Short circuits: New trends in the consumption of food and the changing status of meat

This paper describes the emergence of a post‐modern circuit of food and addresses the rise of a new culture of consumption. The assessment of the diffusion of organic products in terms of the emergence of a new culture of food consumption springs from two principle considerations. The first is the much‐discussed question of the globalization of the agri‐food system that has been a focus of attention in the debate in sociology of agriculture and in agricultural economics. The second is the new relevance that the study of culture and consumption has assumed in analyses of social relations and cultural forms. Combining insights from these two bodies of work, the paper illustrates how strategies of food selling/shopping for lifestyle reasons coalesce with particular forms of production. The main theme of the paper is therefore that the cultural change around food consumption has been a vital factor in the constitution of the networks of products, producers, distributors, public authorities, and consumers which constitute post‐modern circuits of food