Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [15]
Implications for Food Safety Politics: Themes
With StarLink products recalled and class action suits settled, we now turn to the food safety interests of the general public. As consumers, we want food to be safe—or safe enough—and we expect the food industry and government to make sure that it is. We also are part of the political equation. As stakeholders in the food system, however, our influence depends on the extent to which we recognize the political forces at work in safety matters. Enhancing that understanding is a principal aim of this book. If the StarLink episode teaches us anything, it is that ensuring food safety is a matter of politics as well as science. In conveying this lesson, the StarLink story illustrates several of the themes that recur throughout the chapters that follow.
The first theme is the fragmented, overlapping, and confusing distribution of authority among the federal agencies concerned with food safety: the EPA, FDA, and USDA. All three agencies were in some way responsible for making sure that StarLink did not get into the human food supply, yet the system failed to ensure that food companies followed rules designed to protect public health. We will see how this divided authority complicates federal oversight of microbial contaminants in food, genetically engineered foods, and protection of the food supply against potential threats of bioterrorism.
A second theme is the food industry’s promotion of economic self-interest at the expense of public health and safety. We have just seen how the developers of StarLink assumed that the corn was safe to eat, made little effort to keep it out of the human food supply, and blamed other parts of the food distribution chain for its appearance in taco shells. The StarLink affair is just one example of what Sierra magazine calls “Brave New Nature—What Happens When Biology Meets Big Business?” (see figure 3). This book provides further examples of situations in which food companies deny responsibility and blame others in matters of food safety, and oppose, resist, and undermine food safety guidelines, following them only when forced to do so by government action or public opinion.
FIGURE 3. Environmental groups recognize political influences on science when they ask what happens when “biology meets big business,” as in this cover story from Sierra, July/August 2001. (Courtesy of Sierra magazine and the photographer, Philip Kaake. Reprinted with permission.)
A third theme is the food industry’s invocation of science as a rationale for self-interested actions. In the case of StarLink, Aventis used scientific arguments—that the protein was present in amounts too small to cause allergic reactions and that scientists could find no evidence of allergenicity—to divert attention from the ways in which it had ignored the terms of its EPA registration. This book explains how food companies use science as a political tool to oppose requirements to keep harmful microbes out of food, label genetically modified foods, or institute protective measures against bioterrorist threats.
A fourth theme has to do with the use of food safety as a means through which consumer advocacy groups raise issues about the self-interested exercise of corporate power, the imbalance in power between corporate and public interests, and the collusion of government policies with business interests. In the StarLink affair, consumer groups successfully used the EPA’s registration rules and uncertainties about allergenicity to challenge the marketing of genetically modified foods and to obtain a large judgment in a class-action