Perspectives on food packaging design

Abstract

This special issue seeks to provide a snapshot of current scholarship on food packaging design across a range of disciplines (history, linguistics, perception, marketing and design), engaging in a variety of methodologies. A special issue of this nature is particularly needed as packaging has been widely under-represented as a subject of serious attention, whether in national libraries, major design surveys or much academic scholarship, particularly in the humanities. Beyond introducing the collected articles of the special issue, this editorial article reviews existing studies of packaging across a range of disciplines. These studies have contributed to our understanding of food packaging design and provide a useful analytical tool box. The final section will introduce the articles that make up the sSpecial issue and discuss their contribution to the nascent scholarship of food packaging. Establishing the gap in scholarship In Thomas Hine's history of packaging, The Total Package (1995), he writes of the paradox of packaging's simultaneous centrality and neglect in contemporary life. He observes that despite its pervasiveness, 'it flies beneath nearly everyone's analytical radar'. Noting that people only pay attention to it when there is a problem: when a container will not open or when it pollutes. In Hine's useful bibliographic essay, 'Sources and Further Reading', he observes a similar lacuna in the nontechnical scholarship on the subject. Although Hine made this point more than two decades ago, this lack persists and is borne out by searches across scholarship from the social sciences, humanities and design history. While one would expect to find packaging prominently featured in design and graphic design history surveys, its inclusion is sparse and sometimes non-existent, while other design practices, including advertising, book and poster design, are extensively addressed (Table 1). In an article evidencing the neglect of packaging in academic scholarship, 'Packaging of identity and identifiable packages' (Chatterjee 2007), the author outlines an exhaustive range of scholarly investigations of consumer-commodity relations in which a 'nuanced analysis of product packaging is largely missing', including those on retailing (Cook and Crang 1996), race, class and gender (Thomas and Treiber 2000;

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