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is thus bound up in discursive judgements made by people, fi rms and institutions
not by markets. A commodity can move in and out of favour, as meanings are
manufactured and values appropriated.
Bell and Valentine (1997) redirected food research by focusing on how our rela-
tionships to eating have altered, especially through the technologies of food. They
explored how circuits of culinary culture could be mapped across space, moving
from the body, home, community, city, region, nation, to the global, to conclude
that all geographical scales could end up on one plate. By centring and beginning
with the body, they probe tensions around what has been called the 'omnivore's
paradox' - humans have sought a varied diet in order to survive and so are inclined
towards innovation and experimentation, yet humans have to be wary about what
they consume because unknown food is a potential source of danger (e.g., food
poisoning, allergies, unhealthy diets, cancer).
Le Heron and Hayward's (2002) study of the Australasian breakfast cereals
industry illustrates the importance of deep and long-run cultural economy processes.
They found that even a 'simple' analysis of production organisation and change in
breakfast cereals (an industry founded in the 19th century on religious principles
and notions of improved diets and food) could not be separated from powerful
cultural and social traditions particular to the industry. Competing defi nitions of
cereal value come from the socially constructed symbolic content of breakfast
cereals. Much 'gaming' in cereals ingredients occurs - higher fats mean less sugar,
higher sugar means lower fats, but declines in both sugar and fat are rarely seen.
Instability and variety in breakfast cereals as a category are infl uenced by pressures
from a wide fi eld of NGOs. The narratives of the contemporary industry still align
with the industry's foundations, so adding further episodes in the 'cereal' of the
moral commodity.
The alternative food literature (for a critical review see Maye et al. [2007]) in
which food becomes the basis for a localised life commonly romanticises and ide-
alises place in food (e.g., slow food, short supply chains). In some versions of the
rural idyll, the range of place-bound connections with the corporate food regime
are ignored. The comfortable conservatism of retreating to the local restricts the
geographical imagination, suppresses debate over wider issues and reduces the need
to articulate the geography of power relationships. Conversely, work on alternative
food networks literature has inserted the marginalised south into the food literature
(Murtesbaugh 2002) and re-enlivened development issues.
At the turn of the 21st century, the contemporary foodscape suddenly altered.
Two principal infl uences were a growing consensus on diet and cancer spearheaded
by the 1997 World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) report on Food, Nutrition and
Prevention of Cancer, and the global obesity epidemic, highlighted by the World
Health Organisation (WHO) in 1998. Obesity activated the political imagination
of governments (Morgan et al. 2006, pp. 168-72). That the conventional food
industry failed to foresee obesity as perhaps its biggest challenge is ironic when set
against the trajectories outlined in the chapter.
The advent, diffusion and aggressive marketing of low-cost, processed food, high
in fat, salt and sugar, is widely believed to be one of the main causes of the epidemic.
Convenience foods are an effi cient way to deliver calories, and this happens in
numerous ways: calorie density, super-sized portions, speed of eating, the frequency
of their consumption through grazing or snacking, hand-sized packaging for eating
on the move and so on. Statistics compiled from Lang and Heasman (2004, p. 206)
