Discovering quality or performing taste?

Abstract

This multiauthor book deals with different aspects of food quality. It brings together a number of contrasting approaches to quality of food. The eight chapters are loosely organized into three parts: theoretical and conceptual issues; formal and informal regulation processes; social and political response to industrialized food production and mass consumption. Chapter one briefly reviews existing disciplinary approaches to understanding judgments about taste, presents empirical examples using music and wine, and gives an account of taste based on the ethnomethodology. Chapter two analyses the social theory by Schulze, outlines the principles of consumer demand and supply, discusses the social world perspective including types of involvement and segmentation process, and identifies social worlds. Chapter three explores economic theories of quality and the central dilemmas addressed by these, especially in relation to food quality. In addition, a different approach is developed to understand how shared cognitive integrations, embracing producers, intermediaries and consumers, is essential to the overall constitution of food quality. Chapter four presents a brief history of the development of the halal market in France and suggests that the consumer, through the retailer, possesses control over the definition of the halal quality of meat. Chapter five examines the ways in which food agencies in the UK and European Union (EU), through its scope and action, represent international responses to wider food quality concerns; explains some key decisions by the EU within a framework of multilevel governance; emphasizes the influence of institutions, their operating procedures and practices as shaping factors of public policy; discusses food safety regulation and policy reform in the UK and at the international level. Chapter six evaluates ideas of quality in the context of the development and regulation of food supply chains with reference to some European research and current British experience; explores the diversity and impact of short food supply chains; and presents a case study of the retailer-led conventional chains in the UK during the bovine spongiform encephalopathy and foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks. Chapter seven investigates some contemporary understanding of quality prevalent within alternative food markets and networks; assesses alternative conceptions of quality from the perspective of aesthetics; considers the relationship between economic and aesthetic discourses in the food sector; identifies a process of market aestheticization in which economic concerns configure the quality of given foodstuffs; investigates the role of new social movements in heightening awareness of the economic, social and environmental relationships that surround foodstuffs; focuses on three main characteristics of food (local provenance, environmental qualities and social significance). Chapter eight discusses the political morality of food consumption and proposes a classification of alternative consumption activities and illustrates them with some examples of recent consumer movements and boycott. The conclusion reviews alternative approaches featured in the preceding chapters to assess progress towards a better conceptualization of food quality. Areas that require further studies are considered, including biology and ecology, history and cuisine, cooking and eating, innovation and competition. Researchers and students in all social science disciplines that are concerned with food (marketing, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, human nutrition and economics) will find this book interesting and very useful.