Paper short abstract:

How did plastic food packaging became mundane? Thévenot’s account of ‘reality testing’ is used to trace various ontologies of packaging. A key focus is how the functional agency of plastic is enacted in markets, and how this functionality is both technical and moral - and often contested.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the processes whereby plastic food packaging became mundane. Rather than tell this story via the logics of technical innovation or inexorable market expansion the aim is to investigate exactly how this material changed the ontological status of food, markets and consumers and how it became unnoticed and ordinary. Using Thévenot's account of 'reality testing' or the complex processes whereby what counts as 'good' or 'real' emerges through everyday pragmatic engagements with the world, the development of various social grammars or ontologies of packaging is investigated. A key concern is to understand how the functional agency of plastic packaging was enacted in specific market arrangements, and how this functionality was always both technical and moral. In the early history of wrapping previously unwrapped food in plastic a key market challenge was to explain to consumers what this material change was good for. These justifications were essential to generating forms of agencement for packaging, and to configuring new and common practices around it. They were also often contested leading to food markets having to develop new standards and rhetorics that would justify the practical in moral terms. Using examples from the early history of plastic food packaging, and more recent contestations of it, the mundane status of packaging is revealed as a complex and always contingent achievement.