Food stories: consumption in an age of anxiety

This paper (originally presented as the Cultural Geographies 2009 annual lecture) reflects on the agenda set out in Maps of meaning 20 years ago which sought to chart a series of new directions in cultural geography. At the core of that project was an argument about the politics of culture and the idea of cultural politics. Today, that agenda might be re-cast as an attempt to map the intersection of culture and economy or, more precisely, of political and moral economies.This paper will apply these ideas to the geographies of food where, despite relative affluence and food security, consumers in the West (and particularly in Britain) are often described as living through an ‘age of anxiety’. Consumer anxieties about food have been provoked by a range of food scares and farming crises. As a result, manufacturers and retailers have struggled to re-establish consumer trust in food and governments have urged a re-connection between food producers and consumers. The paper explores the concept of consumer anxiety and draws on a series of consumer interviews and life histories with people in the British food industry to illustrate the nature of contemporary anxieties about food. The paper concludes with some reflections on the intersection of public and private anxieties as illustrated by these personal and corporate food stories.