How Is Food Political? Market, State, and Knowledge - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 21

agreement on the means of attaining desired end states. It is thus important to distin-
guish between ideas we think of as normative —what ought to be the case—and ideas we
think of as empirical —how things actually work. Normative ideas are often expressed as
ethics or obligation; empirical ideas are expressed as claims about how the world works.
Ideas about the empirical world—how things work—become necessary components of
guides to policy and behavior in accord with normative preferences (Dryzek 2005).
How ideas matter in the chapters that follow fall into identifiable processes:
a) Cognitive screening : Ideas matter first because interests are not the stable stuff of
neoclassical economics, nor are they unambiguously recognizable. Political econ-
omy begins with investigation of interests, then looks to their interaction. But
knowing an interest depends not only on normative or ethical reasoning, but on
information as well: The brute facts of the world do not come coded with impli-
cations for one's interests or means of attaining them. Cognitive screens are con-
structed of both science and culture.50 The inchoate nature of interests, especially
in distal spheres such as agriculture or new technology, creates a cognitive oppor-
tunity structure for framing by political entrepreneurs and social movements.
Foundational components of these screens include such dichotomies as natural/
unnatural and risky/safe and credible/biased. An individual's interests may or may
not be served by organic or bio-fortified food, for example—deciding which it is
requires information on outcomes.51
b) Expertise and epistemic brokerage : Interests are especially dependent on media-
tion by ideas and information in matters evoking risk, uncertainty, and the future
(Elster 1993, chap. 4). Are there foods that cause or prevent cancer? High infor-
mation costs and cognitive complexity necessitate epistemic brokerage—a trusted
authority to sort the true from the false. Michael Pollan, for example, is a leading
epistemic broker on matters of food: what we should believe, what is true, what
are corporate talking points as opposed to facts on the ground. Epistemic broker-
age will vary in importance with information costs and cognitive distance: We are
almost all, for example, dependent on epistemic brokerage in atmospheric science
on which the future of the species depends. Few of us read peer-reviewed atmo-
spheric science. For climate change, global society has established internationally
trusted sources. Global assessments for defining authoritative knowledge in food
and agriculture, however, have proved controversial and inconclusive (IAASTD,
2009; Scoones, this volume). Information costs in food and agriculture for indi-
viduals are high for that large percentage of the world's population that has not
ever grown crops for a livelihood. The information one gets is dependent on the
networks one belongs to—and their associated media connections—and thus the
epistemic brokerage dominant in that network (Herring 2010).
c) Strategies and tactics : Once interests are established, issues of collective action
arise.52 To act presupposes at least some sense that the action will be meaningful,
and thus supported by others. Networks are critical intermediaries in this process
of establishing a basis for collective action. If collective action is to be effective,