Qualities of food / / edited by Mark Harvey, Andrew McMeekin, Alan Warde.

• Superior document: New dynamics of innovation and competition
• TeilnehmendeR: Harvey, Mark, 1943-; McMeekin, Andrew.; Warde, Alan.
• Year of Publication: 2004
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: New dynamics of innovation and competition.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (214 pages) :; digital file(s)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

How do people make judgments about what food is worth eating and what tastes good?; 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?

The book presents a case study of retailer-led food governance in the UK to examine how different 'quality logics' actually collide in the competitive world of food consumption and production. It argues that concerns around food safety were provoked by the emergence of a new food aesthetic based on 'relationalism' and 'embeddedness'. The book also argues that the study of the arguments and discourses deployed to criticise or otherwise qualify consumption is important to the political morality of consumption.

Table of Contents

Tables and figures --Series foreword --Contributors --Preface --Introduction --1. Discovering quality or performing taste? A sociology of the amateur --2. Standards of taste and varieties of goodness: the (un)predictability of modern consumption --3. Quality in economics: a cognitive perspective --4. Social definitions of halal quality: the case of Maghrebi Muslims in France --5. Food agencies as an institutional response to policy failure by the UK and the EU --6. Theorising food quality: some key issues in understanding its competitive production and regulation --7. A new aesthetic of food? Relational reflexivity in the 'alternative' food movement -- 8. The political morality of food: discourses, contestation and alternative consumption --Conclusion: quality and processes of qualification --Index.