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Safe at any scale? Food scares, food regulation, and scaled alternatives

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Abstract

The 2006 outbreak of E. coli O157:H7, traced to bagged spinach from California, illustrates a number of contradictions. The solutions sought by many politicians and popular food analysts have been to create a centralized federal agency and a uniform set of production standards modeled after those of the animal industry. Such an approach would disproportionately harm smaller-scale producers, whose operations were not responsible for the epidemic, as well as reduce the agroecological diversity that is essential for maintaining healthy human beings and ecosystems. Why should responses that only reinforce the problem be proffered? We use the framework of accumulation and legitimation to suggest corporate and government motives for concealing underlying problems and reinforcing powerful ideologies of individualism, scientism, and centralizing authority. Food safety (or the illusion of safety) is being positioned to secure capital rather than public welfare. We propose implementing the principle of subsidiarity as a more democratic and decentralized alternative. Because full implementation of this principle will be resisted by powerful interests, some promising intermediate steps include peer production or mass collaboration as currently applied to disease prevention and surveillance, as well as studying nascent movements resisting current food safety regulations.

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Notes

  1. The use of the term “fresh” is quite questionable. Technically, once spinach is washed and bagged it becomes a processed food and thus is no longer fresh. More practically, any food that travels hundreds of kilometers from point of production to point of sale and can sit for a week or more waiting to be sold is hardly fresh. While “uncooked” might be a more accurate term, we follow the industry convention in this paper.

  2. The bill, “Safe Food Act of 2007,” sponsored by Durbin (S654) and DeLauro (HR1148), was introduced on May 1, 2007. It is basically a recycling of the “Safe Food Act of 2005” and the “Safe Food Act of 2006.” None of these bills made it out of committee.

  3. Eade Ranch, Taix Ranch, and Wickstrom Ranch also were identified as sources of E. coli 1057:H7 contamination in the bagged spinach. Only Paicines Ranch, however, had the “exact” signature.

  4. The bagged spinach was shipped to and recalled from Canada, Mexico, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Iceland (FDA 2006).

  5. As one reviewer pointed out, considerable debate surrounds the “self-nonself” model of the immune system. Many immunologists now feel that the “danger model,” “which suggests that the immune system is more concerned with damage than with foreignness,” has greater and more nuanced explanatory power (Matzinger 2002). This debate is clearly beyond the scope of the current paper and the expertise of its authors. Nevertheless, regardless of the mechanisms involved, immunity and health are closely dependent upon context (both immediate and evolutionary) and the maintenance of diversity.

  6. (1) the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the Department of Agriculture; (2) the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition of the Food and Drug Administration; (3) the part of the Agriculture Marketing Service that administers shell egg surveillance services established under the Egg Products Inspection Act; (4) the resources and facilities of the Office of Regulatory Affairs of the Food and Drug Administration that administer and conduct inspections of food establishments and imports; (5) the resources and facilities of the Office of the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration that support—(A) the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition; (B) the Center for Veterinary Medicine; and (C) the Office of Regulatory Affairs; (6) the Center for Veterinary Medicine of the Food and Drug Administration; (7) the resources and facilities of the Environmental Protection Agency that control and regulate pesticide residues in food; (8) the part of the Research, Education, and Economics mission area of the Department of Agriculture related to food safety and animal feed research; (9) the part of the National Marine Fisheries Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the Department of Commerce that administers the seafood inspection program; (10) the Animal and Plant Inspection Health Service of the Department of Agriculture” (H.R. 1148, 2007).

  7. US food safety regulations illustrate both state support for accumulation, particularly for the largest firms, and state and corporate engagement in legitimation. Kolko (1963) suggests that the regulations passed in the Progressive Era, such as the Pure Food and Drugs Act, and the Meat Inspection Act, were welcomed by big business as a means to reduce competition. This view contrasts sharply with accounts that describe these laws as victories of a Progressive movement on behalf of the public. Less contentious is evidence that these laws were implemented and enforced in ways that were most amenable to the largest firms (Law 2005). Regulations solved a legitimation problem for big business by regaining public trust in the food system that had been eroded by the muckrakers. At the same time, they effectively provided a competitive advantage to the large firms that could more easily afford the expense of compliance. They also facilitated what is in effect a state-sanctioned cartel, by enforcing an agreement among the largest firms to avoid competing in the in the arena of food safety (Carson 2007). Milk pasteurization laws passed in 1914 and 1915, for example, led to the demise of numerous small milk distributors in cities including Detroit, Chicago, Boston, and Milwaukee as well as to the rise of two national holding companies, Borden's and Sealtest (Levenstein 1988).

  8. The European Union uses the word subsidiarity in its constitution, but it is implemented in ways that privilege powerful interests (Hirschl 2005).

  9. State-level disruption is not just a hypothetical possibility—governments have been found to engage in internet censorship in 25 of 41 countries recently surveyed by researchers at Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and Toronto (Davies 2007). In the US, telecommunications companies are currently working to privatize the online commons. They are lobbying Congress to enact legislation that would allow them to discriminate against non-commercial data, either sending it much more slowly or removing it entirely (Chester 2006).

Abbreviations

CDC:

United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

E. coli :

Escherichia coli [serotype O157:H7]

FDA:

United States Food and Drug Administration

GAO:

United States Government Accountability Office

HACCP:

Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point

NIH:

United States National Institutes of Health

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  1. Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA

    Laura B. DeLind

  2. Department of Community, Agriculture, Recreation and Resource Studies, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Philip H. Howard

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DeLind, L.B., Howard, P.H. Safe at any scale? Food scares, food regulation, and scaled alternatives. Agric Hum Values 25, 301–317 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-007-9112-y

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