Embracing the Elephant

the experience of these authors at the interface of food studies and the food industry suggests the risks of both engaging and not engaging in these sorts of collaborations. The risks of engaging are as clear to me viscerally, from my own experience working at the intersection of food studies and food science (a field very closely connected to the food industry), as they are in the pages of these reflections. Food studies scholars who wish to conduct scholarship at this intersection not only have to manage the pragmatic challenges of negotiating bureaucracies, ‘‘power geometries,’’ ethical issues, and asymmetrical expectations around timelines and ‘‘outputs’’ (Jackson, Introduction), but they also have to manage an equally daunting and consequential set of symbolic dangers. These have to do with ‘‘caricatured views,’’ ‘‘simplistic moral judgments’’ (Jackson, Introduction), and ‘‘tacit assumptions’’ (Evans) among food scholars about the food industry, those who work within it, and, by extension, those who would conduct scholarly research in close proximity to or in partnership with it. Drawing on what they have learned through their experiences, the authors provide on the one hand a set of pragmatic insights that will be useful for food studies scholars who may be called, for one reason or another, to these outer reaches of the field. On the other hand, they challenge us to make those symbolic dangers a sustained focus of our critical reflection. The food studies researcher who engages at this intersection clearly has to overcome suspicion and misunderstandings on the part of industry collaborators, but I want to highlight the challenge issued by these authors that has to do with how we handle our own suspicion and mistrust, and whether or not we are willing to think critically about the ways in which the perceived taint of engaging with the food industry inhibits our ability to ask and answer many of the questions—about the sustainability, ethics, and future of the food system, for example—that are at the center of our field. These interactions are inevitably fraught with real ethical and pragmatic challenges that need to be carefully attended to with skill and ongoing reflection. But we should give as much attention to our unexamined assumptions, negative biases, and foregone conclusions. As Evans argues, treating the large corporations that dominate the food system as legitimate objects of social scientific inquiry and cultural analysis, opening the space for ‘‘empirical encounters’’ with producers, and allowing our critical stance to open into intellectual curiosity rather than foreclose it has the potential to have an impact that is, in keeping with the outsized power of these actors within the food system, very significant. While neoliberal pressures on academic researchers to seek funding sources and produce particular kinds of ‘‘impact’’ (Jackson, Introduction) are absolutely part of the picture (push factors), there may be new opportunities emerging at the food studies / food industry interface because of changes taking place within the food industry and, importantly, in its relationship with consumers (pull factors). Evans’s ‘‘empirical encounter’’ in the realm of food waste points to a potential shift in the dynamics of the relationship between business and civil society, while Truninger’s leads her to argue ‘‘that the greenwashing business context of the 1990s is insufficient to explain some of the corporate ethos found in twenty-firstcentury business operations.’’ Furthermore, she points out that ‘‘the growing strength of civil society pressure’’ is driving companies to take a new interest in ‘‘responding to external pressure to change perceived malpractice.’’ Without being overly optimistic (or naive) I think it is reasonable to suggest that new opportunities and imperatives for critical scholarship are created in this evolving scenario, which includes almost daily news stories about major producers responding to consumer pressures, and in which, feeling the heat of consumer criticism, companies are investing in trust building through various forms of ‘‘transparency,’’ from storytelling to supply chain accountability. Meanwhile the monolith we refer to as ‘‘the food industry’’ is itself evolving, as food tech startups fueled by venture capital (and driven by many of the same concerns that animate alternative food politics) ‘‘disrupt’’ established business practices. As the food industry doubles down to both assess its