From the risk society to risk practice: organic food, embodiment and modernity in Sicily

Abstract

This article uses ethnography from the city of Palermo (Italy) to analyze organic food’s role in the culinary anxieties that characterize late modernity. Popular interpretations see the organic phenomenon as the product of a new kind of society in which some consumers regularly reflect on various sorts of environmental risk and how to avoid them. The article argues that this interpretation, while not without empirical grounding, is limited by the privileging of cognitive forms of knowledge over embodied ones in people’s relationship to food. Distinguishing between the risk society and risk practice, the article discusses the concomitant importance of forms of knowledge based on the body, the senses, and corporeal memory, showing how the cognitive and the embodied influence each other to form a local risk culture of organic foods.