"Patrimonialized" food products

An alternative to agro-industry and industrial food production?

Abstract

Nowadays, discourses about food and about food production and distribution in particular proliferate. A good part of them revolves around agribusiness and the food industry, its benefits and potential and its unwanted, even perverse, effects. A wide diversity of arguments are mobilized, defended and refuted by proponents and opponents, from often polarized perspectives.

In the first part of this article, some of these discourses are presented, as well as the arguments used, the actors who utter them, their objectives, and their strategies. We will briefly summarize the discourses critical of the current forms of food production and their proposals for change, which take the form of a series of alternatives, considerably different from each other. Within the broad spectrum of proposals for change, which are distributed on a continuum that goes from the radical transformation of the forms of food production to the occupation of small niches complementary to it, are the strategies for the patrimonialization of food products. The second part focuses on this heritage process, the discourses it mobilizes, the agents that intervene and the strategies that are used. The third part focuses on the role of citizens and consumers in this patrimonialization, and on the meanings that patrimonialized food products adopt for them, as well as the uses to which they are given and the place they occupy in dietary patterns.