Introduction

Food is vitally important for human subsistence. Moreover, the nature of socio-environmental and politico-economic conditions is particularly intricate in the process of food production. This intricacy begs the question, ‘who is producing what kind of food, for whose benefit, and to whose disadvantage?’ (Moragues-Faus and Marsden, 2017: 281).

This chapter poses the question of whether food production-focused research can also become the lens that helps to open up new lines of inquiry about what is ‘European’ about European white-collar crime. Even though both isolated deviancy and systemic harm feature in the fabric of modern food systems, criminological engagement with intersections of food, crime and harm has not been prolific (see Walters, 2007; Cheng, 2011; Croall, 2012). Once the concept of food crime was introduced by Croall in 2007, avenues for research included food fraud, food poisoning (Tombs and Whyte, 2010), food mislabelling (Croall, 2012), trade practices and environmental law (Walters, 2006), food pricing, exploitation in food production (Tombs and Whyte, 2007) and cruelty to animals (Agnew, 1998; Yates, 2007).

The intersection of food and criminological research in the European context can be observed in The Routledge Handbook of White-Collar and Corporate Crime in Europe (2015), which invokes the topic of food crime in relation to food adulteration and hygiene regulation. Since then, European criminologists have developed a better understanding of the criminal acts embedded in the food chain through the analysis of food fraud (Lord et al, 2017; Flores Elizondo et al, 2018; Ruth et al, 2018) and harmful labour practices (Davies, 2018). Nevertheless, only 12 out of 42 contributors to the most recent edition of A Handbook of Food Crime (Gray and Hinch, 2018) come from European countries, with the majority of authors being North American and Australian researchers. It is evident that the European research on food crime needs to be problematized further. Moreover, the specificities of the European context might facilitate this task and provide additional opportunities for academic inquiry, thus advancing research into both food crime and European white-collar crime.

Echoing critical traditions in criminology, I suggest that focusing solely on food crime creates boundaries that do not allow us to venture beyond the rigid binary between criminal and lawful. Food production may involve serious harms that lie beyond traditional definitions of crime (Gray and Hinch, 2015), on the spectrum that Passas (2005) calls ‘lawful but awful’.