Qualities of Food

Mark Harvey, Andrew McMeekin & Alan Warde New Dynamics of Innovation and Competition Manchester University Press, ISBN: 0-7190-6854-1 Price: £55.00 Hardback, 224 pages, October 2004 Buy the book

In this book, the complexity and the significance of the foods we eat are analysed from a variety of perspectives, by sociologists, economists, geographers and anthropologists. Chapters address a number of intriguing questions: how do people make judgments about taste? How do such judgments come to be shared by groups of people?; What social and organisational processes result in foods being certified as of decent or proper quality? How has dissatisfaction with the food system been expressed? What alternatives are thought to be possible? The multi-disciplinary analysis of this book explores many different answers to such questions. The first part of the book focuses on theoretical and conceptual issues, the second part considers processes of formal and informal regulation, while the third part examines social and political responses to industrialised food production and mass consumption. Qualities of food will be of interest to researchers and students in all the social science disciplines that are concerned with food, whether marketing, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, human nutrition or economics.

[Introduction - 167Kb pdf format]

Contents

List of tables and figures
Series foreward
List of contributors
Preface

Introduction - Mark Harvey, Andrew McMeekin and Alan Warde

1. Discovering quality or performing taste? A sociology of the amateur - Geneviève Teil and Antoine Hennion

2. Standards of taste and varieties of goodness: the (un)predictability of modern consumption - Jukka Gronow

3. Quality in economics: a cognitive perspective - Gilles Allaire

4. Social definitions of halal quality: the case of Maghrebi Muslims in France - Florence Bergeaud-Blackler

5. Food agencies as an institutional response to policy failure by the UK and the EU - David Barling

6. Theorising food quality: some key issues in understanding its competitive production and regulation - Terry Marsden

7. A new aesthetic of food? Relational reflexivity in the ‘alternative’ food movement - Jonathan Murdoch and Mara Miele

8. The political morality of food: discourses, contestation and alternative consumption - Roberta Sassatelli

Conclusion: quality and processes of qualification - Mark Harvey, Andrew McMeekin and Alan Warde

Index

Return to MUP Books