Careless (food) marketing: a caring agenda for studying food

Purpose This paper uses ethics of care (EoC) to scrutinise and transform food marketing scholarship in world-leading journals over the last decade. Having identified caring deficits in this scholarship, this paper aims to explore caring opportunities to make research in marketing more caring towards contemporary challenges of food. Design/methodology/approach A two-stage systematic literature review was adopted to understand research on food in world-leading marketing journals. Stage 1 analysed food research in papers published in 4 and 4* (CABS ranking) marketing journals. Findings were interpreted through Tronto’s (2013) EoC and caring deficits identified. Stage 2 analysed food research in papers published in 3 (CABS ranking) marketing journals and 4 (CABS ranking) related disciplines. Findings were interpreted identifying caring opportunities, derived from caring deficits. Findings Deficits in world-leading scholarship derive from a predominantly narrow focus on atomistic consumers at the choice point, investigated through positivistic research using psychologically driven frameworks. In revealing the cyclical nature of these caring deficits, this study proposes a caring agenda with caring opportunities, based on exemplars from excellent marketing scholarship and related disciplines. Research limitations/implications This study develops a research agenda for ethically driven scholarship in food marketing and consumer research. Practical implications A transformative caring agenda is proposed to go beyond scholarly epistemological and theoretical divisions and revolutionise the discipline. Social implications A caring approach to scholarship enables responses to the wicked problems within contemporary food marketing. Originality/value This paper contributes to the special issue by bringing an ethical dimension to current debates on the limitations of the field and proposes a caring agenda for future research.