Anxious Appetites: Food and consumer culture

Review

In this innovative and thoughtful book, Peter Jackson illuminates a fundamental but often overlooked truth: food fears are always the product of particular historical moments and political economies. Through richly detailed and nuanced case studies of recent food fears from around the world, Jackson critically pushes scholarship on risk, anxiety, and consumer choice in new directions. (Melissa L. Caldwell, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA)

Based on extensive, diverse and recent empirical research, this book gives an admirable account of how anxieties around food are generated, circulated and allayed. It makes a significant evidence-based, theoretical contribution to understanding food consumption in the early 21st century. (Alan Warde, University of Manchester, UK)

Bringing together a number of research projects, this important book asks us to rethink the two words of its title, to be "educated" by anxiety and also by appetite. Peter Jackson offers a social and geographical focus - ranging in scale from the global to the body - that explores both the roots and the routes of contemporary food anxieties. With a series of case studies including horsemeat, Jamie's Ministry of Food and household practices around convenience and food safety, and mixing methods from policy, media and survey analysis to ethnographic observation and interviewing, Anxious Appetites clearly illustrates that Food Studies has earned its place at the table. (David Bell, University of Leeds, UK)

Product Description

Despite government claims that food is safer and more readily available today than ever before, recent survey evidence demonstrates high levels of food-related anxiety among Western consumers. While chronic hunger and malnutrition are relatively rare in the West, food scares relating to individual products, concerns about global food security and other expressions of consumer anxiety about food remain widespread.

Anxious Appetites explores the causes of these present-day anxieties. Looking at fears over provenance and regulation in a world of lengthening supply chains and greater concentration of corporate power, Peter Jackson investigates how anxieties about food circulate and how they act as a channel for broader social issues. Drawing on case studies such as the 2013 horsemeat scandal and fears about the contamination of infant formula in China in 2008, he examines how and why these concerns emerge. Comparing survey results with ethnographic observation of consumer practice, he explores the gap between official advice about food safety and people's everyday experience of food, including a critique of ideological notions of 'consumer choice'.

A captivating, timely book which presents a new theory of social anxiety.

Book Description

Identifies the roots of present-day consumer anxieties about food and traces their effects in contemporary Western societies.

About the Author

Peter Jackson is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is the editor of Changing Families, Changing Food (2009), co-editor of The Handbook of Food Research (2013) and lead author of Food Words: Essays in Culinary Culture (2013). He was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Victoria Medal in 2007 and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Besides his academic work, he also chairs the Social Science Research Committee of the UK Food Standards Agency.