Conclusions and Policy Options

Abstract

Ethical traceability was defined in the first chapter as ‘the ability to trace and map ethical aspects of the food chain by means of recorded identifications’. Traceability is currently mainly used for a range of sometimes overlapping purposes, notably for the management of food safety and public health recall, control and verification, supply chain management and for assurance schemes around food quality and provenance. Only in the latter cases is traceability communicated to consumers; these cases therefore constitute an exception to the general intention of EU Food Law and Codex Alimentarius, which do not consider it appropriate to extend the principle of traceability as far as consumers (as shown in Chapters 2 and 3). The common idea throughout all the studies presented in this book has been that traceability, as used to map the production history of food products, can also be used to map ethical issues in the food chain that relate to production practices. Equally important from the outset was the question of how ethical traceability could be used for enabling informed food choice. By reconstructing or mapping the production history of foods as can be done by means of traceability schemes consumers are empowered to become part of a communicative process concerning food production practices. The analysis in Chapter 4 shows that traceability, i.e. the history of the product, is in fact already used in food advertisements as a commercial communication strategy. In this use of traceability, in advertisements, telling the story of a product ascribes identity to the product, which in turn allows disembedded modern consumers to reconnect with food in a ‘non-superficial’, cultural and ethical manner. The users and beneficiaries of this ethical traceability information about food are primarily consumers. The major ethical concerns of consumers are therefore outlined in Chapter 1. Consumers are substantively concerned about health, animal welfare, the environment, terms of trade, working conditions, etc. Consumers have procedural concerns about the reliability of information, transparency, voice, participation, etc. This analytical distinction is important as it calls our attention to the fact that different measures must be taken in order to address the concerns properly.