Are food quality schemes an alternative to the conventional food system?

Abstract

The environmental, economic and social impacts of the current hegemonic agrifood regime, based on mass food production and global market oriented distribution have led governments and state agencies to increasingly promote alternative policies prioritizing food quality over quantity. Some of these policy measures try to highlight distinctive features based on geographical origin of foods (e.g. appellations of origin) or production systems (e.g. organic farming). In order to understand how food quality is conceptualized and to assess its transformative potential, in this chapter we present an analysis of the metaphors used in one of the main European legal texts on this subject (EU Regulation 1151/2012). Results show how this agrifood quality policy is mainly oriented to protect those producers in risk of being excluded from the current hegemonic agrifood regime, but this protection is basically understood in economic terms, while other environmental and social domains are almost absent from the policy aim.