Abstract
We use the case of red meat food safety to illustrate the need to problematize policy. Overtime, there have been numerous red meat scandals and scares. We show that the statutes and regulations that arose out of these events provided the industry with a means of demonstrating safety, facilitating large-scale trade, legitimizing conventional production, and limiting interference into its practices. They also created systemic fragility, as evidenced by many recent events, and hindered the development of an alternative, small-scale sector. Thus, the accumulated rules help to structure the sector, create superficial resilience, and are used in place of an actual policy governing safety. We call for rigorous attention to not only food safety, but also the role and effect of agrifood statutes and regulations in general, and engagement in policy more broadly.
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Notes
The Pure Food and Drug Act (PFDA) of 1906 was signed into law on the same day; its primary areas of concern was adulteration and truth in labeling of nearly all other processed foods. While PFDA and FMIA, together, are generally considered the beginning of the “modern” US food safety system, we limit out discussion to FMIA as PFDA has a very different trajectory.
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Acknowledgements
The case study that provides the basis for this paper was supported by a grant from the Community Vitality Program of the Families and Communities Together Coalition at Michigan State University and by funding from the Vice-President for Research and Graduate Studies at Michigan State University. The authors wish to acknowledge Utaka Walton and Deborah Pierce for their assistance with various administrative tasks. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2007 Rural Sociological Society meetings in Santa Clara, California. We are grateful for the comments received during our presentation and from anonymous reviewers of our draft manuscript. Lastly, we would like to thank Steven Wolf and Jill Harrison for their guidance and support.
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Worosz, M.R., Knight, A.J. & Harris, C.K. Resilience in the US red meat industry: the roles of food safety policy. Agric Hum Values 25, 187–191 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-008-9127-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-008-9127-z