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Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries
Series Editors
Jack Legrand and Gilles Trystram

Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation


in the Food Industries

Gwenola Yannou-Le Bris


Hiam Serhan
Sibylle Duchaîne
Jean-Marc Ferrandi
Gilles Trystram
First published 2019 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as
permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced,
stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers,
or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the
CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the
undermentioned address:

ISTE Ltd John Wiley & Sons, Inc.


27-37 St George’s Road 111 River Street
London SW19 4EU Hoboken, NJ 07030
UK USA

www.iste.co.uk www.wiley.com

© ISTE Ltd 2019


The rights of Gwenola Yannou-Le Bris, Hiam Serhan, Sibylle Duchaîne, Jean-Marc Ferrandi, Gilles
Trystram to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019948306

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data


A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-489-6
Contents

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv

Part 1. Food and Sustainable Development Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter 1. Food: Issues and Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3


1.1. History and roles of food . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2. Environmental impacts related to food. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.3. Food systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.3.1. The emergence of food systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.3.2. Characterization of food systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.3.3. Historical evolution of food systems: models
and functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.4. Evolution of food: disruptions in the practices
and symbolism of foodstuffs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.4.1. Disruptions in agricultural production modes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
1.4.2. Disruptions in the way companies are organized. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
1.4.3. Disruptions in the ways in which space
is occupied and developed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
1.4.4. Disruptions in distribution systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
1.4.5. Disruptions in consumption patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
1.4.6. Disruption in food values. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
1.5. Contribution of food systems to food supply . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
1.5.1. An intensive, specialized and concentrated
agro-industrial system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
1.5.2. A globalized agro-industrial food system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
vi Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

1.6. Trends, challenges and scenarios for a sustainable


global food system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
1.6.1. Three trends and challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
1.6.2. Three scenarios or tools to explore the possible
future of the global food system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
1.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

Chapter 2. The Ecological Transition for Sustainable Food . . . . . . . . . . 41


2.1. Food and ecological transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
2.2. Ecological transition and corporate social responsibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.2.1. The different strategies observed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
2.2.2. The origin of stakeholders and corporate social responsibility . . . . . . . 47
2.3. Taking environmental issues into account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
2.3.1. Taking environmental performance into account
in product design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
2.3.2. Qualitative or semi-qualitative environmental
assessment tools and methods. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
2.3.3. Quantitative and monocriteria environmental
assessment tools and methods. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
2.3.4. Quantitative and multi-criteria environmental assessment
tools and methods: lifecycle assessment (LCA) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
2.4. Taking nutritional issues into account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
2.4.1. The framework for action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
2.4.2. Tools and indicators for nutritional profiling of foodstuffs . . . . . . . . . 72
2.5. Consideration of economic and social issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
2.5.1. Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
2.5.2. Illustration of a Canadian dairy industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
2.6. Implementation of an ecodesign approach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
2.7. Ecodesign practices for food chains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
2.7.1. The principles of transforming business practices
through standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
2.7.2. Management system standards: tools for managing
sustainable development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
2.7.3. The role of standards in fostering innovations
related to sustainable development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
2.7.4. Consumer behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
2.7.5. Agricultural practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
2.7.6. More sustainable agri-food business practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
2.8. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Contents vii

Part 2. Implementation of Ecodesign Practices in Food


Innovation Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

Chapter 3. Ecodesign of Food: The Cases of


ÉcoTrophélia Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
3.1. The ecological transition, a driver of innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
3.2. Ecoinnovating by taking into account ecodesign practices . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
3.3. Know-how resulting from the ÉcoTrophélia competition . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
3.4. Framework for the analysis of ÉcoTrophélia projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
3.5. ÉcoTrophélia projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
3.5.1. VitaPlus: a range of dishes for pleasure, health and
vitality for the elderly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
3.5.2. Mixi’Mousse: rice-based mixes and mousses for
hospitalized people suffering from dysphagia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
3.5.3. Minigloo: a nutritious frozen dessert for children
aged 1 to 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
3.5.4. Vertu: biscuits with plant extracts and essential oils
to support quitting smoking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
3.5.5. Lardons de la mer: high-quality fish offcuts
used as bacon meat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
3.5.6. PannIno: ecodesigned gnocchi with bakery by-products
in three flavors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
3.5.7. Prêt Par Moi: traditional creamy mixes, culinary
aids for the preparation of hot dishes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
3.5.8. Devatâ: a Cambodian lemongrass liqueur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
3.5.9. Kokinéo des Incrépides: the balanced, tasty and
complete crispy seafood, accessible to all budgets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
3.5.10. So Sea’S: a vegetarian sausage available in snack form . . . . . . . . . . 189
3.5.11. Ici&Là: a vegetable burger made from lentils and other vegetables . . . 196
3.6. Analysis of ÉcoTrophélia projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
3.6.1. Food ecodesign: an innovative design process that
goes beyond new products . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
3.6.2. Detection of opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
3.6.3. Selection of the business model and product architecture . . . . . . . . . . 205
3.6.4. Determination of the innovation frontier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
3.6.5. Learning and arbitration of ecodesign practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
3.6.6. Creating sustainable value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
3.7. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
viii Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

Chapter 4. Feedback for Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation . . . . . . . . . . . . 217


4.1. Feedback on the ÉcoTrophélia cases: definition of the
ecodesign project phases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
4.1.1. Entry point: a strong individual commitment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
4.1.2. Creativity: ideation and conceptualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
4.1.3. Market analysis: definition of strategic positioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
4.1.4. Knowledge creation: the use of experimentation,
experts and partners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
4.1.5. Product development: taking sustainability into account . . . . . . . . . . 222
4.1.6. Communicating sustainability: towards new
distribution systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
4.1.7. Towards the construction of sustainable business models . . . . . . . . . . 223
4.1.8. Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
4.2. Resilience in the development of ecoinnovation within
the framework of student projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
4.2.1. The importance of the starting point for innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
4.2.2. New knowledge, new tools, complex decision-making
and consistent choices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
4.2.3. Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
4.3. Transfer of experience to training and the company . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
4.3.1. Educational contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
4.3.2. Managerial contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
4.3.3. Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
4.4. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
Foreword

Experience and Imagination

When the two people in charge of the ÉcoTrophélia project – one being the
outstanding organizer of the ÉcoTrophélia student competition and the other the
head of AgroParisTech, a school for the training of the French food elite – asked me
to write a foreword, I pondered the subject. Here is another book on this famous and
indispensable ecological food transition, a book for “ecoinnovation” in food that is
based on the reflections of “agro” students. Is this really serious? But once you
know the background of the two authors, you are reassured about the rigorous aspect
of the book.

Beyond its academicism, this book is crucial. Certainly so. It is crucial because it
is essential for future professionals, students and engineers who will provide us with
the food of tomorrow, a possible 10 billion human beings by 2050! Everyone knows
or should know that if we continue to produce our food as we have done for
decades, our planet will no longer accept it. We are talking about transition when the
situation requires a revolution, a revolution to challenge decades of practice, habits,
traditions, beliefs and doctrines. The authors are aware, to know them well, that the
most recent in this game are the most effective.

This includes AgroParisTech engineers, who having worked for 20 years on the
innovative projects of XTC’s customers, participate happily each year in the national
ÉcoTrophélia Jury. I too know, beyond their rigor, their formidable creative power,
their great ability to overcome established rules and not to bother with professional
constraints... that they do not yet know. And I am always impressed with the result.

This is the great interest of this book: to know how to propose another
perspective on the methods that will make tomorrow’s food, combining experience
with imagination, the best of the scientific literature on the subject and the creative
power of the best of tomorrow’s engineers.
x Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

The authors provide us with an overview of methodological guidelines, good


practices and essential tools for all those who will contribute to our food future.
However, they don’t add up to a collection of successful recipes. Because when it
comes to innovation, there is no such thing. Innovation and probably even more so
ecoinnovation remains a high-risk sport. One out of every two food innovations
launched on the French market is a failure in the year following its launch.

Undoubtedly, we must ask ourselves what an innovation is. Let us keep it simple
and avoid the sterile debate on the true and false innovation dear to theorists. There
is only one useful innovation, the one that brings a new benefit to the consumer.
This benefit, in this case, will be an “eco-benefit” that integrates the environment
from the design of the product or service and at all stages of its lifecycle. From the
formulation of the recipe, the farm, the processor, the packaging, logistics, the sale,
the consumption, the end of life, these benefits are potentially very numerous. These
include the ecology of the manufacturing process, the ecodesign of packaging, the
reduction of energy resources, fair price for all operators in the sector, animal
welfare, etc.

Eco-benefits will have to overcome constraints: compliance with specifications,


technical feasibility, controlled impact transfer, cost control, time to market, risk
management and, of course, consumer expectations. This final constraint is difficult
to understand, with a somewhat whimsical and inconsistent behavior of those who
refuse palm oil except in their favorite spread and stigmatize over-packaging by
buying in bulk and their mineral water in packs of six bottles.

Let us never forget that the winning innovation is a set of several benefits whose
combination will seduce the consumer. The main risk here would be to suggest that
the ecodesigned nature of the product will be solely responsible for the failure or
future success of the product.

It is important to remember one thing: beyond the vital aspect of eating, eating is
above all an act of pleasure. But, in the same way that consumers do not accept a
guilty pleasure in terms of their own health, they will refuse tomorrow a pleasure
that could harm our planet. If this consumer is not aware of the urgency of the
subject, those who will tomorrow be at the helm of the food industry could have the
heavy responsibility of proposing an offer adapted to this vital issue for all of us.
May this book help them to do so.

Xavier TERLET
President of XTC World Innovation
Acknowledgments

In 2012, the ÉcoTrophélia project was selected by the Agence nationale de la


recherche (ANR) as one of the winners of the “Initiatives d’excelle en formations
innovantes”, IDEFI (Initiatives of Excellence in Innovative Training) call for
projects. Thirteen institutions took part in this project, the aim of which was to
promote ecodesign and ecoinnovation in higher education courses, by promoting the
development of curricula on this subject in their courses. These establishments are
AgroParisTech, AgroSup Dijon, UL-ENSAIA, ENSCBP-Bordeaux INP, ISARA
Lyon, Montpellier SupAgro, Oniris Nantes, EBI, ESIROI Université de La Réunion,
ESIX, FMA-UHA, AgroCampus Ouest and PURPAN.

The success of these projects was based on the skills of a group of teacher-
researchers, whose dual mission was to support and tutor student groups and to
mobilize common knowledge and skills to propose new learning frameworks for
ecoinnovation processes. These supervisors were numerous in all the institutions;
the list provided below stipulates those directly involved in ANR ÉcoTrophélia. We
equally thank their many colleagues who also contributed to the project. These
direct supervisors of the project included:
– AgroParisTech: Agnès Marsset-Baglieri and Gwenola Yannou-Le Bris;
– AgroSup Dijon: Jean-Marie Perrier-Cornet and Gaëlle Roudaut;
– UL-ENSAIA: Catherine Humeau-Virot and Lionel Muniglia;
– ENSCBP-Bordeaux INP: Fernando Leal-Calderon and Aziz Omari;
– ISARA Lyon: Jérôme Zlatoff and Pascal Boulon;
xii Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

– Montpellier SupAgro: Bernard Cuq;


– Oniris: Jean-Marc Ferrandi;
– EBI: Clémence Bernard and Laurence Taupin;
– ESIROI: Fabienne Barnavon-Remize;
– ESIX: Martine Sarrette;
– FMA-UHA: Saloua Bennaghmouch and Sybille Farine;
– AgroCampus Ouest: Thomas Croguennec, Amélie Deglaire, Juliane Floury,
Coralie Germain, Catherine Guerin, Valérie Lechevalier and Françoise Nau;
– PURPAN: Loubnah Belahcen, Gwenaëlle Jard, Peter Magali and Hélène
Tormo.

The ÉcoTrophélia project was, in fact, also supported by the contribution of a


group of engineers specifically recruited by partner institutions. These engineers
were: Benoît Cuillère, Angela Frugone, Olivier Toppin, Stéphane Brun, Céline
Levert, Hiam Serhan, Ana Amado, Amrine Lallmahomed, Alicia Bernardi, Flavy
Benoit, Gaëlle Petit, Laura Cousin, Corinne Stewart, Grégoire Fronteau, Marie
Maison, Élise Bourcier, Lou Dumas, Agathe Couvreur, Élodie Barre, Sophia El
Andaloussi, Camille Ponchon, Mélanie Sotiriou, Lucas Arhens, Leslie Saint-Marc,
Sylvain Claude, Marine Martin, Lucile Meyer, Anaïs Le Moign, Morgane Le
Guisquet, Jacky Madi Corodji, Fatema Abassbhay, Noémie Gerbault and Marine
Lagardère.

