Food Transgressions
Lewis Holloway2016, Food Transgressions
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Abstract
Mike Goodman and Colin Sage (eds.) (2015) Food Transgressions: Making Sense of Contemporary Food Politics. London, Ashgate, pp.155-180) 'reconnection' are being defined and enacted in different ways in different systems. In sum, then, the chapter is interested in a number of different entanglements: first, between different livestock breeding knowledgepractices, second, between different modes of food production-consumption, and third, between the various humans and nonhumans in meat supply networks. Power, knowledge and life That foodin terms of the way it is produced, processed, retailed and consumedis political, has long been recognised. Detailed examinations of the changing political economies of agriculture produced during the 1980s and 1990s focused, for example, on the problematic position of relatively small, independent farm businesses vis-à-vis processes of integration and corporatisation in the wider capitalist economy (e.g. Marsden et al 1986a, 1986b, 1987, 1992). More specifically, and more relevant to the theme of this chapter, studies examined the changing agricultural bioeconomy, exploring the expanding roles of large biotechnology companies and food industry conglomerates in crop-genetic and agri-chemical experimentation and 'technology transfer' (see Goodman et al 1987; Goodman and Redclift, 1991, and for a more recent study, Gibbs et al, 2009). Discourses of progress, modernisation and rationalisation in relation to food production have become significant, and are similarly important in the case of the advancement of genetic knowledge-practices in livestock breeding. While this important work on political economic power relations in the food industry has continued (see, for example, Morgan et al 2006), more recent work has begun to pay more attention to the politics of food consumption, arguing that consumption practices are as embedded in power relations and struggles as production and processing practices (e.g. Lien and Nerlich, 2004). In some cases, work has aimed to integrate production and consumption relations by looking at supply chains or networks, focusing for example on how value and meaning is produced at the different nodes of the system (e.g. Jackson et al, 2006). 'Whatever [the supermarket's] criteria is, this is where I come in to say [to the abattoir company] this is what we want. Can you deliver it? What are your volumes like? And then how do we move that in one direction or another? How do we tell the farming community that we do want Anguses or we do want them grazed for six months? Or they ought to be fed vitamin E or something like that in the last 90 days. I help with
