Food and Nutrition Scandals in Germany Since the 1950s: Social Value Change and Scandalisation as Catalysts for Environmental Policy

Abstract

The article deals with the question of how a permanent environmental discourse was able to establish itself in the Federal Republic of Germany after the Second World War, a discourse which is now firmly anchored in politics and the media. The main idea is that this happened in a process in which the catalysts were scandals in an area that directly affects people, the food sector.

After the first food scandals had already occurred before the First World War, their number and public attention increased steadily from the 1950s onwards—until finally, by the end of the 1970s, a state had been reached that can be described as a scandal in permanence. Today, there is widespread scepticism towards any form of food, which can be described as a kind of underlining of a far-reaching environmental awareness. However, to explain this state of affairs, other factors must be brought into the analysis. These include, above all since the 1950s, an increasing internationalisation of the discourse on nutrition, a comprehensive change in values in large parts of the population, the spread of ever new mass or food panics, and all this exacerbated by a media landscape that is characterised in its reporting by an accelerating tendency towards scandalisation. Particularly through the influence of social media, it has gone from discovering individual scandals to declaring the scandal in permanence.