Since 2000, the ÉcoTrophélia competition has motivated the organization and
participation of teams to present new ecodesigned products. This book illustrates a
very small part of the ecodesign projects submitted to the national and European
competitions. We extend our gratitude to all the members who organized these two
contests.

Finally, this project was initiated, led and coordinated by CCI Vaucluse led by
Dominique Ladeveze, whose team composed of Benoît Cuillière, Angela Frugone,
Olivier Toppin, Stéphane Brun, Céline Levert, Catherine Gravezat and Nickie
Mauche.
Acknowledgments xiii

Our appreciation also goes to the ANR and to all these institutions, teacher-
researchers, students, engineers and members of CCI Vaucluse, whose various
contributions have fueled the ideas and work presented in this book, as we hope it
will contribute to enriching your reflections and projects.
Introduction

The history of food shows a permanent dynamic of innovation. These


innovations concern the foods themselves, their production processes, and the
methods of distribution or preservation used. Various innovation levers have been
mobilized, highlighting at least two strategies:
– scientific or technological progress;
– the change in eating behaviors and of individuals or communities.

In this context, companies have also changed their practices to include


innovation as a major focus. Thousands of new foods are offered every year, even
though not all of them find their market; this shows the remarkable creativity and
dynamism of an undoubtedly very original economic sector.

All these innovations – whether they address food safety, the control or creation
of new sensory perceptions, the redefinition of nutritional compositions, the
introduction of efficient biological agents (such as probiotics), innovative
packaging, food-related services such as ease of preparation – are always part of a
purpose that accompanies human activities and their evolution or even their
mutation.

There is little doubt that advances in science, a better understanding of the


effects of food on humans, such as the ongoing work on humans’ digestive health,
will continue to open up many avenues for food innovation or renovation.

However, in a societal context where ecological, environmental and societal


responsibility concerns are on the rise, a new order is emerging. The environmental
impact of food and agriculture plays a major role in global warming, carbon impact
and in general the future of societies. This role is increasingly analyzed, informed
and communicated, and modifies food demand and behavior. It also modifies the
xvi Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

supply and influence of food companies’ strategies. This context induces a need for
new innovations and opens up a field for ecodesign and ecoinnovation.

These types of approaches are not, in fact, so new. They were often practiced
historically either to reduce costs (energy savings, and material savings in particular)
or for reasons specific to a particular agricultural resource or food. There is
nevertheless a great interest in understanding, mastering and implementing
approaches, tools and methods to ecodesign food and develop more sustainable
business models. In the absence of a formal method, good practices deserve to be
analyzed, developed and compiled.

For a collective of teachers and institutions training in food engineering in


various curricula, ecodesign therefore appears to be a significant challenge. Since
2000, several higher education institutions have jointly organized a dynamic based
on the establishment of a national food innovation competition, reserved for
graduate students (initially named Trophélia, then ÉcoTrophélia, see box I.1). This
competition, which has become a European success, made it possible in 2012 to
create a project to share methods, concepts and resources dedicated to the ecodesign
of food. Thanks to the implementation of a project-based learning pedagogy in the
training curricula, students developed project management, management and
communication skills that traditional curricula did not provide and confront creative
issues. It was a rewarding, useful, professional and practical experience that became
highly sought after by companies. Higher education institutions have thus adapted
the content of their courses, taking into account all the skills required to create
eco-innovative food products. Eighteen years of cooperation around competition
have made it possible to share a common analysis, a recent development of which
has sought to better teach ecodesign of food. Each collective of teachers has
strengths, originalities and the whole covers a priori all the necessary skills.

The objectives were:


– to work on product engineering with an ecodesigned purpose and on renewed
business models in order to make ecoinnovation possible;
– to confront a wide range of situations through student projects, supervised by
teachers or researchers. These projects may be the result of requests from
companies, ideas from teachers and researchers, or proposals from students.

In the pedagogical management of projects, it has proved useful in building


training tools and reflecting on the very varied dimensions of ecodesign. The
contextualization of each project shows that a generic method does not emerge, but
practices, tools and training content are required and therefore the acquisition of
certain skills is essential.
Introduction xvii

After six years of working together, it seemed useful to make a restitution so that
engineers and students could have an overview and guidance on these methods,
good practices and tools. This is the purpose of this book.

It was difficult to present the hundreds of projects developed and their diversity.
A dozen of them were therefore chosen, and this description is the focus of a
chapter. However, it was essential to contextualize current developments in food
and, more generally, in food systems. The driving forces for companies to engage
in ecodesign and innovation are then analyzed. Finally, on the basis of the
ÉcoTrophélia cases presented and discussed, we have a chapter that analyzes
the driving forces and obstacles to ecodesign and ecoinnovation. This provides the
subsequent content of the book in detail.

Part 1, entitled “Food and Sustainable Development Challenges”, describes the


context and issues of food sustainability based on an analysis of the structure and
dynamics of food system evolution. It is structured around two chapters:
– Chapter 1, “Food: Issues and Challenges”, describes the historical evolution of
food systems that contribute to the development of our food, and discusses the
positive and negative impacts of their evolution. Recent trends, scenarios and
challenges that sustainable development poses to food systems to contribute to the
ecological transition of food functions are analyzed;
– Chapter 2, “The Ecological Transition for Sustainable Food”, shows how
sustainable development is expressed in the form of corporate social responsibility
according to three strategies: a prescriptive strategy through regulation, a normative
strategy through voluntary standards for continuous process improvement and a
proactive strategy through the integration of ecodesign practices into activities to
promote ecoinnovation. It also presents the ecodesign management tools and
methods that instrumentalize the implementation of sustainable development in the
business systems of companies.

Part 2, entitled “Implementation of Ecodesign Practices in Food Innovation


Projects”, illustrates the consideration of the four pillars of sustainable food
development through the ÉcoTrophélia projects presented, highlighting these
impacts on the characteristics of products and business models. This presentation is
structured around two chapters:
– Chapter 3, “Ecodesign of Food: The Cases of ÉcoTrophélia Projects”,
describes how the ÉcoTrophélia project and competition were created and for what
purposes. It defines the building blocks of the “Ideonis” toolbox implemented by
students in the process of carrying out their ecoinnovation projects. This chapter
xviii Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

details 11 projects developed between 2001 and 2017 that we have grouped into four
categories related to the orientation axis of the value of innovation: a) health through
food; b) improving the added value of by-products and the fight against waste; c) the
consideration of populations in precarious situations; and d) protein transition;
– Chapter 4, “Feedback for Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation”, presents the lessons
learned from these project experiences. It defines the different phases of an
ecoinnovation project, from stakeholder engagement to market creation and analysis
sessions, and knowledge creation process (new experiences and partnerships), and
engages in the construction of a sustainable business model. This chapter also
reviews the main obstacles to eco-responsible innovation and highlights the
educational and managerial contributions drawn from these projects.

This work is the result of a very significant collective of students, lecturers,


researchers and engineers in companies, all of whom are thanked for it.

In 2000, the Chambre de commerce et d’industrie du Vaucluse (Vaucluse Chamber of


Commerce and Industry) created Trophélia, student trophies for food innovation. Since then,
1,750 students and their teacher-researchers from more than 20 French higher education
institutions have come together to present more than 700 new food products, bringing
universities and businesses closer together.

In 18 years, the formula has spread and ÉcoTrophélia has taken on a European dimension,
a real reference in terms of innovation transfer and bringing together the academic world and
agri-food professionals. Today, in nearly 20 European countries, ÉcoTrophélia Europe is
stimulating the creation of student-food innovation competitions, with the support of the
European Union and professional federations.

Since 2011, ÉcoTrophélia Europe has motivated the organization of 120 national
competitions, brought together more than 500 universities and nearly 4,000 European
students, and enabled the celebration of more than 400 innovative food products. This success
is the result of broad partnerships at the local, national and European levels. The various
actors have found an interesting complementarity to create a structuring and beneficial
dynamic for the whole sector. ÉcoTrophélia Europe is to date a major European event for
innovation and competitiveness of agri-food companies.

History of the project1

2000. At the initiative of CCI Vaucluse, Actia (Technical Coordination Association for
the Food Industry) and the Agroparc Technopole, higher education institutions, universities,
professional branches and technical centers organized the first Trophélia.

1 Available at: ecotrophelia.org/.


Introduction xix

2008. Based on the principle that made Trophélia France so successful, CCI Vaucluse and
ANIA created the Trophélia Europe competition as part of the SIAL (Salon international de
l’alimentation) in Paris, which was participated by eight countries. The involvement of the
national food federations grouped within FoodDrinkEurope supported this European
development. The winner of the national selections of each participating Member State was
de facto the representative of its country in the European competition.

2011. The European Commission recognized Trophélia’s exemplarity and mandated CCI
Vaucluse to implement a European project to promote ecoinnovation in the agri-food sector.
Students had to integrate an eco-responsible dimension into the design and implementation of
their project. Taking into account the elements of sustainable development in the development
of agri-food products has become a requirement and a major challenge for the
competitiveness of agri-food companies for the future. Trophélia thus became ÉcoTrophélia.

2012. ÉcoTrophélia was one of the winners of the IDEFI call for projects, selected as part
of the Programme investissements d’avenir, France. The objective of this project was to
create a national and European network for training in excellence in food innovation and to
strengthen the competitiveness of agri-food companies (particularly SMEs) through
innovation for the years ahead.

It also aimed to become an exemplary pedagogical model with international visibility


through the recognition of the excellence of national agri-food education, thus contributing to
the structuring of the leading European industry.

2013. The 2030 Innovation Commission announced the launch of the global innovation
competition. The organization of this global competition was specifically inspired by the
ÉcoTrophélia competition, a now recognized reference in food innovation.

2014. The support of the French Fund for Food and Health made it possible to create the
“ÉcoTrophélia France innovation nutrition” prize.

2015. ÉcoTrophélia was a partner of the France pavilion at the Milan 2015 Universal
Exhibition “Feeding the planet, energy for life”, and 16 European countries participated in
ÉcoTrophélia Europe 2015 at the European Commission pavilion.

2016. INTERFEL awarded the competition a new special prize “Services INTERFEL” to
encourage the creation of services associated with the product and belonging to the world of
fresh fruits and vegetables.

2017. The Ministry of Agriculture and Food awarded the competition a special “Fight
against food waste” prize to encourage the reduction of food waste, at the processing,
distribution and/or consumption stage at home or out-of-home catering.

Box I.1. ÉcoTrophélia: history and principle of the project


PART 1

Food and Sustainable


Development Challenges

Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries, First Edition.


Gwenola Yannou-Le Bris, Hiam Serhan, Sibylle Duchaîne, Jean-Marc Ferrandi and Gilles Trystram.
© ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
1

Food: Issues and Challenges

1.1. History and roles of food

Providing food is one of the major human activities, both for individuals and the
organization of societies. Eating meets a vital need, but is also a source of
questioning on the impacts of this diet on health. The solutions sought to meet this
need vary according to different ethical, religious, community, social and other
criteria. These solutions rely on anthropological, legal, health, chemical or
microbiological studies and analyses. Indeed, the term “food” is a polysemic: it
refers just as much to a science, a context and an industry. The social and scientific
questions related to this term have not ceased to evolve over time, with the
consequence that more and more scientific disciplines have become involved in
this field.

These questions have always connected food to agriculture, livestock and


fisheries. Even before the existence of organized agriculture, hunter-gatherers had
to deal with concerns about their food, including preserving a level of hygiene,
making it edible, as well as preserving food for “delayed consumption” when
cultivation was not possible. These challenges remain and are the essential
foundations for a history of food. To illustrate the main stages of this food history,
Table 1.1 presents some key dates. These dates illustrate the various means
implemented to ensure, first, a delayed consumption of food and then, gradually, the
complementary search for flavors, tastes, textures and savors (olfactory sensations)
that provide a new organoleptic1 dimension that differentiates foods. These goals
prompted the diversification of food sources and changes in diet. The history of
various foods illustrates the evolution of consumer tastes and expectations. To
illustrate, for a long time in France, white bread was a symbol of bourgeois wealth;

1 An organoleptic property is any aspect that can excite a sensory receptor.


4 Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

in contrast to brown bread, which was consumed by subordinate social groups. It


was not until the 1970s that the nutritional qualities of wholemeal bread (made with
wholemeal flour) was discovered (Curtet 1998). The examples in Table 1.1 show
that, in order to achieve food’s key nutritional functions (providing essential
nutrients for the body’s make-up, maintenance and protection), it was necessary to
develop physical, chemical and biological processes, either alone or in combination.
It is thanks to these innovations that it has been possible to ensure the processing of
agricultural raw materials and allow the development of a considerable range of
attributes (criteria determining a food value).

