Food, Ethics and Community: Using Cultural Animation to Develop a Food Vision for North Staffordshire

Abstract

Eating ethically involves a plethora of activities, being both a contingent and a challenging practice (Williams et al, 2015). The desire to be more ethical in our food choices is connected to anxieties over food consumption, including how and what we should be eating (Ashley et al, 2004), the conditions of production and distribution, highlighted through various food scares from BSE to horse meat in burgers (Jackson, 2010) and the amount of food that gets wasted in the process (Evans, 2014). Such are the range of issues that it becomes hard for consumers to identify a precise focus for the anxiety beyond a general ‘lack of confidence in food’ (Osowski et al, 2012:58) with the result that they feel unsure as to how to respond (Benson,1997)