From Food Chains to Food Webs: Regulating Capitalist Production and Consumption in the Food System

Abstract

This review addresses food as a topic of sociolegal studies. We show that the divide between production and consumption in law and social science is increasingly untenable in the context of contemporary globalizing, industrializing food chains underpinned by a productivist ideology and supported by a consumptogenic cultural economy. Sociolegal studies of food are well-suited to grappling with the complexity of production–consumption dynamics through regulatory governance studies of hybridized (public and private) supply chain standards. Yet we argue for an expanded focus on the embeddedness of food chains in social, political, and, importantly, ecological food webs. We suggest that sociolega..