A central goal of the federal legal system for food is to ensure the integrity of representations made by sellers of food about their products. To achieve transparency, the law of food deploys three different kinds of regulatory strategies: prohibitions against fraud, compelled disclosures, and constraints on discretionary disclosures. Collectively, these constraints create an enormous legal structure governing representations about the food we eat. Nevertheless, the transparency achieved by law is only partial, and indeed sometimes serves only to conceal a lie. Resource limits at federal agencies charged with regulating food hollow out enforcement programs aimed at false or misleading representations. Regulatory fragmentation ensures that agencies with very different cultures and missions preside, confusingly, over the transparency of the food system. Lopsided participation by food producers before the agencies works distortions in rules on mandatory disclosures. In these ways, the existing legal system for food fails to deliver the transparency it seems to promise. Moreover, the existing legal system does not even try to achieve the level of food-related awareness that many in the contemporary food movement would desire, awareness that would entail knowledge about the environmental, animal welfare, and human labor consequences of our food supply. I propose three ideas for improving understanding of our food supply: allowance of citizen suits under federal food laws, frank acknowledgment by federal agencies that they cannot adequately enforce these laws, and a good deal more skepticism on the part of consumers toward the reliability and credibility of representations made to them about their food.

This work explores the relationships between legal institutions and political and economic transformation. It argues that as law is enlisted to help produce the profound economic and sociotechnical shifts that have accompanied the emergence of the informational economy, it is changing in fundamental ways.

Food Law and Policy surveys the elements of modern food law. It broadens the coverage of traditional food and drug law topics of safety, marketing, and nutrition, and includes law governing environment, international trade, and other legal aspects of the modern food system. The result is the first casebook that provides a comprehensive treatment of food law as a unique discipline. Key Features: Draws together cases with other regulatory materials such as rulemaking documents and agency requests for proposals for grant funding. Focuses on federal law and includes discussion of innovations in food law happening at the municipal, state and federal level. Covers the latest developments in food law.

Academic food ethics incorporates work from philosophy but also anthropology, economics, the environmental sciences and other natural sciences, geography, law, and sociology. Scholars from these fields have been producing work for decades on the food system, and on ethical, social, and policy issues connected to the food system. Yet in the last several years, there has been a notable increase in philosophical work on these issues-work that draws on multiple literatures within practical ethics, normative ethics and political philosophy. This handbook provides a sample of that philosophical work across multiple areas of food ethics: conventional agriculture and alternatives to it; animals; consumption; food justice; food politics; food workers; and, food and identity.

As the modern food system continues to transform food - its composition, taste, availability, value, and appearance - consumers are increasingly confronted by legal and regulatory issues that affect us all on a daily basis. In Food Law in the United States, Michael T. Roberts addresses these issues in a comprehensive, systematic manner that lays out the national legal framework for the regulation of food and the legal tools that fill gaps in this framework, including litigation, state law, and private standards. Covering a broad expanse of topics including commerce, food safety, marketing, nutrition, and emerging food-systems issues such as local food, sustainability, security, urban agriculture, and equity, this book is an essential reference for lawyers, students, non-law professionals, and consumer advocates who must understand food law to advance their respective interests.

Imaging Animal Industry focuses on the visual culture of the American meat industry between 1890 and 1960. It describes how, during that period, photographs and other images helped to shape public perceptions of industrial-scale meat production. Although the meat industry today bans most photography at its facilities, in the past this was not always the case: the meat industry not only tolerated but welcomed cameras. Meatpacking companies and industry organizations regarded photographs as useful tools for creating and managing a vision of their activities, their innovations, and their contributions to the march of American economic and industrial progress. Drawing on archival collections across the American Midwest, this book relates a history of the meatpacking industry’s use of images in the early to mid-twentieth century. In the process, it reveals the key role that images, particularly photographs, have played in assisting with the rise of industrial meat production.