Mainstream Criminology And Food Crime

This essay will discuss the issue of mainstream criminology's disinterest for the issue of food crime. It will start by discussing different forms of food crime, introducing the idea that, in this field, harmful behaviours are rarely considered criminal and even more rarely they are criminalised. It will continue by discussing the areas that suffer these harms, adopting the green criminology principle that harms against humans, environment and non-human animals are all equally important (Beirne and South, 2007). The third part of this essay will analyse the power structures behind food crime and it will show that giant corporations that control the food industry became so powerful that they can control those food regulations that should

Historically, food and crime have incredibly often been related (Croall, 2014). In the 19th century, almost every available food was in some way adulterated (Accum, 1820 in Wilson, 2008). However, it was not until 1820, when fifteen people died after eating adulterated lozenges, that the need for regulations and reforms about food safety was exposed in the UK (Paulus, 1974). There are many ways, during the 'food chain' - that is all the processes that food goes through during its growth, preparation, distribution and consumption - in which food could be involved in different kinds of crimes. This section aims at providing a selective review of the most significant ones. Food fraud, for example, involves the "watering down" of a product with a cheaper material (Croall, 2014). An example of this was the 2013 horse-meat scandal: meat labelled as "100% beef" sold in big supermarkets (i.e. Tesco), was found to be mixed up to 29% with horse-meat (Lawrence, 2017b). This allowed the producers to set the retail price for these "100% beef" burgers at a half of the average market price for the same non-counterfeit products (Lawrence, 2017b).

Therefore, it is possible to claim that it has a 'glocal' - both global and local - dimension. The exploitation of resources and the massive use of chemicals involved with intensive agriculture have contributed to permanently damage the environment, thus endangering the development of different species (Croall, 2014). In fact, intensive agriculture is causally related to increases in water and air pollution, decrease of soil fertility, and soil erosion (Lang et al., 2009). All of these, taken together, can be held responsible for the destruction of natural habitats of a number of species of wildlife (Lawrence, 2008). Intensive farming has also been linked to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions (Croall, 2014): intensive livestock accounts for nearly one fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, rivalling with the emissions from the global transport sector (Lawrence, 2017c). Further, in developed countries people consume more animal protein than we need for survival, meaning that many people could do much more for the environment by cutting their meat consumption than by cutting their car and plane journeys (Lawrence, 2017c). Regarding this, research published in 2013 (cited in Lawrence, 2017c) looked at how much animal protein you can get from 100 grams of grain protein. Results showed that the production of 100 grams of animal protein (meat or