David SchleiferReforming Food: How Trans Fats Entered and Exited the American Food System This dissertation explains how food manufacturers began using trans fats, a type of dietary fat found in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, but later replaced those oils with alternative technologies. Based on interviews, archival research and policy analysis, I detail how activists, academic scientists, regulators and industry supply chains participated in framing trans fats as unhealthy and in making the transition to alternative oils. I discuss five conditions under which corporations will change the products they manufacture. First, corporations may respond positively to activists’ campaigns if they can assemble the physical capacity to reformulate products. Activists and scientists in the 1980s decried manufacturers’ use of saturated fat, and in some cases promoted trans fats as healthier. Firms could respond positively because oils containing trans fats were already available, viable technologies that offered distinct technical advantages in manufacturing. Second, scientific claims are especially likely to affect industrial production when industry actors find those claims credible. In the early 1990s, trade associations funded a USDA study indicating that trans fats were probably more harmful than saturated fats. Whether or not industry actors entirely believed the claims, they found them credible enough to act by beginning to develop trans fats alternatives. Third, manufacturers appear to favor regulation that lets them frame reformulated products as improved. Industry supported federal labeling that would allow them to clearly communicate to consumers when trans fats had been eliminated from packaged foods. Fourth, industry actors must convince each other to assemble alternative technologies. Some manufacturers committed themselves to reformulation early, which helped trade associations enroll crops, farmers, processors, and suppliers into the trans fat replacement project. Suppliers commercialized alternatives, convincing hesitant manufacturers about whether and how to reformulate. Manufacturers and suppliers together reworked thousands of products so that trans fat-free versions of their products would look, taste, and feel exactly like the originals. The case of trans fats helps explain instances of both industrial change and obduracy by identifying dimensions of variation in industrial capacities and propensities to change. These include the degree of material flexibility of technologies; the degree to which industry finds scientific claims sufficiently credible; structures for inter-firm collaboration; whether industry can incorporate pending regulations into their business plans and whether those regulations allow firms to manage their communication about products with consumers and investors; and whether firms can change products but also keep them fundamentally the same. Firms’ interests shift through interaction with activists, scientists, regulators, other businesses and material technologies. Firms appear more likely to try to change established products if they believe they can do so without alienating customers or damaging their reputations. I therefore see the case of trans fats as offering some hope about human possibilities for taming troublesome technologies and for making a range of products safer, healthier and more sustainable. Curriculum Vitae |
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