Ethical Foodscapes

Premises, Promises, and Possibilities

Bibliographic Data

ID4941817
AuthorsMichael K Goodman (0000-0003-4861-029X, King's College London), Damian Maye (0000-0002-4459-6630, Countryside and Community Research Institute, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham), Lewis Holloway (0000-0002-6947-6301, University of Hull)
Year2010
Volume42
Issue8
Pages1782-1796
Publication date2010-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning A Economy and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0308-518X • E-ISSN: 1472-3409
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1068/a43290
OpenAlexW1990854439
LanguageEN
Citations received93
References cited65

Ethical foodscapes?: premises, promises, and possibilities That food is good to `think' as much as eat, is most certainly true.Yet, it is even more true that `good' food is even better to both think and feel with (and sometimes eat) at the moment, particularly in an era of food scares, continuing poverty, a supposed `obesity crisis', debates concerning food (in)security and food sovereignty, and environmental degradation.In short, the good food `revolution'öfrom foods defined variously as healthy, low-carbon, fairly traded, local, organic, free-range, cruelty-free, natural and/or slowöhas no doubt come to a supermarket shelf, farm shop, TV set, book store, magazine rack, or even a kitchen table near you.In this, especially given the rise of celebrity chefs and their desire to help us cook everything from haute cuisine to something simply quick and tasty, good food has also become good to watch, read about, and sometimes even perform in one's own kitchen.Watching what we eat (Collins, 2009) is no longer simply about dieting, but is a full-time spectator sport that is as much about `eater-tainment' and increasing the fortunes of branded celebrity chefs as it is about cooking a meal and bringing good food to the masses.But then again, `bad ' food is also good to think about and watch.Indeed, bad food has spawned a growing media industry that is much beyond the relatively tame investigative journalist-type expose ̈s of the industrial food systems which make up part of Freidberg's (2004) `ethical complex of food'.Here, the success of `non-eatertainment'öin the form of movies such as Fast Food Nation (Linklater, 2006), Super Size Me (Spurlock, 2004) and the Academy AwardÕ nominated Food, Inc. (Kenner, 2008), television programmes such as The Biggest Loser and You Are What You Eat (Channel 4), and books such as Bad Food Britain (Blythman, 2006), The End of Food (Roberts, 2008), Stuffed and Starved (Patel, 2007), Animal Factory (Kirby, 2010), and Eating Animals (Safran Foer, 2010)ösuggests a desire to be scared and perplexed by seeing what others eat, what we are eating, and the conditions under which food is currently produced.And, there is little doubt that `bad' food can also still be `good' to eat, if the success of the `Double Down' sandwich from KFC is any indication.It is now one of the most popular launches of a new item ever for the company and, needless to say, is quite dubious in terms of its health effects (AP, 2010).Consisting of slices of bacon and cheese nestled between two pieces of boneless fried chicken, and held together with a mayo-like sauce, KFC expects sales to surpass 10 million by May 2010 and will continue to offer it on its menu into the foreseeable future.Much like the so-called `ordinary ethics' of consumption (Barnett et al, 2005), the `goodness' and `badness' of the various foods described above hints at the ordinarily and inescapably ethical/moral character of all foods.Yet this recognition provides very little traction empirically, theoretically, or practically.Rather, food is entangled in discourses and practices which necessarily have and indeed always will have ethical implications for the humans and nonhumans, societies and environments, involved in its production ^consumption relations.What is of interest, then, are those questions about what we should and should not eat, what becomes regarded as `good' and `bad' food, and how these constructions are intimately situated and contextualised, what sets of criteria define the `good' and `bad' meanings embedded in particular foods, who decides on how these criteria are defined and how food production ^consumption networks are (or are not) regulated.And, very importantly, these differential, shifting

Business · Corporate governance · Engineering ethics · Environmental ethics · Ethical issues · Ethical Leadership · Political science · Praxis · Public relations · Sociology · Computer Science · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Engineering · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Organic Food and Agriculture

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