Since the 1950s, there has been an acceleration in these dynamics of changes in
food supply and expectations about food. Two major developments have been the
development of transport and of the cold chain that significantly changed the link
between agricultural production, location, processing, distribution and food
consumption. In the aftermath of World War II, the ambition to feed the population
led to the development of the contemporary dominant agro-industrial food system.
Initially built to produce, process and distribute safe food, the system’s objectives
have evolved. Due to fierce competition, its development has produced new foods
that create new perceptions and sensations for their consumers. In order to ensure
the stability of industrial processes and the characteristics of the final products, a
standardization of agricultural materials was carried out, which contributed to the
reduction of biodiversity. Thereafter, the pursuit of innovation has focused on
diversifying and strengthening the nutritional functions of differentiated foods that
meet the needs of an increasingly diverse population. Finally, more recently, the
agro-industrial system has integrated concerns about sustainability, including natural
resources preservation, environment protection and various social issues – as the
impact of the food on the health – into the design of food.

However, the impacts of food cannot be considered solely through the prism of a
particular food product. The nature of the diet and the associated mental behavioral
components are also essential considerations. Moreover, there are not one but many
food models; however, this book focuses on the agro-industrial model developed in
the industrial countries. Indeed, the development of industrial solutions,
guaranteeing in particular low food costs (the share of the French household budget
devoted to food was 25% in 1970 and 13% today) is predominant and has been
accompanied by urbanization – a phenomenon that can be observed globally as
consumers have relocated to cities, often far from agricultural production.
Food: Issues and Challenges 5

- 400,000 First proof of cooked food

Delayed consumption of dairy


- 9,000 Cheese-making technology
products

Drying of meat products in their First known application of meat


- 5,000
own fat (Egypt) product frying without vegetable fat

- 4,000 Beer fermentation

- 3,000 Butter

Beekeeping (Egypt) hive


- 2,400
engineering

Stabilization of meat products for


Drying, salting, smoking of meat
- 2,000 preservation under non-controlled
products (Babylon/Egypt)
conditions

- 2,000 Noodles (China)

- 300 Jam (Italy) Packing and preservation

- 340 Sausages (Greece)

- 350 Crystallization of sugar (India)

Different laws and regulations


1238 First appearance of food regulation
for brewing processes

1680 Fried potatoes (Belgium) Use of vegetable oil

Concentration of sugar cane


17th Example of circular economy and
juice: first fermentation and
Century energy recovery and material saving
distillation of molasses

Use of by-products to reduce loss


1735 Stock cubes (France)
and reduce waste

1756 Mayonnaise

Establishment of industrial
1780
plants for drying

Manual extrusion, used in 1920


1797
for pasta

1801 Beet sugar

Preservation for delayed


1804 First canned food
consumption
6 Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

1842 Deep freezing of food

Thermal stabilization of wine:


1850
Louis Pasteur

Dried food products, long-term


1866 Baby food (Nestlé)
preservation without cooling

Margarine, butter substitute: H. Alternative to butter (animal


1869
MegeMouries product) with vegetable butter

Spray drying of foods and


1872
powders

Popcorn machines (Charles


1885
Cretors)

1893 UHT for liquids

Coca-Cola (John Pemberton,


1886
Atlanta, United States)

1889 Dried coffee (New Zealand)

1902 Hydrogenation of oils

Corn flakes (John Harvey


1902
Kellogg)

1913 Aseptic processing of food Food safety, preservation

Food storage in a controlled


1930’s Packing and preservation
atmosphere

Safe, sanitary dairy processes in


1940 Cleaning in dairy processes
particular

1945 Food irradiation

1946 Microwaves

2013 Artificial steaks, in vitro

Table 1.1. Examples of food history and associated discoveries


Food: Issues and Challenges 7

1.2. Environmental impacts related to food

Food production represents at least a third of the production of greenhouse gases


(but also 23% of the carbon impact, 23% of the water impact and 9% of the energy
impact) (Martin 2015). Behind these data, there is a significant difference between
the impacts of animal and plant resources: in the West, the ratio of the amount of
plant protein ingested to produce one kilogram of animal protein is, on average, 7
for cattle, 6 for chickens and pigs, and 3 for eggs.

If we turn to the food processing phases, they impact the natural environment
through wastewater discharges, particularly water withdrawals and significant
energy consumption. Some aspects of the food production process, such as heat
treatment, consume significant amounts of energy. Food packaging also has a major
environmental impact through the waste it produces. Finally, in France, 25–30% of
processed food is wasted (not consumed) and some studies estimate that controlling
this waste alone would make it possible to address global food insecurity (Esnouf et
al. 2011).

Minimizing waste during food processing and stabilization is an old issue. For
example, sugar cane factories (see Table 1.1) historically have been self-sufficient in
terms of energy and can even generate and supply electricity to the grid because a lot
of work has been done to control their energy consumption. Moreover, beet
sugar factories have gradually but dramatically reduced their water consumption
and encouraged the reuse of process water. Some deli meats are also energy
self-sufficient thanks to the reuse of animal fats. Today, energy accounts for only
3–15% of food processing costs and there is much engineering work underway to
further reduce energy use. The optimization of transportation and warehousing is a
vital area for further preservation, as the environmental impacts created by
transportation can be significant. Finally, food storage (including refrigeration) and
cooking also have significant environmental impacts.

However, the relationship between diet and environmental impact is complex.


Foods with high energy density are the strongest contributors to the greenhouse
effect; therefore, the higher the proportion of calories or dense foods consumed, the
greater the impact per unit mass. But they are also the most satisfying and can
therefore require smaller quantities. Contrary to beliefs, a good diet in nutritional
terms has a powerful impact on the environment. Indeed, since a good diet includes
low energy density foods, the amount consumed can be higher than in a high calorie
diet (Darmon 2015). Eating habits are therefore crucial to the environmental impacts
of our food. Reducing this impact means regulating consumption in terms of food
choices and quantities consumed.
8 Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

1.3. Food systems

The term “food” refers both to an individual process and to the services provided
by one or more food systems that deliver food to populations. The term “food
system” refers to “all the activities that contribute to the food function in a given
society [...] the way in which people organize themselves to produce and consume,
as well as the level and structure of their consumption” (Malassis 1994, p. 11). In
other words, a food system refers to a production and consumption model it induces
in a given space and context. It mobilizes its own actors, resources and means that
enable it to produce and distribute food products/services. A food system constitutes
of a specific implementation of the food function and the multiplicity of existing
food systems synthetizes the various food offers in markets.

Today, in Europe, faced with the constraints and opportunities of sustainable


development, food systems are being pressured to make unprecedented changes that
relate to their four key stakeholders: public authorities, farmers, the agri-food
industries, and consumers. Public authorities are introducing policies, regulations,
action plans, scenarios, etc., to promote sustainability in all food systems and to
ensure that citizens have sufficient food available in sufficient quantities, with
sufficient hygienic and nutritional qualities to meet the required standards. At the
same time, agriculture in developed countries is facing a difficult economic context
as climate change poses a threat to plant and animal production in the required
quantity and quality. To avoid the world without “agriculture” predicted by Peter
Timmer in 2009 (Timmer 2009a), profound changes are required. That is the
challenge of sustainable agricultural development faced with a concentrated,
specialized and customer-oriented agro-industry and large-scale distribution
(Timmer 2009b). The agri-food industries – interfaces between agricultural supply
and demand requirements – are being questioned by a growing proportion of the
population demanding unstandardized and sustainable food products. This societal
demand calls not only for innovative products/services but also for “natural” foods,
made with simple, healthy ingredients, produced with ethical practices while
respecting the environment. A multitude of expectations must be met to satisfy these
demands. It is necessary to develop products that make positive short- and long-term
contribution to consumer health and are economically accessible, practical, tasty,
nutritionally adapted and environmentally friendly. Finally, these products have to
integrate values and symbols that are consistent with the beliefs of responsible
consumers.
Food: Issues and Challenges 9

The development of such customized food products requires a systemic and


multidisciplinary approach. It introduces a value chain approach to ensure a
sustainable development path. In order to better illustrate the facts that have led the
different food system stakeholders to seek new practices, in the following section we
briefly review the strong ties that link the creation of food systems (FS) to the
development of our modern societies (see section 1.3.1). Since there are not one but
several FSs, we review the scientific literature to illustrate the factors that
specifically characterize them (see section 1.3.2). We then outline in the
chronological order of their appearance the major models of FSs in developed
countries (see section 1.3.3). This definition of the major patterns enables us to
establish the evolution of food consumption allowed by the successive and
synchronous existence of these different FSs (see section 1.4). Section 1.5 provides
an overview of the contribution of these production and consumption models to
sustainable development issues. Finally, section 1.6 presents the challenges and
issues facing food system actors (producers, processors, public policies and
consumers) in order to increase the sustainability of the practices and products that
characterize them.

1.3.1. The emergence of food systems

The food systems underpin our societal structures. Food systems have always
been a major concern for humanity, because the existence and well-being of
societies depend on the efficiency and quality of food production and distribution.
The structures and dynamics of food systems are influenced by a set of elements
(means, institutions, practices and actors), formal and informal relationships
between their actors and the regulatory modes that govern them (e.g. market,
conventions, norms and regulations). It is through these structures and their
combinations that companies organize their food supplies and consumption (Esnouf
et al. 2011).

The analysis of food supply from the food system(s) perspective first of all raises
questions about how each of the food systems contributes to the satisfaction and
evolution of the food provision. Second, the food system paradigm allows us to
question the type of actors and activities that structure and animate the system.
These include agriculture, transportation, processing, distribution and consumption.
In order to integrate sustainable development into the food system through
innovation, it is essential to consider the nature and impacts of the various activities
and their interactions. Such a framework makes visible the relationships between the
activities, flows, institutions and the knowledge necessary to feed a population.
10 Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

Addressing food issues (eating or feeding a population) requires us to study the


conceptual foundations of food systems, for which researchers have used two
complementary methodologies. The first is the systemic approach and the second the
historical and socio-economic approach. Figure 1.1 provides an overview of the two
conceptual methodologies for studying food systems.

Figure 1.1. Synthesis proposal on the two conceptual approaches


to the study of food systems. For a color version of this figure,
see www.iste.co.uk/yannou/ecodesign.zip

– The systemic approach conceives a food system as a network of interdependent


actors located in a given geographical space (region, nation, multinational space).
These actors participate, directly or indirectly, in flows of goods and services
oriented towards meeting the food needs of one or more consumer groups, within or
outside the focal area. Any modification of an element in this system may result in
the modification of one or more other elements. This approach is useful for
understanding the dynamics that relational knowledge or specialized and scattered
knowledge among different stakeholders (Bengtsson et al. 2015) can create. It does
Food: Issues and Challenges 11

not, however, meet our need here to present a global overview of the major forms of
existing food systems in developed countries.
– The historical and socio-economic approach highlights the characteristics of
the different periods that have shaped the world history of food. For example,
Malassis (1994) referred to three main periods or “food ages” that are mainly
present in developed markets: the pre-agricultural age (hunting and gathering);
the agricultural age (sedentarization of humans, cultivation, livestock) and the
agro-industrial age (agriculture based on industrial and commercial activities). This
periodization is extended by Rastoin’s (2015) claim that we are now in an
“agrotertiary” age. In this period, farmers are no longer just agricultural producers,
they also provide services related to products or region. In this age, food is, from the
point of view of its economic content – no longer simply a material good, but a
service-solution to certain problems in particular contexts.

The decreasing duration of each of these periods can be attributed to an


acceleration of technological change. In Europe, the duration of the first agricultural
era was estimated at 10,000 years, while the artisanal era was estimated at a few
centuries, the following agro-industrial era was estimated at less than a century, and
the agrotertiary era has only been in existence for a few decades. Reflecting the
living conditions of the populations, each of these periods gave rise to a diversity of
food systems. However, this apparent linearity of the evolution of food systems is
artificial, because these different models can coexist, in varying degrees of relative
importance, according to geographical areas. Thus, the development of industrial
production does not imply the complete disappearance of handicraft production.
Indeed, to understand the diversity of existing food systems, a finer analytical grid
than historical trajectories is required.

1.3.2. Characterization of food systems

Even though an exhaustive description of food systems is unrealistic, it is


possible to draw out their diversity by using a supply chain heuristic. Colonna et al.
(2011) provide such an analysis in their research. The elements identified can be
grouped into three groups of semantic variables as shown in Table 1.2.

The consideration of these variables illustrates the diversity of supply chains and
food products that may exist. However, within this diversity, six archetypal food
systems can be identified that we outline in the next section.
12 Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

VARIABLES CHARACTERISTICS

These variables describe the geographical proximity between


production and consumption (food miles); the number of intermediate
1. Stuctural variables of
actors in distribution circuits (“short circuits” versus “long circuits”);
supply chains, from raw
the degree of processing and incorporated service (“raw product”
materials to delivery of
versus “processed product”); the nature of the product, its nutritional
products/services
values, its food/non-food uses, its preservationn methods; and the
concentration of production units.

