Enquiring into Trust

Abstract

Our research project was devised to explore the basis and dynamics of trust in food in a context where the BSE crisis had pushed issues of food safety high up the political agenda in Europe. The prevailing ethos was one in which political authorities, but also market actors, perceived an erosion of confidence among consumers that food being produced and sold was safe to eat. Those in positions of power thought the consumers’ fears, if not entirely groundless, much exaggerated; and irrespective of the real circumstances, considered it an urgent priority that trust should be restored. How that might be done depended partly on understanding how trust in food ebbs and flows. The main scholarly view, as described in Chapter 2, approached the matter in terms of changing perceptions of risk in the modern world and how these affected the behaviour of individuals, but we were unpersuaded that this was a plausible way of understanding variations in trust. It seemed to us that trust in food was based on much broader considerations than simply safety, and that an adequate account would have to pay much greater attention to the institutional context in which action occurred and opinions were formed.