Horsemeat-gate

Abstract

Academic and lay debates about food variously articulate the ways in which contemporary food provisioning systems are inherently problematic and unstable. Drawing evidence from the seeming prevalence of adulteration scandals, moral panics and other food crises, these debates reproduce a set of entangled moral discourses about food, its consumption and production. Within these discourses, ideological lines are drawn, and particular types of consumers (typically poor and working class), particular types of producers (those that produce for the agri-industrial food complex) and particular types of retailers (typically “budget” and “corporate” supermarkets) are vilified as the loci of all that is supposedly wrong with food. Missing, however, is a more nuanced social and cultural reading that unpacks these discourses and analyses failings within food through multiple lenses such as class, social deprivation, and their multi-scaler geographical implications. Using the recent horsemeat scandals that dominated headlines in spring 2013, the purpose of this commentary is to unpack and disentangle these discourses of food. We argue that “what is wrong with food” is less related to its systems of provision, but rather more the ways its various agents are discursively cast and subsequently moralized as perpetrators of a globalized and industrial food system