The following are taken into account: work organization (“family”


versus “wage”, “artisanal” versus “industrial”): competition and trade
framework; forms of financialization of trade and risk management:
2. Variables attributable to
the roleand forms of public action (state intervention, local authorities,
political or institutional
international institutions); control of the system (direct or indirect
approaches.
support); the international integration or not of the system; governance
(control of decisions and information, standardization, approaches
through contracts and value chains).

These variables measure the product quality, standards/signs and


3. Variables that relate to organizations with which it is associated; the product’s relationship to
the cognitive processes and geographical space; the place and legitimacy of technologies (GMOs
social behaviors of the in Europe); the consideration of people or social justice in production,
populations concerned by exchanges and consumption (ethical, cultural or religious dimensions);
the products and services. knowledge and mastery of culinary know-how of food preparation
(traditional recipes guaranteed).

Table 1.2. Characterization elements of supply


chains (source: Colonna et al. (2011))

1.3.3. Historical evolution of food systems: models and functions

Historically, different food system models have emerged to meet the needs of the
various actors in food production and distribution process and the populations
dependent on these systems. Figure 1.2 illustrates the major FS models and their
global function. Each system is the result of a particular organization and a specific
network of actors. Indeed, the industrialization of the agricultural sector and
distribution has resulted in the transformation of the food economies in the way of a
mass consumption economy (Malassis 1996). This market is made up of an
intertwined set of food systems whose respective importance varies according to the
Food: Issues and Challenges 13

production and import capacities of each country. But this market is also defined
according to the standards of living, consumption practices and public expectations.

Figure 1.2. The major models of food systems providing the


creation of world food supply. For a color version of this
figure, see www.iste.co.uk/yannou/ecodesign.zip

1.3.3.1. The domestic food system


In the domestic food system, processing and consumption are undertaken at the
site of raw material production. This system provides for the subsistence of a large
part of the populations in poorer nations. Recently, this system has been undergoing
a renaissance both in the developed and developing countries and even in urban
areas. Its mode of functioning can be organized by an individual, a family or a
community through either allotment or plots or shared urban gardens (Scheromm
et al. 2014).

1.3.3.2. The local food system


The local food system differs from the previous one in that it sells all or part of
its production. Historically, this FS is present throughout the world, and currently
strengthened in the northern countries through the involvement of local communities
through local markets, direct sales on farms, consumer associations and/or producer
organizations such as the Association du maintien d’une agriculture paysanne
(AMAP).
14 Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

1.3.3.3. The convenience food system or traditional food circuit


The convenience food system allows the exchange of basic food products
(cereals, tubers, pulses, fruits and vegetables) that can be stored and transported over
medium distances (100–1,000 km) from production to consumption sites, which are
often urban. The main logic that motivates actors in this system (i.e. producers,
transporters, wholesalers, artisanal or semi-industrial processing companies and
retailers) is to secure the supply and distribution of their production with relatively
low material investments.

1.3.3.4. The agro-industrial food system


The agro-industrial food system has emerged since the 1950s. It is based on the
development of improved transportation and the agri-food industries (AFIs). This
system is based on a logic of producing standardized food at the lowest possible cost
with stable quality for mass markets.

The objective of this type of system is to take advantage of economies of scale to


reduce production costs and thus the final cost to the consumer. This system has led
to a decrease in the share of the household budgets devoted to food. This has made it
possible for consumers to spend on other items, including education, housing and
recreation. Thus, the share of the budget of French households devoted to the
purchase of food and beverages (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) fell sharply from
34.6% in 1960 to 15.1% in 2016 (Bourgeois 2017). This industrialization replaced
artisanal farmers’ knowledge with scientific and technical knowledge, nearly all of
which is developed outside farming. With the globalization of markets, dominant
players (manufacturers or distributors) have emerged. These actors can often define
the required quality of the farm output and impose it as a standard (Humphrey and
Memedovic 2006). Paradoxically, even though this standardization ensures the
stability of food characteristics and guarantees food safety, it also contributes to a
reduction in the diversity of agricultural practices and biodiversity. Finally, it is
predicated on the use of chemical inputs to ensure the required productivity
(Meynard et al. 2016).

For this system to develop, two prerequisites were essential: the ability to
preserve and store food to ensure its year round availability. The two major
innovations that made this possible were (Soler et al. 2011):
– the development of preservation techniques such as some food preservatives
and refrigeration systems. These techniques encouraged the development of
abundant supplies, especially of ultra-fresh and dairy products. It also contributed
greatly to the deseasonalization of the fruit and vegetable supplies;
Food: Issues and Challenges 15

– the use of various preservatives that ensure that the desired properties of the
food product are consistent.

The evolution of the general principles on which the contemporary food industry
is based has been made possible by the dissociation of two stages in the
transformation process (Soler et al. 2011):
– the refining of agricultural raw materials in such a way as to extract their
elementary components;
– reassembly, which is the process by which food is reconstituted from these
elementary components to constitute a recipe.

This deconstruction/reassembly dynamic is at the heart of industrial processes


for processing and preserving food products. The purpose of this dynamic is to
modulate the properties of the raw materials to control the properties that are
inherent in the processed product (Trystram 2004). The dissociation of the stages of
the transformation process has resulted in the emergence of two types of companies:
– manufacturers of intermediate food products (ingredients, additives and
technological inputs), whose main research and development activity is focused on
improving cracking processes, i.e. the reduction of complex organic molecules into
smaller ones or ensuring that the desired properties of the final products are
achieved;
– assembly manufacturers, whose innovations have focused on developing new
products, thereby considerably expanding the range of products available to
consumers.

In Europe, the food supply from agro-industrial food systems now confronts
societal demands in certain markets. These demands include, for example, the
reduction in meal preparation times due to women entering the work force and the
increasing proportion of single-parent households. In France, increased urbanization
has resulted in shorter meals and demand for practical, almost tailor-made meals
(Madella 2018). Thus, to accompany these new lifestyles, food is becoming more
and more functional as expressed in the saying “we eat as we live”. Simultaneously,
growing concerns about the impact of food production on the environment and its
consumption on health are pushing the evolution of food systems (Kantar TNS study
conducted for SIAL 2016). In this regard, the European Commission points out that
“urban planning and management” and innovations in urban food systems are
providing development opportunities in both urban and rural areas, improving food
security and countering various forms of malnutrition (De Cunto et al. 2017). This is
at the heart of current widespread concerns about how to feed the world’s population
in 2050 if two-thirds of the population lives in cities (FAO 2014).
16 Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

1.3.3.5. Food systems of differentiated quality


The products of these food systems have differentiated identification signs
and/or product quality attributes. While these are not on the product, they exist as
signifiers of environmental, superior, original, ethical, religious and other qualities.
This information is therefore embodied in quality signifiers such as the clean label,
fair trade or private brands described as homemade products, traditional recipes, etc.
Different production, processing, distribution and consumption systems are involved
in the creation of each of these quality indicators:
– food systems committed to heritage quality. These systems based on particular
regions or knowledge systems (e.g. about production or processing) represent
devices for linking food quality to natural particularities or ways of producing the
food item. For example, official quality signs such as PGIs (Protected Geographical
Indication) in Europe guarantee a strong link between the product and the
production conditions of its place of origin. TSG (Traditional Specialty Guaranteed)
products certify that a food product has been manufactured according to a traditional
recipe;
– food systems of superior taste and quality. French products certified “Label
Rouge”, for example, guarantee quality linked to superior production or
manufacturing conditions, varieties or breeds;
– food systems linked to the natural attributes of agricultural or livestock
practices. Product quality is based on environmentally friendly, energy-efficient
practices and the people involved in production. These include organic farming,
sustainable agriculture or permaculture. These systems can incorporate various
values such as environmental protection, food safety through the absence of
synthetic plant protection products, animal welfare, ecosystem, biodiversity, etc.,
that consumers consider important;
– food systems with ethical, religious or community quality. Here, the product’s
quality is derived from these systems, such as fair trade, kosher and halal. These are
based on practices and organizations that respect moral or religious values and/or
solidarity with a category of people such as small producers in the South, people
with disabilities, or members of a religious faith.

1.3.3.6. The agrotertiary food system


The agrotertiary system has been developing since the end of the 20th Century.
While the increased demand for services changed the definition of supply in its
agro-industrial production and dissemination stages, it had also changed consumers’
and producers’ expectations of agricultural production stages.
Food: Issues and Challenges 17

This evolution suggests that now agriculture has a new market logic that defines
new competition between producers and is based on new concepts and methods
adopted from the tertiary sector. This tertiarization appears in three ways (Lorino
and Nefussi 2007):
– farmers have become providers of market services. For example, they are
involved in the development of green tourism (catering, accommodation, etc.);
– farmers become non-market service providers. Here, they are recognized as
providing landscape management, land use, environmental preservation, etc.;
– the tertiarization of agricultural production, providing a “product-service” can
mean making raw products available in places close to where consumers live
(vegetable baskets at the exit of the subway, at the workplace, etc.) or undertaking
initial processing on the farm. This includes producing soups or preserves,
butchering fresh meat and vacuum packing, and a myriad of other products/services.

With agricultural sector tertiarization, value creation methods within food chains
are changing and becoming more complex (Lorino and Nefussi 2007). This
tertiarization suggests reexamining the modes of creating and sharing the economic
value created. The addition of a service to the agricultural product allows farmers to
increase the value of the product, but also transforms the farm’s economic model.

Food processing requires premises that comply with the health regulations. This
implies investments in equipment and training, but also requires operators to find
time to produce, promote and distribute their products.

Similarly, the creation and implementation of biogas plants, linking local


authorities, food distribution stakeholders and farmers, reexamine the nature of the
value created by the agricultural producer and the definition of his/her profession.

Finally, the multiplication of data capture applications, the compiling and


processing of crop and livestock data, including data on land conditions, reactions to
animal and land treatments, etc., provide new sources of value creation. Food actors
are therefore confronted with new service challenges related to the digitalization of
the agricultural and agri-food sector. Digital technological innovations can be used
to develop new “sustainable” solutions to decision-making processes. For example,
by providing a better knowledge of plots and crop needs, precision agriculture
makes it possible to reduce inputs through the more precise use of seedlings and
treatments (use at the right time, in the right dose, etc.) and thus reduce
environmental impacts (PwC 2016). Through these innovations, the added value of
agricultural and food technologies becomes less linked to the tangible aspects of the
machines themselves and more linked to digital services that accompany them.
Today, almost all machines have sensors that collect data not only on their own
18 Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

operation, but also on the environment in which they operate (Zysman and Kenney
2018). Indeed, these machines, ranging from feeding stations and dairy farm milking
machines to tractors and machines for sowing and field harvesting, can detect,
collect and transmit data to databases where the information can be processed and
presumably result in greater efficiency. To achieve their optimal service efficiency –
for economic actors and for the environment – the use of these technologies will
require new working and organizational methods, new skills that will be
accompanied with greater processing of information flows. While these digital
innovations offer new opportunities for agri-food system actors (improved
operational function, prediction of risks, etc.), they nevertheless change skill
requirements, such as an ability to use software and analyze output, and change
employment and employability. These may change the role of farmers in this
transformation of the organization of work in agricultural, food and distribution
enterprises.

These new organizational forms in the agricultural world are emerging and
changing the existing order in response to the expectations of public and societal
policies. This requires firms, which are dependent on consumer confidence, to create
innovative or customized food products, introduced as “solutions” compatible with
the new requirements. This means the development of products that meet current
values, including respect for the environment, improved animal husbandry
conditions, and the enhancement of the production area of agricultural products.

1.3.3.7. Conclusions about the co-existence of food systems


The different elements that interact in the creation of food systems and the
multiple values of the products/services they create show that the food function and
its challenges have been constantly evolving since the sedentarization of man. The
evolution of these food systems illustrates a shift from a traditional food system
producing low-processed food products of high heritage value to one in which food
products of pre-specified (standardized) quality and in which the definition
of the proposed food product is characterized by an approach of building the
problem/solution pair that is always renewed (HLPE 2017). This renewal is made
possible by the active integration of consumer needs and societal requirements into
food product design and innovation which improves an existing product or creates a
new one. In this model solutions are, at least in part, co-designed, co-produced and
implemented by the various actors in the food value chains. These solutions are
increasingly the result of collective action by various parties and undertaken with the
goal of creating a more sustainable food supply. However, if there is indeed a time
frame for the emergence of these different systems, one of the factors contributing to
the complexity of this economic sector is the coexistence and intermingling of these
different systems. Coexisting in varying proportions according to geographical
areas, needs, cultures and wealth of local populations, the systems respond locally to
Food: Issues and Challenges 19

the expectations of different socio-economic groups. One of the questions raised by


the desire to integrate sustainable development into the overall food system is how
to understand the balance required to maintain between the variety of systems and
the types and organizational forms that the current digital revolution should enable
and that could meet current and future global challenges, and how this could
occur, while respecting the know-how of businesses involved in developing the
food supply.

