finally, the engineer regime was supplemented by the promotion regime as the enterprise pushed advertising to equip its branded chocolate bar with an image that could be culturally connected to the needs and desires of the Norwegian society of the time. As long as all these different aspects interacted smoothly, their role as trust‐building factors remained hidden, but the outbreak of a salmonella crisis opened the black‐boxed trust regime since it required the company's management to retie the broken connections in order to establish a new trust regime. Kvaal and Østby found out that Nidar's managers succeeded with a technological and a cultural fix to the problem. They regained trust through reorganizing the whole manufacturing process and creating a new identity for their product. Hence, this product‐centred investigation of the connection between food, technology, and trust highlights the multidimensional but simultaneously highly precarious constellation that is necessary for building and maintaining trust.

Notes

1. Beck, Risikogesellschaft; Bonß, Vom Risiko.

2. It was Eric Hobsbawm who characterized the first half of the twentieth century as an age of catastrophes (Hobsbawm, Das Zeitalter der Extreme).

3. Rip, Mutual Dependence.

4. Giddens, Konsequenzen.

5. Fischler, ‘Food, Self and Identity.’ Michael Pollan popularized Fischler's idea in his book, The Omnivore's Dilemma.

6. Frevert, ‘Vertrauen.’

7. Simmel, ‘The Sociology of Secrecy,’ 450.

8. Ibid., 450–1.

9. Luhmann, Vertrauen.

10. Ibid., 23.

11. Ibid., 37.

12. Ibid., 69.

13. Giddens, Konsequenzen, 48–9.

14. Ibid., 50–1.

15. Ibid., 109–13.

16. Shapin, A Social History, 36.

17. Ibid., 22.

18. Ibid., 7.

19. Daston and Galison, Objektivität.

20. Porter, Trust in Numbers.

21. Sassatelli and Scott, ‘Novel Food,’ 239.

22. Kinsey, ‘The New Food Economy’ and Cortada, The Digital Hand, 296–305.

23. One of the first and still one of the best explorations of the mechanization of food and consequentially of taste is in Giedion, Mechanization. Since then, a range of dissertations have tackled this field under the history of technology rubric. For the USA, see Wilde, ‘Industrialization of Food Processing’; Petrick, ‘The Arbiters of Taste.’ A whole range of new books and articles have come out in the last few years. See, for example, Belasco and Scranton, Food Nations; Teuteberg, Die Revolution; Schollier, Sarasua, and Van Molle, Land, Shops and Kitchens; Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory.

24. Smil, Enriching the Earth; Smil, Feeding the World.

25. Cronon, Nature's Metropolis.

26. Karafyllis, ‘Das Wesen der Biofakte.’

27. Schrepfer and Scranton, Industrializing Organisms; Horowitz, Putting Meat; Godley and Williams, ‘Democratizing Luxury’; Poutrus, Die Erfindung; Boyd, ‘Making Meat’; Warman, Corn & Capitalism.

28. Orland, ‘Turbo‐Cows’; Bugos, ‘Intellectual Property.’

29. Hamilton, Trucking Country; Belasco and Horowitz, Food Chains.

30. Kinsey, ‘The New Food Economy.’

31. Stanianzi, ‘Negotiating Innovation’; Kjærnes, Harvey, and Warde, Trust in Food; Bildtgard, ‘Trust in Food’; Van Otterloo, ‘The Development.’