This article traces the history of the US FDA regulation of nutrition labeling, identifying an ‘informational turn’ in the evolving politics of food, diet and health in America. Before nutrition labeling was introduced, regulators actively sought to segregate food markets from drug markets by largely prohibiting health information on food labels, believing such information would ‘confuse’ the ordinary food consumer. Nutrition labeling’s emergence, first in the 1970s as consumer empowerment and then later in the 1990s as a solution to information overload, reflected the belief that it was better to manage markets indirectly through consumer information than directly through command-and-control regulatory architecture. By studying product labels as ‘information infrastructure’, rather than a ‘knowledge fix’, the article shows how labels are situated at the center of a legally constructed terrain of inter-textual references, both educational and promotional, that reflects a mix of market pragmatism and evolving legal thought about mass versus niche markets. A change to the label reaches out across a wide informational environment representing food and has direct material consequences for how food is produced, distributed, and consumed. One legacy of this informational turn has been an increasing focus by policymakers, industry, and arguably consumers on the politics of information in place of the politics of the food itself.
...More
Thesis
Schwartz, Jason Lee;
(2012)
External Factors: Advisory Committees, Regulation, and American Public Health, 1962--1999
(/isis/citation/CBB001567388/)
Article
Schleifer, David;
(February 2013)
Categories count: Trans fat labeling as a technique of corporate governance
(/isis/citation/CBB214363773/)
Article
Adam Plaiss;
(October 2016)
From Natural Monopoly to Public Utility: Technological Determinism and the Political Economy of Infrastructure in Progressive-Era America
(/isis/citation/CBB268683175/)
Chapter
Daemmrich, A.;
Greene, J.;
(2010)
From Visible Harm to Relative Risk: Centralization and Fragmentation of Pharmacovigilance
(/isis/citation/CBB001221031/)
Thesis
Frohlich, Xaq Zachary;
(2011)
Accounting for Taste: Regulating Food Labeling in the “Affluent Society,” 1945--1995
(/isis/citation/CBB001567293/)
Article
Healy, David;
Mangin, Derelie;
Applbaum, Kalman;
(2014)
The Shipwreck of the Singular
(/isis/citation/CBB001421185/)
Article
Anderson, Stuart;
(2008)
From “Bespoke” to “Off-the-Peg”: Community Pharmacists and the Retailing of Medicines in Great Britain 1900 to 1970
(/isis/citation/CBB000932017/)
Thesis
Downer, John Richard;
(2006)
The Burden of Proof: Regulating Reliability in Civil Aviation
(/isis/citation/CBB001561438/)
Article
Joan H. Robinson;
(October 2016)
Bringing the pregnancy test home from the hospital
(/isis/citation/CBB812145388/)
Article
Frohlich, Xaq;
(Spring 2022)
Making Food Standard: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Food Standards of Identity, 1930s–1960s
(/isis/citation/CBB979639865/)
Article
Kirk, Robert G. W.;
(2012)
“Standardization through Mechanization”: Germ-Free Life and the Engineering of the Ideal Laboratory Animal
(/isis/citation/CBB001230796/)
Article
Rubin, Vera C.;
(2010)
Charlotte Moore Sitterly
(/isis/citation/CBB001034821/)
Article
Bradley Fidler;
Andrew L. Russell;
(October 2018)
Financial and Administrative Infrastructure for the Early Internet Network Maintenance at the Defense Information Systems Agency
(/isis/citation/CBB161620234/)
Book
Rajala, Richard A.;
(1998)
Clearcutting the Pacific Rain Forest: Production, Science, and Regulation
(/isis/citation/CBB000111923/)
Book
Mark R. Wilson;
(2016)
Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II
(/isis/citation/CBB116027771/)
Book
Obach, Brian K.;
(2015)
Organic Struggle: The Movement for Sustainable Agriculture in the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB747820136/)
Thesis
Kaplan, Rebecca;
(2013)
Cows, Cattle Owners, and the USDA: Brucellosis, Populations, and Public Health Policy in Twentieth Century United States
(/isis/citation/CBB001567512/)
Chapter
Jeremy Kilpatrick;
(2014)
Mathematics Education in the United States and Canada
(/isis/citation/CBB010523862/)
Book
Julie A. Cohn;
(2017)
The Grid: Biography of an American Technology
(/isis/citation/CBB970828462/)
Chapter
Benjamin Brendel;
(2022)
Constructing dams' global success story : knowledge production, staging, and exchange in US American and Spanish dam building from the 1920s to the 1970s
(/isis/citation/CBB401385425/)
Be the first to comment!