1.4. Evolution of food: disruptions in the practices and symbolism of


foodstuffs

Section 1.3 introduced the organizational archetypes of major food systems and
the objectives to which they respond. In this section, we describe how changes in the
practices and paradigms of the various stakeholders have made it possible to
transform these systems and change the very nature of food.

The evolution of food is understood in the light of the changes that society has
undergone as a result of the industrial and agricultural revolutions. The industrial
revolution, a consequence of the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels, has
totally changed the role of physical labor and the scale of food production and
processing. This industrial revolution has transformed agriculture and changed not
only production, but also the functions and value of food. The mechanization of
agriculture, the intensive use of fertilizers and pesticides, and progress in the
processing, packaging, transport and marketing of agricultural products have
all contributed to and been the result of the emergence of an agri-food industry.
All of these developments coevolved with changes in consumer demand and societal
needs.

The food evolution has taken place in a context of growing populations and
wealth. An increasing number of innovations of functional food have been
accompanied by the development of these riches. This process of “industrial
capitalism” (Cohen 2006) manifested itself through six revolutions or disruptions
(see Table 1.3): in agricultural production modes (see section 1.4.1), business
organization (see section 1.4.2), agricultural food processing, land use and
development (see section 1.4.3), distribution (see section 1.4.4), consumption (see
section 1.4.5) and in the identity and value of food products (see section 1.4.6).
20 Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

EVOLUTION OF FOOD TRANSFORMATION OF AGRICULTURAL AND AGRI-FOOD


SYSTEMS PRACTICES

Disruptions in agricultural Standardized agricultural raw material.


production modes Digital management of agricultural work.

Disruptions in the ways Mechanization of production units.


companies are organized Standardized management systems.

Disruptions in the ways in Transition of food production from the farm to the sectors.
which space is occupied Agricultural spaces as lands of geographical denomination and
and developed know-how

Proliferation of food and non-food products inhypermarkets.


Disruptions in distribution
Concentration of distribution and development of distributors’
systems
private labels.

New models for the organization of consumption.


Disruptions in consumption
(procurement practices, preparation, consumption).
patterns
Search for new meanings to food functions.

Disruptions in the values Development of health foods.


carried by food Development of new food design skills.

Table 1.3. Relationship between changes in food systems


and in agricultural and industrial practices

We next discuss these different disruptions and show how technological


advances in the food system are related to increased knowledge about food, its
components, changes during storage, mechanisms for controlling desirable or
undesirable biochemical compounds and processes, all of which have contributed to
the enhancement of food quality and safety. We then reflect on the positive and
negative consequences of this progress.

1.4.1. Disruptions in agricultural production modes

During the 20th Century, cultivation and livestock farming methods in developed
countries underwent a major transformation. Extensive animal husbandry practices
(open-air grazing), in large part, have given way to intensive animal husbandry.
Thus, of the 60 million hens raised in France, only 5 million live outdoors. Globally,
industrial livestock farming produces 74% of the poultry meat, 50% of the pork
meat, 43% of the beef and 68% of the eggs consumed2.

2 Source: www.donnees-environnement.com/chiffres-agriculture.php#france.
Food: Issues and Challenges 21

Agricultural raw materials have gradually become standardized in order to limit


the impact of production hazards on the quantity and quality of products intended
for industry. At the same time, the globalization of raw materials flows has
broadened the sources of supply for factories and dispersed agricultural and food
flows in an increasingly complex and intertwined system of international trade.

The transformation of agricultural inputs and outputs and livestock through


genetic selection practices has led to a reduction in the number, diversity and
variability of agricultural raw materials over time (see Figure 1.3).

The standardization of the characteristics of raw materials facilitates the


productivity of industrial processes and the stability of the performance of processed
products, but reduces the variety of agricultural supply. However, the reconstruction
of product variety at the industrial level, precisely at the assembly stage, increases
the diversity of finished products, introducing delayed innovations as an important
feature of the dominant food system (Trystram 2012).

However, the evolution of the supply of food systems is not only driven by
technological innovations. As mentioned in Table 1.2, societal demand is also
responsible for the increase in the number and change in the nature of the quality
criteria for defining a foodstuff.

Figure 1.3. Trends and figures in the evolution of agricultural


practices and livestock (source: FAO 2014a). For a color version
of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/yannou/ecodesign.zip
22 Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

To better analyze the quality of a food product, Barbosa-Canovas et al. (2009)


propose eight variables:
– sensory and organoleptic components;
– nutritional components;
– safety;
– cost;
– practicality, including food stability and preservation;
– the image linking the product to a landscape, a culture;
– environmental protection, sustainable agriculture and organic farming;
– ethics, as occurs with, for example, the development of fair trade products.

The wide range of solutions made possible by the intersection of all these
characteristics sheds light on the complexity of food product design. This
complexity is reinforced by the variability in the final consumer’s perception of their
culture, previous experiences, timing and tasting conditions (Eckert et al. 2014).

The evolution of food supply over the past century, which has led to the
multiplicity of these criteria, is illustrated in the French context by Figure 1.4
resulting from the work of Colonna et al. (2011). The latest development is the rise
of concerns about the sustainability of food systems. This concern has led food
production stakeholders to reengineer their previous criteria to make them
compatible with the principles and challenges of sustainable development.

The technical constraints of the processing industries require, on the one hand,
stable properties in raw materials and, on the other hand, compositions appropriate
to the physico-chemical reactions they must control (e.g. a high gluten content of
wheat for baking). These constraints have pushed agricultural production towards
specialization and standardization. This standardization has moved innovation
spaces to transformation, where new recipes are created. The value-creating factors
in this area were initially far removed from the quality of the material itself. Then
there were, questions on the impact of material quality on consumer health, and then
finally on nature and society.

1.4.2. Disruptions in the way companies are organized

Initially, the craftsman was replaced by the factory operator; then the number of
the latter decreased due to the mechanization of production. The loss of knowledge,
know-how and responsibilities of the operators of these successive organizations has
Food: Issues and Challenges 23

made it necessary to invent new forms of management. They address these


knowledge gaps and propose hierarchical structures that establish shared
responsibility. This is the challenge of Taylorian and Fordist forms of labor
organization.

Figure 1.4. Historical evolution of factors explaining the evolution of food quality
(source: Colonna et al. 2011). For a color version of this figure, see
www.iste.co.uk/yannou/ecodesign.zip

In France, in the middle of the 19th Century, following problems of falsification


and fraud affecting certain food products (wine in particular), regulatory frameworks
developed with a dual objective of disciplining competition through economic
regulation and protecting consumers through health regulations. Indeed, in terms of
consumer health regulation, the government no longer controls the quality of the
processes of transformation, as this role has been transferred to the producer of the
product (Stanziani 2005). There, the producer must ensure that the processes
guarantee safety.

For companies, these regulatory frameworks, although often perceived as


constraining and costly, have provided training and learning support for their staff.
This contribution was further reinforced by the implementation of Total Quality
Management [TQM]) principles (Juran and de Feo 2010).

At the end of the 20th Century, food quality control and assurance were
integrated into organizational management practices as a new source of business
value. The deployment of quality management system standards (the ISO 9001
family) has become widespread in agri-food companies and craft workshops,
thereby playing a major role in the dynamics of these organizations and increasing
the value of food products. Indeed, by supporting continuous improvement loops,
24 Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

the type of management linked to these normative approaches allows the


development of the company’s dynamic capabilities (Teece 2007). These dynamic
capabilities represent the company’s ability to identify new needs and opportunities
and to seize and transform its practices and culture to meet new needs through
relevant innovations. This transformation involves the integration, into the
organizational structure and production processes, of new knowledge (related to
technologies, processes, supplies, including the expertise of external stakeholders)
that complements and reconfigures the elements of its business model.

The shift from artisanal to industrial food production has distanced the end user
from the raw material producer. This distance implies a transfer of responsibility, as
the processor becomes the guarantor of the level of hygiene of the product. To
ensure this result, public policies have established a regulatory framework that
ensures the health and safety of production and thus consumer protection. This
regulatory framework his complemented by a normative framework, based on good
practices, the implementation of which can have two effects. First, the application of
standards provides certain factors that differentiate the product offering and include
compliance with rules regarding the product’s safety. Second, management system
standards are a potential source of questioning established practices, and encourage
the analysis of new stakeholder needs; in this sense, they constitute a lever of
innovation for the company (Serhan 2017).

1.4.3. Disruptions in the ways in which space is occupied and


developed

By moving away from their initial status as food producers, consumers have
changed their eating habits, while having an increasing concern about their food.
They no longer know the history of the product they consume, feel they have lost
control over the quality of their food and consequently question their trust in the
food industry in general and in food brands in particular. These concerns have been
fuelled by various scandals and journalistic investigations.

Fischler (2004) distinguishes two categories of changes that have occurred since
the 1950s that have contributed to the evolution of Western eating habits:
– general changes (social and demographic factors, etc.) have impacted the use
of the agricultural space in Western European countries. In the 1950s, a quarter of
the French population lived off the land or in the countryside. Between 1980 and
2007, the active agricultural population in France dropped from 8 to 3.4% of the
total active population (Agreste 2011). Between 2010 and 2013, the number of
farms fell by a further 8% from 490,000 to 450,000 (INSEE 2015). Moreover,
agricultural activity no longer depends on all family members, as farmers’ spouses
are increasingly working off farms (Agreste 2012);
Food: Issues and Challenges 25

– Changes, specifically in relation to the field of food, have influenced the diet
and sense of the function in industrial countries. Food has become a product
processed by industry or food services firms and is increasingly consumed outside
the home. Social categories are also changing as consumers are increasingly
from “white-collar” occupations and have different nutritional and service
needs from those consumers with high levels of physical activity that constituted a
preponderance of food markets in the 1960s.

The development of specific quality food products (AOP, PGI) has addressed
some of these concerns. These products, which are based on a region, have enabled
producer groups to differentiate themselves by reserving names (mainly
geographical) associated with “products of origin” whose specificity is linked to
local production conditions (geology, climate) and related heritage (traditional
know-how). However, over the past 20 years, the differentiation function played by
appellations of origin and food certification has become less predominant. This is
because of the establishment of private label products that have the advantage of
referring to the locations, but also have lower prices (Lagrange and Valceschini
2007).

The increasing urbanization of populations has intensified the extent of the gap
between agricultural production and consumers. In parallel urban lifestyles, changes
in household composition and the increase in employment among women increased
consumer demand for processed food despite the concerns they have about such
foods. The development of registered designations and quality labels is an attempt to
address these concerns and create products with higher added value. And yet, the
multiplication of such quality signs has, in recent years, blurred their meaning and
reduced their effectiveness with consumers.

1.4.4. Disruptions in distribution systems

The evolution of food distribution methods has accompanied the industrialization


of the agri-food sectors. The distributor, with their central purchasing offices, has
established itself as a key intermediary between producers and consumers. Their
prevalence is reinforced by the information asymmetry that exists between the
producer and the consumer and by their financial power during price negotiations. In
addition, the development of transportation, ingredient and food preservation
techniques have made it possible to provide year-round access to a wide variety of
foods, exotic or not. In France, for example, between 1958 (when the first
supermarket appeared) and 2001, the number of hypermarkets increased by a factor
of 100. These hypermarkets introduced three major changes in food distribution:
self-service, low prices and “all under one roof”. For example, with Carrefour,
in 1963 the hypermarket began offering food and non-food products and petrol
26 Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

pumps in its parking lots. Today, in France, distribution is dominated by


six players that have captured more than 80% of the market with sales in 2011 of
166 billion euros (Eurogroup consulting 2012 study).

The concentration of distribution and the development of in-house brands have


changed the balance of power between distributors, processors and agricultural
producers. The economic pressure imposed by the distributors on the processors
increasingly affects the raw material producers. Indeed, in France, upstream
differentiation (supply marketing) has given way to downstream differentiation
(demand marketing), i.e. a personalized service offer according to consumers’
expectations and needs. In “downstream marketing”, the strategies of the
commercial brands, under the pressure of requests for price reductions from
distributors, have invested even more in promotions. The excessive use of such
practices has led to a decrease in food prices. Thus, IRI data (Puget 2018) shows
continuous food price deflation of food in the French market between January 2012
and January 2017.

