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AbstractThis article examines a particular mode of agri‐food governance: international food standard setting. Sociological accounts of technical regulatory processes such as standard setting can help to illuminate the role of expertise in the governance of the agri‐food system. Firstly, the potential contribution of the concept of epistemic communities to the analysis of international food standard setting is discussed. Secondly, the article details the architecture of international trade regulation and the operational procedures of the Codex Alimentarius Commission (the Codex), the intergovernmental organisation in which international food standards are set. Thirdly, the role of scientific expertise to the standard setting process in the Codex is explored through a case‐study of the attempt to establish an international definition for dietary fibre. The article concludes by reflecting upon the importance of contestation over knowledge claims to the conduct of agri‐food governance.

From the beginning of the long sixteenth century, the practices of knowledge production took the form of a complex of processes which produced over time an intellectual and institutional hierarchy within which authoritative knowledge was progressively defined as the "other" of societal/ moral values. These processes of knowledge formation, in articulation with those sets of processes associated with the "economic" and "political" spheres, account for the dominant relational setting "disciplining" human cognition, and thus the "cultural" parameters of action. This long-term pattern of the modern world-system we shall call the structures of knowledge.

In the complex history of hunter‐gatherer studies, several overlapping and at times antagonistic discourses can be discerned. However, one critique has emerged that would render all hunter‐gatherer discourses irrelevant and do away with the concept altogether. The paper explores the poststructuralist roots of this "revisionism" and then argues why the concept of hunter‐gatherer continues to be politically relevant and empirically valid. However, if they are to fulfill their promise of illuminating an increasingly fragmented and alienating modernity, hunter‐gatherer studies will have to become more attuned to issues of politics, history, context, and reflexivity.