Preliminary Programme

Whilst academic research on trust in food proliferated after the food scares of the 1990s limited attention has been given to the evolution of perception of food safety preceding these scandals. The past food systems are often idealised and taken for granted in contemporary society. This paper will focus on how representations and ideas of food changed during the post-war era by studying how food pathogens and food safety were represented in media and consumer organisations.
Food pathogens provide an interesting example of how ideas on safety, in regards to food, are also influenced by social and cultural construction. For example, whilst the 1988 salmonella scare significantly affected sales figures of poultry and eggs, consumers continue to eat products made from unpasteurised milk such as Camembert due to the culturally constructed link of traditional production with good quality.
The paper combines ideas from social theories on modernisation, trust and social construction of risk with insights from the field of food studies. The theoretical segment will look at how larger evolutions in society, technology, media, sub-politics and food interacted. In doing so, the research contributes to the understanding of the effects these changes had on the representation of expertise, products and food safety.
In order to understand how food safety, scares and pathogens were represented and fit within a cultural framework, the case study will focus on a Belgian newspaper and the publications of two consumer organisations for a period of 35 years. A mixed methods approach is used through combining the methods of quantitative framing research and content analysis with an in-depth qualitative thematic approach. (Show less)

The disciplines of chemistry and physiology are often seen as the roots of nutrition science, but the discipline of hygiene or state medicine was also an important field of knowledge and practice for the emerging science of nutrition in Norway from the 1870s. This paper focuses on research conducted in universities by actors from different disciplines and within various networks and relationships with authorities. The history of Norwegian nutrition science is found to be characterized by two themes: one theme is physiology, which concentrated on nutrients and metabolism, and the other is hygiene, which concentrated on food from a wider perspective. The different orientations came to be connected to different policy advice in some periods. Three controversies are studied, one in the early 1900s on the causes of scurvy, one in the 1930s on minimum recommendations for the poor relief diet and the third in the 1960s on the relationship between fat consumption and the rise in deaths from coronary heart disease. The controversies are found to be of different character, although having some common features. Hygiene and physiology offered different framework for policy advices on nutrition, not only in Norway, but also internationally. The paper suggests that it might be fruitful to pay more attention to differences between disciplines within medicine, and to study different paths of development and prestige between disciplines – where research orientations and relationships with policy actors and institutions ought to be taken into account. (Show less)

Since the 19th century the Danish state has used food policies and initiatives to control and/or redirect the food intake of certain population segments. In the late 19th century the state was mainly interested in the dietary conditions of working class families and infants/children. Throughout the 20th century food initiatives aimed at elders did however increase dramatically both in number and detail. In the 21st century food policies targeting aging population segments has come to be a core element in elder care, that attract enormous political (and public) attention.
This paper aims to identify and discuss why food for elders came to such a central part of welfare policy in 21st century Denmark?
The paper combines studies of public (state and municipal) food initiatives targeted segments of the elder population issued between 1892 and 2014 and present institutional practices and individual experiences of elders.
The analyses focuses on; historical and present perceptions of food and the ageing body ; the changing importance of elderly in the welfare state; food as organizational structure in elder care past and present. (Show less)

The Sami are a North European indigenous people living in the northern part of Fennoscandia, and the only European people that was considered a ‘black race’ during the period of racialization in the mid-19th century. Representatives of the ‘white race' wanted to teach the Sami skills including agriculture to give them a chance to avoid extinction, which was otherwise considered to be the fate that awaited native people. Those of the Sami who became settlers were given awards for building subsurface drains and cultivating new areas of land.

In the 19th century the Sami in Finnish Lapland also came face to face with modernizing food culture and the pressures of a new way of life. Until the 19th century they had lived nomadic lives and made their living fishing, hunting, and reindeer herding, but now many of them took up permanent dwellings. Farming was difficult in the harsh climate of Lapland, but market fairs and trading posts offered novel products, and gradually also the Sami started to drink coffee and consume increasing amounts of salt, bread, and sugar. What was initially a high-protein diet started shifting towards carbohydrates. One way of keeping track of this gradual change is to investigate estate inventories, in other words lists of the worldly possessions of individual Sami upon their death: here, alongside tents and fishing nets, items such as coffee pots, soaps, and wall clocks started appearing.

In this paper I examine whether permanent dwellings and the new diet resulted in improved nutrition – or did the opposite occur? Did this nutritional turning point have any substantial impact on how long the Sami lived and how healthy they were? (Show less)

This paper is going to explore the issue of unsuccessful policy of public health nutrition implemented during the times of socialist regime in Polish People Republic (1945-1989). Likewise in other socialist countries, especially in the Soviet Union, public nutrition was high on the political agenda of the government who tried to monitor appropriate food intake of socialist workers, but also to divert their attention from everyday concerns on scarce food supplies. Extended networks of subsidized company canteens, cafeterias and bars were established to feed people on balanced and healthy diet with gross negligence, at the same time, in its taste quality. Numerous nutrition experts advised on proper meal composing with many hints on how to replace unavailable food products (such as meat) and still meet the daily requirements of nutritious value.
Nevertheless, these institutional efforts received muted responses from individual citizens mainly because of general distrust of inefficient political and economic system which was blamed for severe food shortages. Maintaining the strong division between public and private sphere people kept relaying on their own skills and resources, such as informal circles of food supply, home-grown and self-made food and traditional recipes as the only guarantee of safe, healthy, nourishing and tasty consumption. (Show less)