The recombinant BGH controversy in the United States: Toward a new consumption politics of food?

The history of the controversy over recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) is explored in terms of the issue of the potential robustness of a consumption-driven "new" politics of food and agriculture. It is noted that while the dominant historical traditions in the social sciences have served to discount the autonomous role that consumers and consumption play in modern societies, there has been growing interest in consumption within food studies as well as other bodies of scholarship such as postmodernism, social constructivism, social capital/social distinction, and environmental sociology. A review of the shifting pattern of discourses during the rBGH controversy shows that consumption-driven claims and politics played a tangible, but relatively minor role. Even so, it is suggested that the rBGH experience along with parallel trends in food politics (e.g., anti-pesticide campaigns such as the "Alar scare," agribusiness attempts to intimidate opponents through food disparagement laws, conditions-of-production provisions of the World Trade Organization agreement) could make the consumption/consumer dimension of food politics more important in the future. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.