Manufacturing meaning along the food commodity chain

This data collection consists of life stories, individual interview transcripts and one focus group.
Recent ‘food scares’ and farming crises have led to declining consumer confidence in food safety. Focusing on two commodities, chicken and sugar, this project has investigated the social, political and technological changes that have transformed the British food industry within living memory. It uses a life-history approach (supplemented by interviews with policy-makers and consumer focus groups), recording the personal testimony of people involved at every point along the supply chain ‘from farm to fork’. Faced with the need to restore consumer trust, we argue that food producers are involved in managing the shifting cultural meanings of food as much as they are concerned with the commercial imperatives of technological change, product innovation and profitability. Questions of memory and tradition, gender and generation, authenticity and provenance (referred to here as the process of ‘manufacturing meaning’) are therefore assuming greater economic significance for the retail trade.