ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the food quality and food hazards are two sides of the same coin. The weight of recent public opinion has brought food quality to the forefront, to the extent that, in Britain for example, the government has felt obliged to initiate a Food Standards Agency. The point being made here was that modern varieties of fruits and vegetables and intensively produced livestock products are often bland by comparison with the foods produced 50 years ago. Consumer constructions of food quality are well known to the food industry and it has been common for manufacturers to label their products in ways that they know will appeal to customers. The conclusion is that the 1990s were a crucial decade in making food quality a pivotal area, but the early years of the new century will also be important in determining the extent to which quality can be driven by market forces or by the democratic of the consumer.