In Food We Trust?
Technologies of Governance in Industrialized Food Systems
Questions related to technological development, food safety and consumer trust in food increased in importance throughout the 20th century. Today industrialized food systems are integrated parts of everyday life. However, governmental agencies, legislators, food producers, scientists and consumer organizations still struggle to ensure that the foods entering the market place is safe and to deal with on-going technological development.
How were industrialized food and food systems integrated into everyday life in Norway through its sibling systems of food safety and consumer trust? We will investigate policy oriented, academic and public debates and controversies on the social and cultural aspects of food production and consumption. Our approach will enable us to examine the culturally contingent processes that led to the present industrialized system of highly manipulated and transformed foods.
By investigating themes related to food safety and consumer trust in a perspective that combines science and technology studies (STS) and historical studies of technology we can offer an alternative vision of how the present system emerged, its historical roots and transformations in time. A socio-historical study of what we term "the technologies of trust" can improve our understanding of the present situation of our food system and offer alternative visions for securing safe food and consumer trust in the future. The work will be done through five sub projects.
Sub projects
Institutions, Knowledge and Technological Transformations in Industrialized Food Systems
This project aims to investigate the transformations in the scientific and regulatory institutions connected to food safety and consumer trust. Doing this, the project will especially pay attention to institutional transformations in conjuncture with the introduction of new food products and new food production technologies into the food system and in light of developments on the international arena. It will investigate how institutions and knowledge have been and is involved in the regulation of new foods and technologies in order to ensure safety. Further this will illuminate the way in which science, technology and institutional setups in the food safety sector have co-evolved during the 20th century. By following central debates concerning the organization of the food safety field, it will be possible to examine shifts in the way matters of food safety and consumer trust are framed at the regulatory level, but also as a cultural concept, through the 20th century. The project will both lay the contextual framework for the other analyses and be used to synthesize the project findings.
Responsible for the project: Prof. Per Østby and post.doc. Terje Finstad.
Additive Technologies. Negotiating Food, Safety and Consumer Trust
During the 20th century new substances were invented that could be used to slow down or disguise natural decay. This project will use debates on food additives to explore how these technologies came to be integrated into the food system through negotiations related to questions of health, safety and trust. It will target controversies connected to food additives in order to see how actors in the food field worked to develop, integrate and regulate new food additives. The industrial laboratory "Hermetikkindustriens laboratorium" will be a key institution as will central state agencies trying to regulate the use of additives. In order to get at the consumer side of things, the home economics institution "Statens forsøksvirksomhet i husstell" will be important. This study will put historical perspectives to use on empirical materials that have not been much studied by historians. A central aim is to write a history of the integration of the industrial food system using debates on additives concerning food safety and consumer trust in food as a lens.
Responsible for the project: post.doc. Terje Finstad.
Fat in Motion: Technology and the Multiplication of Fat
During the 20th century fat is no longer simply fat. Technologies have been important in the transformation and multiplication of fat. In the 1920s Norwegian Authorities established The Directorate of Fat, to secure supplies. The discourse on fat represents a complex issue involving morals, health, safety and politics. One example is found in the status of butter and margarine, which has fluctuated in relation to health issues. Today discussions have emerged about the "healthy" and "unhealthy" fat, of "natural" and "unnatural" fat. This project will investigate how fat has been produced in medical and public discourse as well as in the realm of politics. When did the idea of healthy and unhealthy fat surface? How does the coming of consumer society transform discourses about fat? How did fat, by help of science and technology, fraction and become several different kinds of fat? How do different types of expertise deal with this? Fat is seldom a part of the food safety discourse, which is typically framed as questions about bacteria or chemical additives. However, since fat is a matter of trust it should serve as a new lens and analytical approach to questions of food safety, technology and consumer trust.
Responsible for the project: Associate professor Stig Kvaal and post.doc. Morten Haugdahl.
Food labeling, human health and environmental concerns – Mediating between the producers and the user
Food labeling informing the consumers of the expiration date of their food has been an important tool to secure the consumers of the quality of their stored food. However, the restrictions set on the dates from the producers' side in addition to a variable consumption rate from the user's side, results in a waste amount of food waste. There is a growing environmental as well as ethical problem: the destruction of fully eatable foodstuff. In this sub project, we will study how media discuss the reasons for food labeling. This sub project will concentrate on the way this has been done in public service television, analyzing the way NRK's program for consumer issues, FBI (Forbrukerinspektørene) has made this a reoccurring theme over the last years. Balancing between the health of the consumers and preventing unnecessary food waste, FBI has drawn the attention on the problem from a variety of angles. This sub project will shed light on the ways this has been done through textual analysis of programs relevant to the research object, interviews with the program's producers within the NRK. The results of this study may be used as a basis for a survey on food labeling and its ethical/safety/environmental implications.
Responsible: Ass.professor Sara Brinch.
The Technologies of Governance in the Households
Trust in food is not only secured by state agencies and technical devices. Trust must be built into everyday practices. Cookbooks can be a good starting point to say something about how nutrition, foods and new technologies or changes in the food discourse is presented and attempted integrated in the population. In itself cookbooks is a technology for the guidance of the household. They tell something about the food culture, about different ideas about what food is and about how foods should be utilized in the households. This project will examine how new nutrition paradigms are mediated in cookbooks: in ingredients, recipes, preparation techniques and in the general information and nutrition advices. The project will focus on four Norwegian nutrition controversies: the porridge feud in the 19th century, the debate following the discovery of vitamins in the early 20th century, the focus on the connection between heart disease and cholesterol in the post war years and the recent debate on health, obesity and low carb high fat (LCHF) diet. As such it will approach the question of how food and nutritional science is integrated into everyday life.
Responsible for the project: Ass. Prof. Stig Kvaal.