In response to this business model environment, both agricultural producers and


processors have sought ways to circumvent this distribution system. This is the case,
for example, of the development of “short-circuits”, which are associations of
producer-sellers that market at physical sales points or on the Internet, and the
development by agricultural cooperatives of brands of processed products sold in
supermarkets or in their own retail outlets. The Internet distribution system for
Nespresso coffee capsules illustrates the alternative solutions sought by the major
brands. Finally, it is now the US Internet giants (GAFA)3 that threaten these
distribution systems. For example, Amazon in the United States or Alibaba in China
offer food distribution services with fast ordering and delivery solutions such as
Amazon Dash buttons.

The development of mass distribution has allowed access to a multiplicity of


food products and has democratized the consumption of products hitherto reserved
for specific social classes and/or special events. In parallel, the “trivialization” of
access to food and the distance between production and consumption on which it is
based may have contributed to a form of “devaluation” of food for some consumers.
Promotional practices in distribution such as a customer appeal policy have
reinforced this trend and have resulted in increasing price pressure. The ultimate
impact of these pressures is decreasing purchase prices for agricultural raw
materials. As a result, alternative models have developed over the past 10 years.
These include short circuits and in-house brand distribution systems. The
development of Internet sales is now challenging all of these distribution systems
and forcing consideration of multi-channel systems in order to reach all markets.

3 GAFA: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple.


Food: Issues and Challenges 27

1.4.5. Disruptions in consumption patterns

The rise of mass retailing has largely contributed to the evolution of


consumption patterns, i.e. the way we organize ourselves to consume. But it has also
changed the nature and amount of food we eat. These consumption patterns include
the organization of the socio-economic unit of consumption (family), the functions
of this unit (supply, storage and meal preparation), food practices (culinary systems
and food intake) and table manners (culture and society) (Malassis 1994). Several
distribution and marketing strategies contributed to this evolution (Étude Eurogroup
Consulting 2012):
– convenience coupled with diversity of choices: stores are closer to urban areas
and offer food and non-food;
– controlled hygienic safety as mass distribution is undertaken under standards
and hygiene rules (HACCP: Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point), which
improves product quality and safety;
– the democratization of economic access to products for various social groups
as stores increasingly stock luxury products, such as salmon and foie gras, and also
exotic products, such as sushi and salsa. There are also first-price or private-label
products.

While households are spending an ever smaller proportion of their budget on


food, this is also changing. Consumption of fruit and vegetables, breads and cereals
meat, and alcoholic beverages is decreasing, but the consumption of processed and
sweetened products, as well as ready meals is increasing (INSEE 2015).

However, some consumers have become aware of the effects of the industrial
production and consumption model on global warming, depletion of natural
resources, nutrition and health and social inequalities. This awareness is now driving
food system actors to search for alternative business models to provide new meaning
to food and new values for food. These new expectations regarding food supply
have prompted some agricultural producers and some agri-food industries to adopt
new innovative strategies to enhance the value of their products through new
production techniques valuing nutrition and health, respect for the environment,
humans, biodiversity and land.

Supermarkets with an abundant supply of both food and non-food products have
changed our consumption patterns. Awareness of the effects of industrial production
on natural resources, the environment and the social factors involved in the food
chain is driving some consumers to demand products with ethical and ecological
characteristics that are superior to what has been previously offered.
28 Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation in the Food Industries

1.4.6. Disruption in food values

In developed countries in the 1980s, to give products an identity compatible with


the search for a positive impact on health, the concept “healthy food” was
introduced. These “foods” were meant to create a new form of value for food by
contributing to the eater’s health.

The role of food is no longer only to nourish and provide the calories required to
satisfy metabolic functions. It should provide the right nutrients to prevent disease or
delay aging; something particularly important in societies where self-image is
becoming increasingly important. Such a perspective fundamentally transforms the
objectives of food product design, transforming it from the “pleasure food” rationale
characteristic of the traditional French culinary model to a “healthy food” rationale
that was adopted in the English-speaking countries. This nutritional model, which
also experienced success in Asia, has struggled to be accepted in France.

Despite the French market’s reluctance to accept such health foods, certain
functional foods, aimed at a specific health function, have been commercially
successful. Actimel is an example of these successes. This product is fermented milk
enriched with probiotics and vitamins marketed as a food that strengthens the
immune system. Cereals fortified with oat bran fermented with lactic acid bacteria
beneficial to the intestinal flora or margarines fortified with vegetable stanols to
lower cholesterol levels are other examples of functional/customized foods
associated with specific health objectives. However, in France, these health-oriented
innovations are often perceived as “unidentified edible objects” (Fischler 2001).
While some consumers have acquired the necessary nutritional knowledge to take an
interest in these new products, others have not accepted them either due to lack of
knowledge and/or refusal to eat foods perceived as unnatural (Lagrange and
Valceschini 2007). However, demand for natural food has grown in the 21st
Century. A desire for “just food” (Padilla et al. 2005) has grown among some
consumers in search of authentic products whose origins and/or manufacturing
processes is known. These are products that the consumer believes express who they
are and, as such are singular (Camus 2004). They are characterized by the
naturalness of their ingredients (organic farming, ingredients with little processing,
etc.) and are believed to contribute to the health of their eaters. The raw and processed
products from the Bleu-Blanc-Cœur sector containing omega-3 rates higher than those
on the market illustrate the products that have been accepted and valued by
this market. In this case, the omega-3 content is not due to a “fortification” of
the food a posteriori (such as certain milks that can be fortified with iron), but due
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Museum of his birthplace, Dijon, where the stray Englishman who
stays to look at them finds that they are as finely severe as are the
pencil drawings of Ingres. I have his one big etching, ‘La Mort du
Vagabond’—the scale too large to be effective generally, but, pace Mr.
4
Whistler, I do not, in this case, find it ‘an offence,’ —and amongst
others, two that have, it may be, no particular rarity, but that are
worthily, and I think even exceptionally, characteristic. The one is ‘La
Communion dans l’Eglise Saint-Médard’: in line and in feeling an
instance of the most dignified treatment of ecclesiastical function or
religious office. And the other is ‘Les Chantres Espagnols,’ the singing-
men, aged and decayed, eight of them, in a darkened choir—was ever
a vision of narrow and of saddened lives more serious or more
penetrating!

4
‘The huge plate,’ writes Mr. Whistler—on the
whole truthfully—‘the huge plate is an offence: its
undertaking an unbecoming display of
determination and ignorance, its accomplishment
a triumph of unthinking earnestness and
uncontrolled energy.’

From these grave things it is sometimes a relief to turn to


Jacquemart’s etchings of still-life. The man himself had troubles: not
difficulties about money, nor, like Méryon, the knowledge that he was
little appreciated—for appreciation came to him early—but lack of
health during years that should have been vigorous, and a compulsory
flight towards the sunshine, which yet did not appreciably lessen the
distance that divided him from Death. But his work, from end to end, in
its serene, deliberate accomplishment, suggests no chances and
changes, no personal emotion, and even no actual experience of
human life. One says at first, it might have been done at any period;
then one recognises perhaps what one may call a modern feeling for
the object portrayed; then one thinks of Hollar’s ‘Five Muffs,’ and of
Rembrandt’s ‘Shell,’ and remembers that both have a freedom, a
delicate skill, akin, after all, to the skill and the freedom in the etchings
of Jacquemart. Of Jacquemart’s two great series, the prints for his
father’s Histoire de la Porcelaine and those of the ‘Gemmes et Joyaux
de la Couronne,’ I possess only the first, and these in book form, as
they were sent me by Madame Techener, the widow of Jacquemart’s
publisher and friend. In a simple, russet-coloured half-binding, done
afterwards by Zaehnsdorf, they stand on a shelf I go to. Elsewhere are
such proofs of Jacquemart etchings as the occasional good fortune of
auction rooms—snatched in a spare half-hour—has brought to a life-
long lover of engravings. There is a certain plate of sword-handles and
daggers—things, some of them, that ‘rend and rip’—

‘Gash rough, slash smooth, help Hate so many ways,


Yet ever keep a beauty that betrays
Love still at work with the artificer, through all his quaint
devising—’

as Robert Browning wrote, describing weapons that lay, as I


remember, at peace at last, on his own drawing-room table. How
Jacquemart etched such blades! By this print of his there is one of a
seventeenth-century watch—just such a watch as I said used to be
fished up from the bed of the Seine, for quaint old Monsieur Wasset—
and with it the presentment of Renaissance jewel; and, perhaps, of a
carved mirror, or a bit of Valenciennes porcelain.
Allow me a reflection! The cheapest way of enjoying objets d’art is
to enjoy them in etchings; and it is often the easiest way, since you
have but to sit in your chair and look; and it is often not the least true,
since the etcher himself has seen with trained eye before his trained
hand came to draw. Well, to enjoy objets d’art in that fashion, with
tolerable completeness and extreme satisfaction, the intelligent poor
man has really but to get the two chief series of Jacquemarts (those
that are still lacking to me, the ‘Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne,’
are, I know Seymour Haden would tell me, the bigger, broader, richer,
more spontaneous of the two), and those fifty plates by different
etchers, of whom Courtry, Greux, and Le Rat were among the
principal, which Holloway published about a score of years since
—‘Works of Art in the Collections of England.’ In that excellent folio,
the men who have just been mentioned, and several others, followed
hard on Jacquemart’s heels. What a treatment of jade, in some of
those plates! Mr. Addington’s vase in particular—absolutely unctuous.
What a treatment of cristal de roche! Desgoffe’s painted panel at the
Luxembourg is only a little finer. What a treatment of ivory!—that
extraordinary Moorish casket, that was Malcolm of Poltalloch’s.
But this is only copyist’s etching, some people may say.
‘Copyists’—No! You would not enjoy it so much, were it merely servile
imitation. It is interpretation, significant and spirited, alert and vivid.
Of the original etchers of the younger school in England, Frank
Short and William Strang have long seemed to me the most
interesting, notwithstanding the as yet somewhat marked limitations of
theme of the one, and that possessing ‘devil’ of the love of ugliness
which I have now almost ceased to hope may be exorcised from the
other. Strang, for all the presence of that which is repulsive to many, is
a man of great qualities. A Celt to the depths of him, he is wildly
imaginative. He is dramatic, and his prints are dramatic, however much
he may profess to be busy with line and tone. Besides, there are
moments in which he confesses to being a poet. He has the instinct of
tragedy. Technically, his etchings are almost always good; nor is it, to
my mind, a sin in them that so many of them set you thinking. I have
but a few of Mr. Strang’s prints; of Frank Short’s I have more, and
when he can interpret a Dewint like that ‘Road in Yorkshire,’ and a
Constable like that sketch of Mr. Vaughan’s, I see no reason for not
putting those mezzotints—interpretations so brilliant, translations so
faithful yet so free—by the side of his work in Etching, inspired not by
familiarity with the art of another, but by the presence of charming line
or charming vista in Nature. Frank Short, in his original work, is a most
delicate draughtsman of form in landscape. ‘Evening, Bosham,’ and
‘Sleeping till the Flood,’ sufficiently show it.
Of another good man, Mr. C. J. Watson, I have not enough to
judge him at my ease; but he is a sterling etcher, distinctly gifted, and
without artifice and trick. An actually imaginative vision one must not
perhaps ask of him, but mental flexibility—can he but cultivate it—may
enable him to go far.
‘Profil de Jeune Fille,’ a rare dry-point by Paul Helleu, has, it
seems to me, like much of the work by that most modern of Parisian
pastellists and etchers, a delightful spontaneity and force and freedom.
It is an inevitable chef-d’œuvre—the greatest, perhaps, of a facile and
exquisite master.
My gossip stops. Grant me only the grace of one more line, to
avow the satisfaction with which, even after having enjoyed the
companionship of at least some little work that is admittedly classic, I
can look upon the prints of Mr. Charles Holroyd, a young etcher of our
latest day. In them so much of what is generally, and often even rightly,
seductive, is frankly abandoned, that they may keep unimpaired at
least the distinction and reticence which are the very soul of Style.

(Art Journal, January and March 1894.)


