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This chapter examines the extensive food riots of 1795-1801 in England and questions how far they may be seen as marking a sea change in the attitudes of the authorities towards popular protest and of the protestors themselves. The food riots of 1795-1801 demonstrated the collapse of the old moral economy as the crowd, and most justices, believed that market manipulation was exacerbating their plight and demanded action. The micro-politics of the moral economy, however, depended on the ability of the justices to deliver. The crisis of 1795 indicated that the justices' instrumental power in the market had greatly waned. This was to have major ramifications for social relations in the decade that followed when the problems of food supply were superseded by an issue that struck deep into the moral economic attitudes of industrial workers: machinery.

When food prices spike in countries with large numbers of poor people, hunger and malnutrition are very likely to result in the absence of public intervention. Government actions often take the form of direct interventions in the market to stabilize food prices, which goes against most international advice to rely on safety nets and world trade. Despite the limitations of food price stabilization policies, they are widespread in developing countries. Price stabilization policies arise as a result of international and domestic coordination problems. At the individual country level, it is in the national interest of many countries to adjust trade policies to take advantage of the world market in order to achieve domestic price stability. When countercyclical trade policies become widespread, the result is a thinner and less reliable world market, which further decreases the appeal of laissez-faire. A similar vicious circle operates in the domestic market: without effective policies to protect the poor, food market liberalization lacks credibility and makes private actors reluctant to intervene, which forces government to act. The current policy challenge lies in designing policies that will build trust in world markets and increase trust between public and private agents.

Chapter five examines natural foods stores that sold vegetarian and organic products with the goal of advancing the causes of environmentalism, animal rights, and pacifism. Natural foods sellers understood their small, independent storefronts as ethical alternatives to American supermarkets and agribusinesses’ relentless pursuit of profit through exploitative labor and environmentally destructive systems of production and distribution. Like feminist businesses, natural foods stores were eager practitioners of cooperative ownership and collective management. By the late 1970s, the natural foods market had become more lucrative than anyone could have imagined a decade earlier. Yet as companies like Whole Foods Market aggressively pursued profits in the 1980s and ‘90s, they would move far from natural foods sellers’ original values of shared ownership, democratic workplaces, and collaboration with social movements.

This chapter examines how grocery stores and Whole Foods Market in particular, have driven the rise of precautionary consumption. It takes the reader through a Whole Foods Market store to understand how the company both cultivates anxiety about toxics, and promises to protect consumers from harmful substances in their food and personal care products. The chapter then turns to the product package, viewing it as powerful mechanism driving precautionary consumption. While Whole Foods Market is not the only market actor encouraging precautionary consumption, the company has helped to mark the grocery store as a site where a new, much more encompassing form of precautionary consumption is possible.

The finalization of the National Organic Program (NOP) accelerated the growth of the organic market. This chapter unpacks related changes that have occurred in the post-NOP period. First, it describes the erosion of economic and organizational partitions between the organic foods sector and the mainstream food industry through a process that is labeled convergence, paying special attention to organic foods retailing. It then argues that newly arrived sector members have transposed cultural schemas from the mainstream business world to organize their work in the organic sector. This has elaborated expansionary understandings by (1) providing a moral justification for market growth, (2) contributing to the marginalization of countercultural businesses and critical activists through boundary work, and (3) relegating consumers to the role of purchasers by encouraging their exclusion from discussions related to organic regulations.

This chapter presents many economic arguments in support of value(s)-based management, the idea that CSR fits in well within a VBM framework because CSR appears to make good business sense. Corporate social responsibility follows from the premise that it is important for a firm to operate in a socially responsible manner that considers the importance of all of its stakeholders and how they contribute to the company's long-term, sustainable creation of value. Economic arguments that support the business purpose of CSR include the fact that it can help recruit and retain employees, provide reputational risk management, assist in differentiating firm branding, and help avoid governmental scrutiny and interference. The existing academic evidence is consistent with the economic arguments supporting a firm's development of a CSR program.

Buying and cooking food in urban working-class neighborhoods offered its own set of challenges and rewards. Urban people had many opportunities to buy cooked food from bakeries, delis, small restaurants, and saloons. Buying prepared food allowed women to take on more wage work, and it freed homes from the heat of the stove. Producing food in the crowded city was difficult but not impossible. Some working-class people produced food for their families or to sell to others in the thriving ethnic communities of dense cities. Both local and family conditions affected each decision—to buy or to cook; the density that discouraged home cooking for some offered opportunities for entrepreneurship to others.

This chapter describes German agricultural development in this period as mainly a demand-driven process. It cites two main forces: rural population growth was the main source of increasing food demand until the early nineteenth century; and export markets on Germany´s external borders represented another. In these markets, powerful integration processes led to a `great moderation‘ of price volatility (of grain markets) during the eighteenth century. Principal actors on the supply side—even in large parts East of the river Elbe—were peasant farmers. The chapter emphasizes that neither did the celebrated liberal agricultural reforms at the beginning of the nineteenth century induce modernization of German agriculture, nor had they any sizeable impact on agricultural growth. Those peasants remained in this role in their post-emancipated guise as free family farmers. This is especially true for areas of advanced intense farming in and around densely populated (proto-)industrial centers.

Explores recent animated films that embrace the idea that belonging to a community does not require conformity to social expectations, but rather builds on the protagonist’s individuality and seeming queerness. In box office hits like Ratatouille (Bird, 2007), Kung Fu Panda (Osborn and Stevenson, 2008), and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Lord and Miller, 2009), and in the lesser known Bee Movie (Hickner and Smith. 2007), The Tale of Desperaux (Fell and Stevenhagen, 2008), character development connects closely with food, which becomes the instrument of the heroes’ redemption even when it would initially appear to be the very cause of their social isolation. This raises the question: What models of acceptable adulthood – in terms of gender, class, ethnicity, and body image - does the interaction with food present to viewers, in particular children, who are arguably among the main marketing targets of these productions? Although cooking is still often culturally framed as an element of the domestic and feminine sphere, in these films food is not domestic or related to care work, and as such appears as more culturally acceptable for males.

Chapter six traces activist businesses through the 1990s until today. They explore the significant but mixed legacy these enterprises have had on American business culture, as seen in a revived appreciation for small business, the emergence of a so-called “solidarity economy,” and corporations’ generous appropriation of the themes and language of liberation, social consciousness, and ethical business. Activist entrepreneurs’ impact on American business may be much less radical than they had originally hoped, but their vision lives on—albeit fragmented and diluted—in the language, products, and goals of countless American companies today.

This chapter examines Irish history during the period from 1833 to 1891 or the so-called era of Charles Stewart Parnell. It discusses how Parnell and his parliamentary associates used the prominence they had won in the land war years to fashion a new kind of Irish political party. The chapter suggests that a major source of change during this time was the upheaval in agricultural and industrial prices and consumer demand on the British food market, which began in the 1870s.