The Political Theory of Food and Drink Policies

The normative implications of food and drink policies have been relatively neglected by contemporary political theorists. This is surprising given the prominent attention dedicated to the regulation of food and drink in the public policy of contemporary states. The recent horsemeat scandal, for example, has raised many moral and political questions regarding the regulation of food consumption. Similarly, measures such as the implementation of taxes on fat foods and sugary drinks have elicited a growing debate on whether the state has the right to interfere with people’s eating and drinking choices. Moreover, there is a well-recognized need to confront different requests for food options (for example at school or workplace) to suit the dietary habits of people belonging to different religious groups and holding different ethical convictions. No systematic attempts have been made yet to show how political theory can provide coherent conceptual and normative frameworks for critically assessing whether and why the state ought to regulate food and drink production, distribution, and consumption and in what ways. The aim of this Section is to fill this gap by offering a forum for political theorists interested in this subject and thus providing the foundations for further research on this topic. While the 7th ECPR General Conference has already hosted a Section on Food Governance, contributors on that occasion were mainly from within the field of political science, so they focused primarily on the empirical, strategic, and structural aspects of food governance. Our proposed Section aims to complement and expand the discussions on food and drink policies by investigating their normative dimensions from the perspective of political theory. The normative implications of food and drink policies have been relatively neglected by contemporary political theorists. This is surprising given the prominent attention dedicated to the regulation of food and drink in the public policy of contemporary states. The recent horsemeat scandal, for example, has raised many moral and political questions regarding the regulation of food consumption. Similarly, measures such as the implementation of taxes on fat foods and sugary drinks have elicited a growing debate on whether the state has the right to interfere with people’s eating and drinking choices. Moreover, there is a well-recognized need to confront different requests for food options (for example at school or workplace) to suit the dietary habits of people belonging to different religious groups and holding different ethical convictions. No systematic attempts have been made yet to show how political theory can provide coherent conceptual and normative frameworks for critically assessing whether and why the state ought to regulate food and drink production, distribution, and consumption and in what ways. The aim of this Section is to fill this gap by offering a forum for political theorists interested in this subject and thus providing the foundations for further research on this topic. While the 7th ECPR General Conference has already hosted a Section on Food Governance, contributors on that occasion were mainly from within the field of political science, so they focused primarily on the empirical, strategic, and structural aspects of food governance. Our proposed Section aims to complement and expand the discussions on food and drink policies by investigating their normative dimensions from the perspective of political theory.