ANNE OLDFIELD
‘Mrs. Oldfield, the celebrated comedian,’ is the title inscribed by a
contemporary—who knew how the lady should be spoken of—upon
the copper which Edward Fisher engraved in mezzotint from the
picture by Richardson. A photogravure reproduction from this rare,
desirable print—which shows the lissome grace and flexible charm
of a young woman who enchanted the town, and who was the
delight of Mr. Mainwaring before she was the delight of General
Churchill—forms the frontispiece to the slight and gossipy and
unscientific, but by no means disagreeable volume which Mr. Robins
has compiled—we cannot say written—about the actress whom he
dubs familiarly ‘Nance.’ A cheaper reproduction of another portrait of
her—the original also by Richardson—is to be found upon a later
page. In both portraits she is represented in propria persona, of
which we need not complain, but which it is expedient to chronicle,
inasmuch as such portraiture throws no direct illumination upon the
achievements of her art. Deprived of any such assistance as might
well have been given, at all events had the compiler of the volume
been dealing with a comedian of later time—with Garrick, say, whose
Abel Drugger is known to us by the canvas of Zoffany; with Siddons,
who not only as the ‘Tragic Muse’ reveals the characteristics of her
power; or even with Mrs. Abington, whose performance as Miss Prue
in Love for Love we seem to witness by dint of familiarity with Sir
Joshua’s picture—we are thrown back entirely, for our acquaintance
with Mrs. Oldfield, upon the written records produced for our survey.
These are remarkably scanty. Of the life of the fascinating
woman much remains in mystery. Of the achievements of the
actress there is what is called, in stilted language, ‘a consensus of
opinion,’ but singularly little of definite chronicle. Certain passages in
the Spectator discuss the appropriateness of her delivery of a comic
epilogue to a tragic play—for it was the fate of Mrs. Oldfield to act
Tragedy sometimes, though she preferred, upon the whole, that the
management should ‘give such things to Porter’—and a few other
contemporary allusions to her were printed in her day; but her day
was before the era of very penetrating criticism, either professional
or not professional: no Lamb, no Hazlitt, had the chance of making
her a peg for whimsicality or pungent brilliance; and the appreciative
amateur who, a generation before her, had, in the diary that the
world cherishes, chronicled his sense of the delightfulness of Mrs.
Knipp and of Nell Gwynne—‘all unready, pretty, prettier than I
thought’—was deprived by Fate of the occasion of waxing cordial
over the personal grace of Mrs. Oldfield.
Accordingly, we receive from an industrious American a volume
written ‘round’ Mrs. Oldfield, rather than actually about her. We
cannot altogether blame him for it. We do blame him for once or
twice slinking away, as it were, from the evidence of his own,
perhaps unavoidable, ignorance, under cover of propriety and a
regard for the conventionalities. Of this nature is his exceedingly
slight treatment of the possible existence of a daughter of the
actress; but he had already brought himself to chronicle some
particulars of two sons—and this was perhaps as much as we could
expect. Mrs. Oldfield was never married. Her time looked leniently
upon such freedom as she took in love affairs; and the transference
of her affection was neither frequent nor brutal. She was a woman of
impulse and of sensibility and of magnetic charm. Men who ‘dined
with Walpole’ passed on without a trace of consciousness of
inferiority in her companionship to the agreeable converse of
Oldfield. She was as kind as she was pleasant. She relieved
Savage, who rose to excellence in the verses penned by him on her
demise. She was endowed with common sense, which is frequently
possessed, though not invariably exercised, by people of genius.
She was nice to the humblest, and she walked with Royalty on the
slopes of Windsor. Brought up in a third-rate street in Westminster
and in a tavern in St. James’s Market, she died at her house in
Grosvenor Street, in only middle age, and left a comfortable fortune
to the two youths born of her connection with distinguished and
superior men. Such, briefly, was the woman—mercurial, gay, and
charming; bringing tears, bringing laughter, never bringing regret.
Would that it were possible to write even as definitely as that of the
actress and of the method of her art!
Mr. Robins, who has filled his pages with the stories of the plot of
a few of her pieces and with extracts from two or three comedies in
which she was presumably most brilliant, would have made his book
perhaps not more generally engaging, but more instructive, had he
printed from Mr. Joseph Knight’s scholarly record in the Dictionary of
National Biography the immense list of her rôles. He does, of course,
speak incidentally at least of the actress’s range; but nothing
convinces one of it quite so surely as the scanning of that record of
her honourable labour. So far as one can tell, she must have been
about at her best in The Provoked Husband; but, did she play
Andromache or even Sophonisba, she got from each the maximum
of its effect. Though poor originally, she was of gentle blood, and
perhaps she played best, with her poetic realism, the parts of ladies
of her day. Over a spell of twenty years, her art—like Ellen Terry’s
and Mrs. Kendal’s in our own time—knew no decay. Like Aimée
Desclée, she acted at the last in presence of great physical suffering.
When she died the Town grieved ‘sincerely’; and though, with
curious English compromise, she was refused a monument, she was
not forbidden to be buried in the great grey Abbey whose walls rise
cliff-like over against the street in which she passed her childhood. It
is a pity that her story has been told by Mr. Robins with so naïve an
absence of anything approaching style. She was a theme for a
writer. But the amiable book-maker and genuinely interested student
of her craft and period who is responsible for the various prolixity of
this volume must be forgiven much because he has loved much. He
tells us, it is true, by way of permissible yet not wholly praiseworthy
padding, much more about her contemporaries in her palmy days,
and in her days not palmy, than about herself. Mrs. Oldfield
meanders, like a thin stream, through a meadow of Queen Anne and
early Georgian gossip. We do not resent the gossip. If it is not
authentic information, it is readable chatter. Would only that it were
easier to disengage from the mass of it the delightful and enlivening
and kindling personality of Mrs. Oldfield!

(Literature, 22nd October 1898.)


SIDDONS AND RACHEL
Two little books by Mrs. A. Kennard—contributions to the ‘Eminent
Women’ series—give with much tact and grace of treatment all that
the ordinary reader, if not quite all the special student, needs to know
about the two great tragic actresses of England and of France. With
regard to both, the special student may ask, perhaps, for more of
theatrical criticism, for an analysis more elaborate of that which was
accomplished in sight of the public, by the two famous artists. Yet, as
regards Sarah Siddons—a tragedian removed from us now by the
space of three generations—there may well have been difficulties.
Rachel, of course, lived in a period of criticism more diffuse and
systematic; Jules Janin filling, in her day, to some extent, the place
since filled by Vitu and Sarcey; and, indeed, the published records of
her performances, though scattered, are elaborate and abundant.
Turning from the public achievement to the private character, little
else remains to be told of Mrs. Siddons; but of Rachel there might
have been produced many a scandalous chronicle. Wrong from one
point of view, Mrs. Kennard, in this matter, was certainly right from
another. Of the ‘Dichtung’ and the ‘Wahrheit,’ which meet in the life
of the artist, she has taken, in some respects, chiefly the ‘Dichtung.’
‘We have tried,’ she says herself, in her preface, ‘to extract the
poetry and romance there is to be found in this life, rejecting what is
base and unworthy.’ Nor must it, after all, be supposed that in
Rachel’s life—outside her art—all was unworthy or base. Always she
was a dutiful daughter; always a devoted mother; sometimes a
generous, and once or twice a constant, friend. But her life was a
fever. And, in her maddened demand for excitement, it ran its course
rapidly.
How different all this matter was with Mrs. Siddons! Rachel was
a Jewess, born in an inn in Switzerland, and bred in France; a
Bohemian who, after twenty-four hours of enforced respectability at
Windsor, ‘avait besoin de s’encanailler’—thirsted to be a cad again.
Mrs. Siddons was an Englishwoman; even the Irish blood, not quite
absent from her veins, was without influence on her personal life—
we are far from saying it did not prompt her to be an artist. And not
only was she an Englishwoman; she was a Kemble besides, and
rigid self-control was the very watchword of the Kembles, in art and
life. We are told she had ‘the gift of tears.’ It may be. Certainly she
roused in others pity and passion. But when one recognises this, one
may remember, too, how the methods acceptable to one age may be
ineffective in another. Mrs. Siddons’s epoch was the epoch of the
acceptability of Claude’s and David’s art. It was the age of firm
contour in draughtsmanship, of composition in painting, of
deportment in manners. In manhood, the age admired as ideal what
Mr. Turveydrop, some time afterwards, only unwittingly burlesqued.
The fire, and genius, and spontaneity of Rachel would speak to us
to-day. Rachel gave to the most artificial of tragedy—to the tragedy
which was ‘so Greek’ to its admirers, so full of Louis xiv. to ourselves
—that truth which Desclée, after her, bestowed upon an incident in
the Avenue du Roi de Rome—upon a passion of this morning.
Should we be equally sensible to the favourite effects of Mrs.
Siddons? Should we—who have passed not only through
Romanticism, but into Naturalism, since her day—be impressed,
genuinely or profoundly, by her Lady Macbeth, her Hermione?
As regards the outer life of the two women—Sir Joshua’s ‘Tragic
Muse’ and the Phèdre whom even Sarah Bernhardt, who has so
much in common with her, has not been able to surpass—it was, as
may be expected, essentially different. Mrs. Kennard owes
something, but cannot owe very much, to the Life of Mrs. Siddons by
Campbell, the inefficient friend of her later years, to whom she
bequeathed her memoranda, letters, and diary. Boaden’s Life, of
which Crabb Robinson spoke as ‘one of the most worthless books of
biography in existence,’ cannot have helped Mrs. Kennard much
more; but she acknowledges handsomely her obligations to Mr.
Percy Fitzgerald. About Rachel a whole literature has been written;
yet much of it is hardly serviceable. At least one biography is
avowedly hostile. Arsène Houssaye does not mean to be ill-natured,
but will at all costs be amusing. Jules Janin—a man of words, so
much more than of thoughts—is hopelessly fluent. He betrays the
essential worthlessness of the mere ready writer.
On the whole, perhaps, it is the letters of Rachel that are the
truest guide. Letters to her parents, to her sister, to her friends—if
not to her lovers—to her master, Samson, on the conditions and the
problems of her work—letters of gratitude, letters of regret, letters
making a small gift, though refusing a great loan—these things build
up gradually, on a pretty sure foundation, the edifice of Rachel’s
character, as it is fitting that we should see it. Rachel’s life was in the
Present. After excitement, was to come, not rest, but le néant. She
acted in bad health as in good, chiefly to satisfy one of the deepest
needs of her nature, reckless what might follow. Mrs. Siddons, when
youth and impulse had left her, dragged herself somewhat unwillingly
from town to town, to repair the losses of her husband—the honest
and somewhat incapable gentleman who sought a refuge for
rheumatism at Bath—and she undertook yet another round of
engagements in order that she might provide herself with a carriage
on her retirement: ‘a carriage, now become a necessity.’
As regards the society the two women cultivated and enjoyed,
Mrs. Siddons liked the intellectual and ‘the great world,’ and visited it
as its equal. But Rachel, in her loftiest social flights, was not so much
an artist as a show. Exhibited to the mighty, and encouraged by
them, and bound to behave herself in their presence—for the
success of eccentricity had not then been established—she was
really most at home with a few Bohemians, and with her kith and kin
who lived on her. Mrs. Siddons cared for the stage much more than
did Fanny Kemble. She had for it a respect which was wanting, it
would seem, even in Macready’s feeling for it; yet, in a measure, she
acted to live, rather than lived to act. Rachel—with the capacity for
unnamed odiousness, and supported in her private life by no fine
example and no noble tradition—did yet, in the main, live for the
practice of her art; though its practice can hardly have been
furthered by her moral deterioration, and the chaos of her later days.

(Academy, 3rd September 1887.)


JOSEPH JEFFERSON
Joseph Jefferson has been seen again—and with all the
enthusiasm of many years ago—in Rip Van Winkle. The playbill
which announces his appearance makes no mention of Washington
Irving, but claims the play as ‘written by Dion Boucicault.’ It needs,
however, no very profound student to detect in that tender and
graceful fancy of the story, a quality not to be numbered among the
useful talents of the versatile dramatist who can give us anything that
lies between London Assurance and the Shaughraun. But I believe
that, after all these years, the work of three hands is really to be
found in the play; Mr. Jefferson himself having manipulated much of
its action and business. He does not act the piece: he lives in it. And
he is only to be compared with Got, in Balzac’s Mercadet. Both
performances are restrained and reserved, without the appearance
of restraint and reserve. Both are quiet. There are no dramatic
outbursts, and no surprises. But in each case a character, a career—
one might almost say a life itself—is put before the spectator.
Greater things have undoubtedly been done upon the stage—
greater things have been done on the stage of our day by Irving, and
greater remain to be done by him—but nothing quite so complete
has been seen: nothing giving one the sense of so easy and
unlaboured a mastery. The pathos is very gentle: the humour has
something of Charles Lamb in it. Jefferson has a face of the utmost
good-humour; very kindly eyes, gentle ways, which win upon the
children and the dumb things of his village of Falling Waters. For it is
certainly his village, this Falling Waters; we cannot seriously
separate the actor from the man. And he has a voice of admirable
quality and compass: an enunciation of the utmost distinctness, with
no perceptible mannerism, unless, indeed, the studied quietness be
itself a mannerism. The voice is capable of what would be called an
almost womanly tenderness, by those who have never observed that
the tenderness of a man—as here to children—may be even a
profounder thing.
In Rip Van Winkle he plays a winning character. We have all of
us a weakness for the amiable ne’er-do-well, who begins by ruining
himself, and ends—much against his feeble inclination—by ruining
his children and his friends. Our sympathy is wholly with him, and not
with his irritated wife; and when he has drunk away his fortune, and
all that he can of hers, we think that if he sits quietly under her
reproaches, or makes but a gentle answer, he has atoned for
everything. That is the magnetism of the lovable. And that is the kind
of character that Mr. Jefferson embodies, in a manner so entirely
natural that you are constantly forgetting that it is a performance. He
has learned nothing by rote. He has an easy way of seeking for his
words: a half-absorbed repetition of part of a phrase, as in our
everyday, unchosen speech. He does not finish his sentence like an
actor who has learned his lines and counted the delivery of them,
and measured them to the end. The common actor winds up an
address as Rossini and his school wind up a finale—‘I have the
honour to remain your humble and obedient servant,’ Schumann
said of them. But Mr. Jefferson’s sentences die off sometimes, or are
changed a little, by a slight thing happening in his presence, or by
the swift occurrence of a fresh thought which you may read in his
face. It is the perfection of naturalness—the perfection of seeming
spontaneity.
And if his humour is as mild as Charles Lamb’s, his pathos is as
gentle as Hans Christian Andersen’s. There is the delicate
suggestion, for those who can seize it—the suggestion and nothing
more. When Rip goes out from the home from which his wife has at
last banished him—goes out pointing to the child, in answer to his
wife’s reproach that he has no part in this house: ‘You say I have no
part in this house’—the pathos is of a simple and suggested kind,
comparable only to Hans Andersen’s, in the Story of a Mother. And
as there is nothing in Literature like the one, there is little on the
Stage like the other.

