Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [16]
A fifth theme is the trouble caused by the markedly different ways in which scientists and the public view food safety risks. Because this particular theme is central to understanding why food safety is as much a matter of politics as it is of science, and because this theme emerges as a factor in so many disputes about food safety matters, it comes first in our discussion.
PERCEPTIONS OF FOOD SAFETY RISK: THE “TWO-CULTURE” PROBLEM
Underlying the politics of food safety is a vexing question of definition: What, exactly, is safe? Although it might seem that a food is either safe or not safe, the distinction is rarely unambiguous. Safety is relative; it is not an inherent biological characteristic of a food. A food may be safe for some people but not others, safe at one level of intake but not another, or safe at one point in time but not later. Instead, we can define a safe food as one that does not exceed an acceptable level of risk. Decisions about acceptability involve perceptions, opinions, and values, as well as science. When such decisions have implications for commercial or other self-interested motives, food safety enters the realm of politics.18
Scientists may be able to settle questions about the allergenicity of StarLink, but science is only one factor among many others that influence opinions about the acceptability of StarLink corn in the food supply. Disputes about food safety often occur as a result of the different ways in which people assess risk. For the sake of discussion, these ways can be divided into two distinct but overlapping approaches to deciding whether a food is safe: from the perspective of “science” and from the perspective of “values.” Table 2 summarizes the characteristics of the two approaches. I place them in quotation marks because the two approaches greatly overlap. Science-based approaches are not free of values, and value-based approaches also consider science. With that said, we can use these oversimplified categories to make some further generalizations. From a science-based perspective there is little reason to exclude StarLink from the food supply; the corn has a low probability of causing allergic reactions. From value-based perspectives, however, there may be many reasons to prohibit its use: its lack of labeling or regulatory approval, for example, or simply because it is genetically modified.
TABLE 2. Comparison of “science-based” and “value-based” approaches to evaluating the acceptability of food safety risks
“Science-Based”
“Value-Based”
Counts and calculates:
Assesses whether risk is:
• Cases
• Voluntary or imposed
• Severity of illnesses
• Visible or hidden
• Hospitalizations
• Understood or uncertain
• Deaths
• Familiar or foreign
• Costs of the risk
• Natural or technological
• Benefits of the risk
• Controllable or uncontrollable
• Costs of reducing the risk
• Mild or severe
• Balance of risk to benefits
• Fairly or unfairly distributed
Balances risk against benefit and cost
Balances risk against dread and outrage
These differences in approaching questions of risk were understood long before anyone invented the techniques for genetically modifying foods. In 1959, for example, the scientist and writer C.P. Snow characterized the ways in which people trained in science tend to think about the world—as opposed to those without such training—as representing two distinct cultures separated from one another by a “gulf of mutual incomprehension.”19 Much more recently, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote, “The ways in which we try to understand and deal with the physical world and those in which we try to understand and deal with the social one are not altogether the same. The methods of research, the aims of inquiry, and the standards of judgment all differ, and nothing but confusion, scorn, and accusation—relativism! Platonism! reductionism! verbalism!—results