Capturing the Sustainability Agenda: Organic Foods and Media Discourses on Food Scares, Environment, Genetic Engineering, and Health

Stewart Lockie

doi:10.1007/s10460-006-9007-3

Abstract

This paper undertakes a content analysis of newspaper articles from Australia, the UK, and the US concerned with a variety of issues relevant to sustainable food and agriculture from 1996 to 2002. It then goes on to identify the various ways in which sustainability, organic food and agriculture, genetic engineering, genetically modified foods, and food safety are framed both in their own terms and in relation to each other. It finds that despite the many competing approaches to sustainability found in scientific and agricultural production discourses, media discourses tend to reduce this complexity to a straightforward conflict between organic and conventional foods. Despite regular reporting of viewpoints highly critical of organic food and agriculture, this binary opposition produces discourses in which organic foods are seen as more-or-less synonymous with safety, naturalness and nutrition, and their alternatives as artificial, threatening, and untrustworthy. Particularly controversial food-related issues such as genetic engineering, food scares, chemical residues, and regulatory failure are treated as part of the same problem to which organic food offers a trustworthy and easily understood solution.

Highlights

It is widely acknowledged that despite almost universal acceptance of the importance and desirability of environmental and social sustainability, the concept of sustainability itself is a slippery and contested one (Barr and Cary, 1994)
Searches were performed on a variety of terms including organic food, organic agriculture, agriculture and environment, food and environment, genetic engineering, genetically modified foods and food scares
There is a clear disjuncture between those discourses of sustainability that dominate agriculture and agricultural science and those that dominate the mass media

Summary

Introduction

It is widely acknowledged that despite almost universal acceptance of the importance and desirability of environmental and social sustainability, the concept of sustainability itself is a slippery and contested one (Barr and Cary, 1994). Conflicting ideas about what a safe and sustainable food system might look like are evident in debates over organic food standards, genetic modification, food labelling, chemical safety guidelines, agricultural research priorities, tree clearing, food safety standards, quality assurance processes, property rights, pesticide regulation, appropriate levels of public investment in agri-environment schemes, and so on. They are reflected in what Lockie et al (2002) identify as high levels of confusion among Australian consumers regarding the social and environmental attributes of foods produced and processed according to a variety of regulatory regimes and the ability of these foods to alleviate consumers’ own food-related concerns and anxieties. The paper will turn briefly to an articulation of the key methods and concepts on which it draws

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion