A Handbook of Food Crime

Immoral and Illegal Practices in the Food Industry and What to Do About Them

Gray, Allison, Hinch, Ronald

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2018
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781447336020
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Food today is over-corporatized and under-regulated. It is involved in many immoral, harmful, and illegal practices along production, distribution, and consumption systems. These problematic conditions have significant consequences on public health and well-being, nonhuman animals, and the environment, often simultaneously. In this insightful book, Gray and Hinch explore the phenomenon of food crime. Through discussions of food safety, food fraud, food insecurity, agricultural labour, livestock welfare, genetically modified foods, food sustainability, food waste, food policy, and food democracy, they problematize current food systems and criticize their underlying ideologies. Bringing together the best contemporary research in this area, they argue for the importance of thinking criminologically about food and propose radical solutions to the realities of unjust food systems.

Table of contents

• A HANDBOOK OF FOOD CRIME
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Section I. Thinking about food crime
• 1. A food crime perspective
• 2. Food crime without criminals: Agri-food safety governance as a protection racket for dominant political and economic interest
• 3. The social construction of illegality within local food systems
• Section II . Farming and food production
• 4. Ethical challenges facing farm managers
• 5. Chocolate, slavery, forced labour, child labour and the state
• 6. Impact of hazardous substances and pesticides on farmers and farming communities
• Section III. Processing, marketing and accessing food
• 7. Agency and responsibility: The case of the food industry and obesity
• 8. The value of product sampling in mitigating food adulteration
• Prohibitive property practices: The impact of restrictive covenants on the built food 9. environment
• Section IV Corporate food and food safety
• 11. Mass Salmonella poisoning by the Peanut Corporation of America: Lessons in state-corporate food crime
• 12. Food crime in the context of cheap capitalism
• Section V Food trade and movement
• 13. Crime versus harm in the transportation of animals: A closer look at Ontario’s ‘pig trial’
• 14. Coming together to combat food crime: Regulatory networks in the EU
• 15. Fair trade laws, labels and ethics
• Section VI. Technologies and food
• 16. Food, genetics and knowledge politics
• 17. Technology, novel food and crime
• 18. Food crimes, harms and carnist technologies
• Section VII . Green food
• 19. Farming and climate change
• 20. Food waste (non)regulation
• 21. Responding to neoliberal diets: School meal programmes in Brazil and Canada
• Section VIII . Questioning and consuming food
• 22. Counter crimes and food democracy: Suspects and citizens remaking the food system
• 23. Consumer reactions to food safety scandals: A research model and moderating effects
• 24. Responding to food crime and the threat of the ‘food police’
• Index