Research into food and trust: A critique and a proposal

Abstract

Trust can be defined as the suspension of suspicion, the absence of calculation, and the belief in reciprocity. Its gold standard is rooted in personal intimacy. Yet societies where direct social contact becomes fleeting, impersonal, and instrumental, and where power is usually delegated, cannot bank on proximity to sustain exchange. While acknowledging that other mechanisms help coordinate interactions and commerce, many social-science studies nevertheless mean to assign a crucial role to trust. Metaphorical language then obtains. To overcome these difficulties in definition and heuristics, this article reformulates the problem with respect to trust in food. It proposes to study two dynamic social pro-cesses of trust building. The first approach explores the acquisition of an individual consumer competence to gauge a good’s acceptability and sustain confidence in its characteristics and utility. The second perspective tracks the institutional construction of trustworthiness whose aim it is to reduce the probability of exposure to a health hazard. The first represents consumers’ effort to limit the risks they take in their daily lives, the second constitutes society’s attempt to diminish the dangers its members encounter (and over which they have little or no control). Neither occurs in historical weightlessness as both happen in a field of force where the balance of power determines the extent of individual empowerment or of institutional protection.