(Academy, 6th November 1875.)


ZOLA’S ‘THÉRÈSE RAQUIN’
On Saturday I went to Thérèse Raquin at the Royalty Theatre; and
while I found the piece itself—as indeed I expected to find it—far less
of a melodrama than certain of its critics had said, I discovered that
the performance, though good and creditable, was not quite so
noteworthy as it had been pronounced. The thing is worth seeing,
though—would indeed in any case be worth seeing. It is but the
second piece of M. Zola’s which has found hospitality among us:
nay, in a certain sense, it is the first, for L’Assommoir was hardly
seen in its nakedness and truth, though it was seen with fulness of
horror in Charles Reade’s version Drink. The version of Thérèse
Raquin—executed mainly, as I suppose, by Mr. De Mattos, but
overlooked by Mr. George Moore—does not widely depart from the
original. It is not a bad translation, though it might, with advantage,
have been a little more colloquial. It suggests nowhere that it has
been subjected to the process which I believe to be the only
satisfactory one, in translation, to a writer who is ambitious, as he
ought to be, to write the English that we talk: the process of wholly
discarding the original at a certain point—when the bare but real
equivalent of that original has once been secured—of forgetting,
from that moment, the existence of the original, and of setting
oneself solely to say well and naturally what the translation, which is
still beside one, says with awkwardness. The translation of Thérèse
Raquin is good enough, it may be, for most people’s requirements
on the stage; but it is not good enough to be counted as literature.
The thing—that is—has not become Mr. De Mattos’s own: he has
remained its somewhat mechanical interpreter.
Thérèse Raquin occupies a middle place in M. Zola’s work. In
point of date, it is early; but I mean ‘a middle place’ in that it displays
neither the exaggerated and sterile realism of the uglier of the
writer’s books nor the abounding poetry of the finer of them. A
problem in itself less interesting than the problem of the Page
d’Amour is, in Thérèse Raquin, treated with hardly a trace of the
poetic tragedy which gives the Page d’Amour so much of its value.
Thérèse Raquin contains only one or two sentences—they are those
in which the wicked little bourgeoise expresses her desire to live for
ever in the sunshine—which permit one to realise that its author is
the author of the passionate idyl La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret. But, on
the other hand, in Thérèse Raquin we are not face to face with the
superfluous and unveracious hideousness of La Terre; and the view
of humanity is not so brutal and so gross as that which is taken in
Nana. No; in these respects we may rank Thérèse Raquin rather
with L’Assommoir itself: in both a sad and ugly and degraded world,
but a glimpse of the skies. In both—as in everything, for the matter of
that, that M. Zola writes—an austere moral: the assured march of
evil-doing to its own punishment.
If Thérèse Raquin were simply the melodrama some of its
opponents have pronounced it to be, the murder, which is the cause
of the two lovers’ remorse and collapse, would have been done, not
in the interval between two acts—the first of which ends and the
second of which begins with a quiet game of dominoes in a Parisian
parlour—but in sight of the audience, with an abundance of water in
the middle of the stage, and at the back a panorama of the Seine by
Asnières or Meudon. As it is, with the material circumstances of the
murder we are not for one moment invited to be concerned. We are
shown in one act the state of mind and feeling in which, to two
people who were perhaps not born to be villains, such a solution as
murder becomes possible; we are shown in another the state of
mind and feeling which, in two such people, may presumably
succeed to that deed of violence of which they have been guilty. The
interest of these acts—different slightly from the interest of the later
ones—is the interest of mental analysis; and, if these acts are
melodrama, The Ring and the Book is a ‘shocker.’
The intelligent, unprejudiced person who goes to see Thérèse
Raquin, comes away with the knowledge that he has witnessed an
exposition of several bitter truths—an exposition made by M. Zola
with power and with singleness of aim, but here and there
accompanied by a purposeless, or at the least an unsuccessful,
diffuseness, which is one of the most characteristic and abiding
defects of this important writer’s method. This diffuseness, this
fulness of detail which is not actually illustrative and explanatory,
Balzac, who was Zola’s master, had in a measure; but he had it far
less than Zola. A profuse employment of the commonplace, in order
that one may be ‘natural’—this avoidance of selection and rejection,
when selection and rejection are of the very essence of Art—
commends itself, as I understand, to a little school of criticism, or of
dogmatism, which has now found voice among us; and that it does
so is an entertaining evidence of the capacity of its professors for
critical preachment.

(Academy, 24th October 1891.)


‘MACBETH’ AND IRVING
I question if Macbeth can ever, in the hands of any tragedian, make
the same mark as Hamlet. Hamlet, as far as the opportunities for the
display of the one actor are concerned, might almost have been
written by an actor’s playwright of our day, bent on securing
prominence for the ‘star.’ Macbeth claims little of our sympathy. Most
of us wonder more at his wife, and care more for Macduff. But it is a
point in Henry Irving’s art, as displayed in this play, that he brings
into such high relief all that Macbeth had of noble, or of the remains
of noble: reverence and awe; indignation at crimes that seemed to
him baser, because they were done for pettier ends, than his own;
admiration of courage in another, and of character more resolute
than his; hesitation, having gone so far, to go yet further in the taking
of innocent blood. Macbeth’s attitude before the prayer of the
grooms; his righteous satire—‘your spirits shine through you’—on
the hired murderers; his invocation to his wife; his almost tender and
pitying warning to Macduff—

‘But get thee back: my soul is too much charged


With blood of thine already’—

all these things show one or other of the qualities that are good in
him. But other things, of course, showing the quite other qualities
that have given Macbeth a name, are more conspicuous and
abundant: at all events are more upon the surface; and the art is
great that knows how to dwell on the sympathetic and worthy, and
that in doing so does much to modify the popular conception.
It may be true, of course, that the main thought of Irving in
Macbeth is to show the deterioration of character through one crime
that brings another; but such deterioration is, after all, generally a
gradual process, and there is time, while it is proceeding, to show
something of the higher nature with which the character began. I
think I note also, in Irving’s Macbeth, an added emphasis, not only
on his belief in the supernatural, but in the power of the supernatural
over him. The prophecy of the weird voices is more than ever a
destiny. His crimes are done under a spell. He is moved to them
from without, by a something not himself, making for Evil.
And the hold that this force from without, this supernatural
power, this sense of destiny, this something not himself, making for
Evil, has upon him, divides Macbeth until the very end of the action
of the play, from such as his own hired murderers. Not that these,
indeed, are set before us, by Shakespeare, as quite voluntary cut-
throats, rejoicing in their profession; but as men rendered desperate:
the one

‘Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world


Have so incensed, that I am reckless what
I do to spite the world’:

the other, less revengeful, yet more weary,

‘So weary with disasters, tugg’d with fortune,


That I would set my life on any chance,
To mend it or be rid on ’t.’

Of course no commonly intelligent actor could fail to indicate—


for the play itself indicates it a hundred times—how much Macbeth is
separated from these, originally; but it does need some such a deep
understanding of the character as seems to be Irving’s, to indicate,
as time goes on, the gradual sinking to that level of theirs—the fact
that the distance that divided the one from the others at the time that
the one would ponder regretfully that he ‘could not say “Amen”’ when
the grooms ‘said “God bless us,”’ had shrunk to well-nigh nothing by
the time when Macbeth’s first greeting to an arriving messenger
must needs, in his desperation, be no milder than—

‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon’—

words which recall the purposeless and exaggerated angers of


impending frenzy—and when his final and bloody resolution—

‘Yet I will try the last,’

is spoken to his foe with a savage hopelessness akin to the


murderers’ own. And it is at least a suggestive and worthy, if not at
every point a complete; stage performance that can display the half-
repenting pathos of the first, and the savagery of the last, and the
passages from crime to crime by which the transition is
accomplished.

(Academy, 23rd December 1876.)


‘THE DUCHESS OF MALFI’
The Independent Theatre has pleased a few, and, it is to be feared,
displeased many, by its production of Mr. Poel’s version of The
Duchess of Malfi. But it is the ill-advised whom on one account or
another it has now vexed; it is the wisest whom it has at last done
something to satisfy. I said ‘at last.’ That was ungrateful. For, once, at
least, before, the Independent Theatre—eschewing mere
eccentricity and the ‘experimental’ drama (a pretty word, very, for the
dull or the unseemly)—once before was it occupied with work of
genius and high literary art, or with work at all events by a writer
whose genius, here and there, is not to be gainsaid. Did it not give
us, for a change, what is at all events the lucid realism of M. Zola?
And now, after a régime more or less of the experimental and
unnecessary, we have again a great man’s work. The Independent
Theatre has once more realised that to be revolutionary is not to be
sufficing. We have had a taste of Webster—Webster, it is true, with
the lime-light turned on at the appropriate moment; Webster with a
skirt-dance; Webster with a measure of scenic effect, dexterously
shocking, or dexterously entertaining, as the case may be, to the
modern taste. But still a classic—a giant in conception and writing—
a strong tower in comparison with a puny earth-work. Excellently has
Mr. Swinburne said of him, ‘There is no poet morally nobler than
Webster.’ Fearlessly has Mr. Gosse asserted that The Duchess of
Malfi is ‘a masterpiece excelled only by King Lear.’ And, if I take
down my volumes of Lamb’s Specimens, I find that, in a little
footnote, Elia becomes most eloquent and most descriptive when he
descants upon this play. ‘To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to
the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear ... this only a
Webster can do.’ And again, contrasting inferior writers with this
potent if imperfect master, ‘They know not how a soul is capable of
being moved; their terrors want dignity; their affrightments are
without decorum.’
But Webster, with all his qualities, had faults that were of his
time, along indeed with faults, or deficiencies, that were his own.
Among the latter I would note some absence of clearness in
exposition. The relation of character to character, the how and
wherefore of the minor events—these things are not invariably made
plain: Webster himself, perhaps, could hardly have passed creditably
through a searching examination in them. And among the faults, or
accidents, if you will, of his time, were—one need hardly say it, but
that it affects his acceptability upon the modern stage—the permitted
coarseness, the absence of reticence on matters we are not
accustomed to amplify and define; and, in mechanical arrangement,
the frequent shifting from scene to scene within the compass of a
single act—a point in which no English dramatist, as far as my
remembrance carries me, went wholly right, until the trick had been
learned from the French masters of construction of our own time.
Mr. Poel, in a version reverent and tasteful by the absence of
additions, has dealt with the deficiencies of Webster’s epoch with
judgment and tenderness. As far as it is possible to be so, the piece
is now what on the playbill it is asserted to be—‘rearranged for the
modern stage.’ And if the modern stage should turn out, after these
initial performances of the new version, not quite willing to have it,
that will be not so much on account of the irrepressible horrors—the
modern stage has no deep-seated aversion to them—as on account
of the limited measure of interest which that stage displays in the
achievements of Writing, in the noble dealing with almost baffling
themes, in the vigour and affluence of literary imagination and style.
The similes of Webster—pregnant, and less far-fetched than much of
the imagery of his contemporaries—are rather lost upon a public and
upon players who account inflation to be poetry and familiarity to be
wit. ‘Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young,’ is one
among a hundred lines, for instance, in which a writer of stately
simplicity—born writer, rather than playwright—requires to be heard
by those to whom the suggestive is sufficient: requires, in a word, to
be met half-way along his road. Then, again, though there are hints

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