Risk and food: environmental concerns and consumer practices

Summary Environmental risks related to food consumption produce needs among consumers to handle such risks through their consumption practices. Consumers ’ ways of coping with risks are dependent on the social relations of everyday life, of which consumption practices are a part. Risk-handling in food consumption is socio-culturally broader than the cognitive rationality assumed in expert knowledge and administrative procedures on risk and risk-handling. Likewise, risk-handling in food consumption is also characterized by ambivalences. The objective of the article is to show that an important social and cultural source of ambivalence in consumers ’ handling of risk in food consumption comes from food consumption practices being caught in the tension between desire and control. The article proposes a heuristic theoretical device, called ‘the contested space of the body’, which is used to discuss the bodily dimension of consumer risk-handling. This is based on a Danish empirical study of parents with small children. A typology of consumers ’ risk-handling is presented which diers from traditional typologies of consumer segments by allowing for overlaps and shifts between the individual positions in the typology. The three types of risk-handling are the worried, the irritated and the pragmatic. The results suggest that in worried risk-handling control marginalizes desire, in irritated risk-handling desire is openly in conflict with control, and in pragmatic risk-handling relief from the contested space of the body is attempted