Conclusion

This chapter attempted to map out contours of interpretations that surround health improvement foods in Japan, especially foods known as functional foods, which have been expected to offer consumers greater control over their health and nutritional choices and allow them to make informed choices.

I argued that confusion on the part of consumers over the safety and efficacy of healthpromoting foods cannot be resolved easily by the evidence-based solutions presented by the government, such as to manage risks and introduce food labels,

The Use of Health Foods in Japan 201 that interpret the issues related to health-promoting foods within the Industrial order of worth. At the same time, what makes the situation more complex is the fact that people in industry value health-promoting foods in terms of market worthiness or competitiveness in the market, but their messages to the public tend to be framed using the values that lie in the Domestic order of worth. In other words, what complicates the use of health-promoting foods such as functional foods is that in lieu of actual, practical contributions to solving the problem, industry and government attempt to express how committed they are to supporting the core values of consumers, thus creating an illusion for consumers that somebody else is ensuring food safety for them.

Furthermore, shifting the emphasis of evaluation of the quality of food to the Industrial order of worth puts consumers in a vulnerable position when choosing foods. Health-promoting foods are regulated, and food labels are there, but how much data is available and to what extent the information on labels represents a real exchange of information are both highly questionable. After all, consumers, industry, and government have fundamentally different agendas for functional foods, with industry trying to sell its products, government trying to provide a certain amount of oversight while enabling the growth of an industry that is expected to help solve certain problems facing Japan, and consumers attempting to select foods that will meet their needs.

The varied meanings which each group gives to the situation deriving from differing orders of worth manifest in the social processes that lead people to the consumption of health-promoting food, sometimes resulting in health problems. It should be noted that an opportunity was lost to actually translate the ideal of “informed consumers,” which frequently appears in public policy statements, into reality. Consumers have the expectation that they will have all the necessary information to enable them to decide whether a food is safe or meets their needs, but in reality, multiple agendas are brought into the social arena that might not match one's expectation and values.

Given the importance of health-promoting foods for economy, the main food choice trends may shift increasingly to ones that reflect the Industrial order of worth, representing a convergence of perspectives on worth by industry and government. These trends will further blur the boundaries of food and drugs. Seeing health-promoting foods in this light helps us understand that in the end, conflicts over food safety are expressions of the kind of world that one wants to live in. Thus, respecting the existence of differing systems of values and orders of worth becomes all the more important in trying to envision an ideal food safety governance.

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Source: Ni Kuei-Jung, Lin Ching-Fu (eds.). Food Safety and Technology Governance. Routledge,2022. — 252 p.. 2022

Conclusion

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