ABSTRACT
The years 2007–2008 marked in Europe a significant rupture with the previous twenty-year period of ‘post-productivism’ with regard to agri-food. Although the true regulatory consequences have yet to fully emerge, this chapter aims to argue that Europe, as well as many other parts of the world, is entering a new more unstable regulatory period in which a revised form of intensive productivism is in its ascendancy. This will be marked, however, by considerable contestation from the more fledgling sustainable agri-food development paradigm. This chapter provides one interpretation of these transitions and contestations by focusing on identifiable changes in dominant food regulatory systems. These are seen as both reflections of and mobilizers for more wholesale transitions in advanced food systems—transitions that affect both production and consumption dynamics at the same time. The focus upon regulatory systems is thus used here as a way of examining the material and practical nature of transition in food practices throughout entire chains and networks of production and consumption.
