Food and Health Policy: In an Age of Austerity and Globalization

Abstract

What is food policy? Miller and Deutsch (2009) discuss what constitutes food studies; they say that food studies are not really the study of food itself but the study of the relationship between food, the human experience, and food (Brillat-Savarin 1976; also see▶Brillat-Savarin and Food). Miller and Deutsch (2009) outline areas of study such as food science, agricultural science, culinary arts, public health nutrition, and agro-economics, to name but a few areas which they see as incorporating food studies. Food policy incorporates all of the areas but is more than even the study of the relationship between food and the human experience. Food policy is more than health and more than just agricultural policies or even nutrition policy as individual strands; it is the interconnectedness and sometimes even the disconnect between these various areas (see also “▶Agricultural and Food Research Policy”; “▶Agricultural Policy and Governance: Overview”; “▶ Food Trade and World Trade Organization: Agriculture Agreement”). Food policy, as an academic subject, is the study of the relationship between all these areas of study and how policies are formed or not developed despite the weight of the evidence (Lang et al. 2009). For a long time, transport polices were not considered as having much to do with food policy; however, now they are seen as integral in terms of how food is transported from where it is grown to where it is consumed. Food policy can also be defined by the absence of a written policy or even benign neglect of an area. The failure to relate food production to oil and oil prices was for a long time amajor commission in food policy; the food system relies on oil, oil to produce fertilizers for food, oil to power the machines to harvest it, oil to process it, and oil to distribute it. There is an argument that food policy should not become a distinct area of endeavor seeking instead to become part of and embedded in other policies. Like the concept of health in all policies, food should be in all policies. This in reality is difficult to achieve, and the fallback position is to develop a separate food policy. This usually takes the form of a nutrition-based policy (Milo andHesling 1998; Caraher andCoveney 2004). It becomes clear that healthy food-related policies can have an impact on other issues such as environment, considering the example of campaigns to increase fruit consumption in the global north. Fruit consumption has increased significantly since the mid-1970s; this has been largely accounted for by the very sharp rise in purchases of fruit juice which does not provide equivalent nutrition to its fresh counterpart. This fruit juice consumption, however, is often of juices from longdistant fruit, notably oranges from Brazil. A study by the Wuppertal Institute in Germany calculated that 80 % of Brazilian orange production is consumed in Europe. Annual German consumption occupied 370,000 acres of Brazilian productive land, three times the land devoted to fruit production