IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/pseptp/halshs-00825183.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

That elusive feature of food consumption: Historical perspectives on food quality, a review and some proposals

Author

Listed:
  • Jérôme Bourdieu

    (PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, LEA - Laboratoire d'Economie Appliquée - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique)

  • Martin Bruegel

    (ALISS - Alimentation et sciences sociales - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique)

  • Peter Atkins

    (IDHE - Institutions et Dynamiques Historiques de l'Economie - ENS Cachan - École normale supérieure - Cachan - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - UP8 - Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis - UPN - Université Paris Nanterre - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

Food quality is always acknowledged as a significant factor in everyday lives, and it often appears in some ad-hoc form or another in the study of economics. Its very fuzzyness may account for its ubiquity. Clarification becomes imperative, and this paper inventories shared features of past research to propose a common research agenda. Its premise is that "quality" requires definition, that definition is conventional and thus negotiated, and that institutions both publicize and enforce agreements on its contents. Qualification in all its guises (certification, geographic provenance, industry labels ...) and venues (state, private, third-party...) relies on an institutional frame that is all the more necessary as markets collapse when consumer confidence in foods disappears. That is why the arbitrage between public health and market efficiency emerges as a major issue when it comes to the definition of food quality.

Suggested Citation

  • Jérôme Bourdieu & Martin Bruegel & Peter Atkins, 2007. "That elusive feature of food consumption: Historical perspectives on food quality, a review and some proposals," PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) halshs-00825183, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:pseptp:halshs-00825183
    DOI: 10.1484/J.FOOD.1.100231
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Food consumption;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:pseptp:halshs-00825183. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Caroline Bauer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.