Negotiating choice, deception and risk: teenagers’ perceptions of food safety

The purpose of this paper is to explore the teenager perspectives of the meaning of food safety, and the implications of those meanings.

Five focus groups were conducted with students (aged 12–14) from Calgary, AB. Participants were asked what food safety means to them and probed about their views on the relationship between food safety and packaged foods. Grounded theorizing informed the analysis.

Food safety was described as located within the system, located within the individual and located within the edible. Key to these teenagers’ understanding of food safety is the theme of food deception – a deception promulgated by food producers, manufacturers and advertisers who lack transparency about what they are actually selling. Teenagers draw attention to the risks associated with living in an industrialized food environment, and to the tension between safety and the industry-driven motive to sell.

Individuals start to make independent decisions around food preparation and consumption as teenagers; as present and future consumers, it is valuable to learn their perspectives and knowledge about food safety. More importantly, food safety is not only simply a health-related issue but also a semantic one. This study moves beyond the knowledge deficit approach characterizing most research on the topic. Instead, it probes the range of meanings associated with food safety and how they are worked out, revealing that the teenagers’ construction of food as “risk objects” reveals different links to harm than the food safety interventions typically directed to them.