Big Food, Corporate Agriculture, and the Trump-Era Regulatory Rollback: A State-Corporate Criminology Perspective

• In Event: Regulatory Rollback 2: The Future of Equality and Rights in an Era of Deregulation

Abstract

The role that food corporations have in determining our health and nutrition is concomitant with the power and influence that corporations exercise across all commercial sectors. These large, powerful, and often multinational entities – collectively referred to as Big Food – employ a robust array of strategies to advance the organizational interests associated with a seemingly paradoxical business model: securing the continuous and ever-growing consumption of food products increasingly associated with negative health outcomes. In the present study, we contribute to the empirical and conceptual bridge connecting food sociology with critical criminology by focusing on the deregulatory strategies and policies of the current presidential administration. Findings include a descriptive audit of the deregulatory impulses that the Trump Administration has had in the food and agricultural sector, and how the current executive branch has exacerbated a criminogenic neoliberal climate; producing conditions favorable to what scholars are increasingly recognizing as food crimes.

Authors

• Kenneth Sebastian Leon, Rutgers University

• Ivy Ken, George Washington University