ABSTRACT
The globalisation of food has changed the way we eat and shop. A visit to any supermarket across the UK in mid-winter may result in the purchase of Shamouti oranges from Israel; savoy cabbage from France; Angeleno plums from Australia; alpine nectarines from South Africa; aromatic ginger from Brazil; asparagus tips from Peru; freshly picked blueberries from Poland; onions from Argentina; bananas from Cameroon; beans from Zambia; and so on. Such purchases have become routine daily consumer practice. Food is a global industry where items from around the world are transported swiftly to our supermarket shelves or discarded all in the name of ‘consumer choice’ and ‘freshness’. Consider the following advertising of Upper Crust, a multi-national baguette and coffee chain established in 1986:
Fanatical about freshness! We are obsessed with ensuring you get the freshest baguette around that’s why after 3 hours we throw them away. We believe we are the only people that do this. That’s how fanatical we are.
So much for the world’s starving! In the affluent West, perfectly edible ‘three hour old food’ can be discarded as waste. There is nothing new in this. It has been estimated that the United States wastes up to 50 per cent of its overall food supply (Harrison, 2004). In Britain alone, it is estimated that discarded food in households, supermarkets and restaurants could possibly feed 113 million people annually (Stuart, 2009). While some of this wastage is related to health and safety regulations and household excess, it is also about corporate profit and the marketing of freshness and consumer choice. It is only recently that leading supermarket chains have begun to utilise their food waste for renewable energies and biofuels (Stiff and Ford, 2009). Foods from near and far fill our supermarket trolleys, stack the pantries of
our ‘global kitchens’ often within a non-critical and hedonistic vacuum. Yet, the production of food is an industry rife with illegal and harmful actions. As a result, ‘food crime’ is an emerging area of criminological scholarship
(Croall, 2006; Walters, 2007). The pollution created from long-distance transportation, the erosion of soils, the sale of contaminated meat, the illegal use of chemicals, the exploitation of farm workers, the use of fraudulent marketing practices and the aggressive trade policies of governments and corporations are some of the areas involving unethical and illegal behaviour in Britain and abroad (Mathieson, 2006; Lawrence, 2004; Lang and Heasman, 2004). Such issues have found a voice in discourses on food security and regulation but little has been written in criminology. Unlawful food trading practices have been constructed within notions of risk and presented as food scandals and not food crimes. This book aims to redress the focus by concentrating on one area of the food crime debate, namely the use of genetics in food production or what is now commonly referred to as GM food. It examines the political economy of GM food within criminological contexts of state, corporate and transnational crime (Green and Ward, 2004; Tombs and Whyte, 2003; Ruggerio, 2000), and within discourses of harm (Hillyard et al., 2004). Elsewhere, I have explored the use of genetics in food production and
examined the exploitation of hunger, the monopolisation of GM technologies and the aggressive trade policies of Western governments and corporations (see Walters, 2004 and 2006). This book further examines global dimensions to GM food through an examination of ‘eco crime’. In doing so, we need to move beyond what Bruno Latour refers to a ‘punctionlist’ assessment of our food production to one that investigates broader networks of connectivity (discussed later).
