The State and Triangular Affairs of Trust

Abstract

Viewed from the perspective of the market relationship between consumers and food provisioners, the thesis that high consumer trust is related to their successful mutual adaptation in a process of modernization, supermarketization and globalization, and that low trust is an outcome of disrupted traditional and familiar relationships, was tested and found useful, but insufficient. In this chapter, the relational institutional underpinnings of trust are further explored by adding the third major pole to the triad of relationship that makes up our ‘triangular affairs’: the state. The role of the state in regulating food has a long history (e.g., Burnett, 1989; Burnett and Oddy, 1994; Lyon, 1998), partly driven by crises. Since the end of the nineteenth century the state has assumed a major responsibility for food safety, pricing and quality, and increasingly other issues of nutrition and ethics. By virtue of the varied and progressive assumption of that responsibility, consumer trust in food immediately becomes one that involves the state as well as market actors. The ways in which different states regulate and monitor food provisioning, and indeed consumption habits, become a matter of trust in the state: its effectiveness, complicity of interests, performance, truthfulness and democratic accountability become engaged.