Accounting for Taste: Regulating Food Labeling in the “Affluent Society,” 1945–1995

Abstract

Accounting for Taste examines the history of the US Food and Drug Administration's regulation of markets through labels as a form of public–private infrastructure, built through the ceaseless work (and antagonisms) of public regulators, the food industry, and expert advisors. From public hearings on setting “standards of identity” for foods to rule making on informative labels like the Nutrition Facts panel, it links a narrow history of institutional change in food regulation to broader cultural anxieties of twentieth-century America, arguing that the recurrence to informative labels as a political solution reflects a transformation in not only scientific understandings of dietary risk but also cultural understandings about the responsibility of consumers. In describing this “informational turn” in food politics, the dissertation foregrounds the important role of intermediaries, specifically consumer and health experts, and intermediate spaces, such as labels, in the framing of political debates about the production and consumption of everyday goods.

‘You are what you eat’: historical changes in ideas about food and identity

“…And one support for the ‘nutrition facts’ label is that it represents the joined authority of both science and the state. It would, however, be incomplete to say that our knowledge of our bodies and our food has been delegated to external experts, since that new expert vocabulary has become significantly vernacularized. This is how we now speak of who we are: we watch our calories and our cholesterol; we are on low‐sodium or high‐fibre diets.…”

Powered by healthism? Marketing discourses of food and health

“…Furthermore, it establishes marketing as a better version of nutrition communication and education , which is able to judge what information consumers can and cannot understand and to address and influence their wants and needs more effectively than public health campaigns alone. This co-optation of product-specific nutritional information into the system of marketing communication is evidenced in the transformation of the term “label” from a regulatory meaning to a promotional meaning of “labelling” (Frohlich, 2012).…”

“…By shifting attention to properties located deep in food’s chemical composition, nutritionism also promotes the so-called information turn: the shift from eating foods to reading foods, i.e. evaluating and selecting foods by (primarily) reading the labels in place of touching, smelling and tasting them (Frohlich, 2012; Yngfalk, 2016). As one study argues, the more time is spent on reading the labels at the moment of food purchase, the more that healthier food choices are made [47].…”

Cross-Sector Partnerships for Systemic Change: Systematized Literature Review and Agenda for Further Research

“…At the national scale, the types of systems studied are diverse, including economic empowerment programme system in South Africa (Hamann et al 2008), the wine sector in Argentina (McDermott et al 2009), water sector in China (Lee 2010), the Food and Drug Administration's regulation of markets in the USA (Frohlich 2012), the health system in Saudi Arabia (Alonazi 2017), the higher education systems in the UK (Hagen 2002), telecommunications policy in South Korea (Larson and Park 2014), e-government in Canada (Langford and Roy 2006). As can be seen from this sampling, cross-sector partnerships and interactions are studied in countries all over the world.…”