Framing local food and food heritage in European Union food policy

The concepts of local food and food heritage have attracted increasing attention in academic and policy debates. Yet, both terms remain ambiguous, contested, and open to multiple interpretations. Within the EU, these notions carry particular importance: food has long been central to EU identity and governance, and current strategies for food system transformation and rural development frequently invoke related terms. While prior work has examined some aspects of the EU food policy framing, no systematic text analysis has specifically examined how the two concepts are being constructed and mobilised within the EUThis study aims to fulfil this gap by exploring how local food and food heritage are conceptualised and operationalised in EU policy documents. It adopts a qualitative research design grounded in a constructionist paradigm. Twelve EU policy documents published between 2011 and 2025 were selected from a broader corpus and analysed using Qualitative Document Analysis (QDA). The codebook was derived from the literature and refined through pilot testing. The findings reveal a shift in the treatment of local food: while earlier and less formal documents refer to it explicitly, more recent, strategic, and legally binding texts rely on indirect framings aligned with food producers’ economic priorities. Food heritage is more consistently present, primarily linked to traditional knowledge and cultural identity. The two concepts intersect most clearly in geographical indications system, and in discourses of local branding and rural development. The analysis demonstrates that EU policies frame local food in line with broader economic objectives, and that food heritage is recognised as part of the EU’s cultural identity and worthy of protection as such. We also conclude that a lack of coherent vision of what is the place of both concepts within the EU food governance risks them being primarily determined by producer competitiveness, thereby causing the relational and cultural dimensions that originally justified these concepts to become marginalised in policy.