A pinch of ethics and a soupçon of home cooking: Soft-selling supermarkets on food television

[No abstract available

Communicating Health Risks Via the Media

Understanding the viewer impact of the primetime television cooking show, MasterChef Australia, may help us to communicate more positively received messages about food and eating

Celebrity chefs, consumption politics and food labelling: Exploring the contradictions

The mainstreaming of ethical consumption over the past two decades has attuned citizen-consumers to their power to shape food production practices through their consumption choices. To navigate the complexity inherent in contemporary food supply chains, ethical consumers often turn to certification and labelling schemes to identify which products to purchase. However, the existence of competing supply chain interests, coupled with the myriad different ways production factors and processes can be combined, has constructed certification and labelling as a highly contested space. Within this context, celebrity chefs have taken on a significant role in influencing food cultures, consumption practices and public policy. As a group of powerful cultural and political intermediaries, celebrity chefs have used their public profile to address causes related to food ethics and sustainability, and to shape consumer ‘choice’ by advocating for the consumption of labelled and certified food products. This article analyses the media campaigns of British celebrity chefs Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to promote ‘free range’ chicken and eggs. It reveals how the celebrity chefs’ interventions into consumption politics often occurs without sufficient sensitivity to the specificities of the particular labelling and certification systems they are promoting, with very different systems often presented as achieving identical ends. In presenting ‘free range’ as a single, idealised and uncontested standard, they (perhaps unwittingly) expose themselves to the range of contradictions involved in the need to present complex information on animal friendly and sustainably produced food in simple, unambiguous and entertaining formats.Michelle Phillipov and Fred Gal

Media Messages About Sustainable Seafood: How Do Media Influencers Affect Consumer Attitudes

Final Report -2017-131Michelle Phillipov, Anna Farmery, Fred Gal

What are they thinking? Consumer attitudes to meat production in Australia

Meat production has come under increasing scrutiny from consumers and citizens who feel that certain practices are unethical and negatively affect farm-animal welfare. Animal welfare can be viewed as both a scientific and social concept, and purchasing products with animal welfare claims can be considered an act of ‘ethical consumption’. The present paper reviews research that examines consumer attitudes to animal welfare and highlights tensions between consumer and citizen attitudes and behaviours, and assumptions that are made within these studies. We present our own research into motivations to purchase free-range eggs as an example of research that attempts to unpack these assumptions, in particular, that such purchases are made out of concern for animal welfare. We present a further example of our own research that attempts to identify how attitudes to meat production are socially constructed. We conclude with recommended strategies to engage the broader community in discussions about animal production, so as to improve industry–community communication about farm-animal welfare in meat-production industries.H. J. Bray, E. A. Buddle and R. A. Anken