Jg. 64 – 2016 – Heft 2: Global food
Eva Barlösius, Clemens Zimmermann: Editorial
Gloria Sanz-Lafuente: European and global food standards. Economic institutions and multilateral communication in the early twentieth century
Ernst Langthaler: Das Fleisch der Weltgesellschaft: Eine globalhistorische Skizze (1850–2010)
Les Lewidow, Michel Pimbert: European agroecological practices: Tensions around neo-productivist agendas
Sarah May, Bernhard Tschofen: Regionale Spezialitäten als globales Gut. Inwertsetzungen geografischer Herkunft und distinguierender Konsum
Daniel Kofahl, Theresa Weyand: Halb vegan, halb vegetarisch, aber auch mal Huhn – soziologische Aspekte des Fleisch-essens und Fleisch- Verzichts in der Gegenwartsgesellschaft
ZAA Forum Ausgabe 2/2016
Jana Rückert-John, Lutz Laschewski: Integrative Perspektiven der Land-, Agrar- und Ernährungssoziologie. Plädoyer für eine thematische Erweiterung der Sektion Land- und Agrarsoziologie der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie
Gunter Mahlerwein, Friederike Scholten: Neue Forschungen zu Problemen der ländlichen Welt Tagung der Gesellschaft für Agrargeschichte (GfA) in Dresden
Abstracts
Gloria Sanz-Lafuente: European and global food standards. Economic institutions and multilateral communication in the early twentieth century
Convergent standards were an important way of promoting trade in food during an earlier period of globalization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The harmonization of measures for inspection and control of foodstuffs within a state was an expression of the rise in intraregional trade. Regulation of qualities, quantities, origins, tariffs and quotas was a part of state intervention worldwide. The literature has come to see food regulation as part of the relationship between experts, governments and private interests. This article aims to study the role and difficulties of a complex circuit of international knowledge and multilateral communication as well as the attempts to standardize particular regulatory systems by creating international committees. Secondly, the paper compares the form and role of local and national institutions and regulations on the control of foodstuffs, paying special attention to Spain and Germany as regards their different administrative and economic structures. There were heterogeneous -national and local- monitoring regimes. Globalization and multilateral communication was accompanied by territorialization.
Ernst Langthaler: Das Fleisch der Weltgesellschaft: Eine globalhistorische Skizze (1850–2010)
Though often marginalized in historiographical overviews, the ‘nutrition transition’, including the emergence of the global meat complex, was central to the development of world society since the mid-nineteenth century. The article follows the historical traces of the transnational value chain of meat; from the production sites via the distribution channels to the consumption sites. It identifies three development phases, which were closely connected to global food regimes. In the British-centered food regime (1870s–1930s), the basic elements of the global meat complex emerged: the expansion of the agricultural frontier in overseas settler colonies, the concentration of the meat industry, the construction of a transoceanic transport and refrigeration infrastructure, the inclusion of food security in the agenda of national policies, the growth of social classes with adequate purchasing power and preferences. In the US-centered food regime (1940s-1970s), the global food complex was widened and deepened, leading to accelerated engineering and commodification of the meat value chain. In the WTO-centered food regime (since 1980s), ambivalent developments emerged. On the one hand, the global meat complex incorporated new world regions such as Brazil as main producer of feeding stuffs and livestock and China as main consumer of meat. On the other hand, food countercultures questioned the ‘meatification’ of diets and promoted meat-less and vegetarian alternatives.
Les Lewidow, Michel Pimbert: European agroecological practices: Tensions around neo-productivist agendas
Agroecology has three practical forms – a scientific discipline, agricultural practices and social movements. Their integration has provided a collective-action mode for contesting the dominant agro-food regime and creating alternatives, especially through a linkage with food sovereignty. At the same time, agroecological practices have been recently adopted by some actors who also promote conventional agriculture. Such practices can play different roles – either fitting the dominant regime, or else helping to transform it. Tensions between those roles arise from a ‘sustainable intensification’ agenda, which has been theorized as a neo-productivist paradigm, newly linking global-market competitiveness with environmental protection. European tensions between ‘fit versus transform’ roles arise in several areas of agricultural policy – subsidy, innovation and research. Opportunities for transformative research lie especially in three areas: farm-level agroecosystems development, participatory plant breeding, and short food-supply chains remunerating agroecological methods. To play a transformative role, collaborative strategies need to go beyond the linear stereotype whereby scientists ‘transfer’ technology or farmers ‘apply’ scientific research results. To the extent that farmer-scientist alliances co-create and exchange knowledge, such gains can transform the research system.
Sarah May, Bernhard Tschofen: Regionale Spezialitäten als globales Gut. Inwertsetzungen geografischer Herkunft und distinguierender Konsum
The present contribution comprises an analysis of the dynamics involved in the spatial differentiation of eating and drinking as determined by global conditions. Drawing primarily on the example of the protective system of the European Union (PDO, PGI), the analysis focuses on the labeling of regional specialties by means of Geographical Indications. To this end, the initial phase evaluates the key coordinates within which the range of instruments and practices are situated. This involves the terminological bases whereby the various processes of specialization are described, as well as the negotiation of tradition and juridification. Based on the above, the paragraph “Creating Traditions: Product and Construction” focuses on the scope and argumentative approaches to the conservation of origins, while also showing those processes of demarcation and differentiation which are already established therein. The following, complimentary paragraph “Eating Knowledge: Consumption and Appropriation” switches perspective, as it were, whereby the significance and social location from the consumer perspective is reconstructed. This then leads to the chapter “The Global Made Local? Co-productions and Self-sufficiency” which advocates an integrative future outlook. The focus here is based on findings invariably only relationally understood as the co-constitution of material goods and their respectively charged significance – a field characterized visibly by increasingly fluid boundaries between production and consumption.
Daniel Kofahl, Theresa Weyand: Halb vegan, halb vegetarisch, aber auch mal Huhn – soziologische Aspekte des Fleisch-essens und Fleisch- Verzichts in der Gegenwartsgesellschaft
The following article deals with the socio-cultural ecology of meat-eating and meatrenunciation. From the perspective of a sociological nutritional science culture, two things are of interest particularly: First, how eating meat donates communitisation in the society and how forms of collective order are generated by eating meat. And secondly, the empirical observation that is increasingly discussed above in the present society, less or not to eat meat for good reasons. To numerous individuals this seems to be connected with high hurdles, because there are cultural reasons for them to eat meat. After the discourse on omnivore and vegetarian-vegan nutritional practices have been illustrated and analyzed by examples, at the end of the article conditions are formulated, which must be considered in a reduction in meat consumption at the level of society.
ZAA Forum Ausgabe 2/2016
Jana Rückert-John, Lutz Laschewski: Integrative Perspektiven der Land-, Agrar- und Ernährungssoziologie. Plädoyer für eine thematische Erweiterung der Sektion Land- und Agrarsoziologie der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie
Gunter Mahlerwein, Friederike Scholten: Neue Forschungen zu Problemen der ländlichen Welt Tagung der Gesellschaft für Agrargeschichte (GfA) in Dresden