Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [18]
Using this science-based approach, U.S. government agencies identify the primary preventable food safety hazards as microbial infections, antibiotic-resistant Salmonella, food allergens, and certain pesticides.25 For science-based reasons, genetically modified foods do not appear on this list. In this book, we will see how government and industry use science-based approaches to set food safety standards, to regulate genetically modified foods, and to make international decisions about food trade. Because so much self-interest is at stake in such decisions, these areas have political as well as scientific dimensions—whether recognized or not.
The StarLink events, for example, revealed how scientific approaches to risk also are subject to values, opinions, and interpretations. People reported feeling ill after eating products made with StarLink corn, but scientific tests could not confirm that the StarLink protein caused the problem. On that basis, depending on point of view, some experts concluded that StarLink could not possibly cause allergic reactions, whereas others criticized the quality of the testing, the small number of people tested, and other experimental factors that cast doubt on that interpretation. Such differences in opinion among experts should be expected. In 1982, Mary Douglas (an anthropologist) and Aaron Wildavsky (a political scientist) observed that scientific judgments of risk cannot—and, indeed, should not—be separated from value judgments:
It is a travesty of rational thought to pretend that it is best to take value-free decisions in matters of life and death. One salient difference between experts and the lay public is that the latter, when assessing risks, do not conceal their moral commitments but put them into the argument, explicitly and prominently. . . . The risk expert claims to depoliticize an inherently political problem . . . [But] knowledge of danger is necessarily partial and limited: judgments of risk and safety must be selected as much on the basis of what is valued as on the basis of what is known. . . . Science and risk assessment cannot tell us what we need to know about threats of danger since they explicitly try to exclude moral ideas about the good life.26
Value-Based Approaches: Estimating Dread and Outrage
Scientific methods estimate the probability that something in a food might lead to illness, but they do not consider the intangible value or significance of that food to the people eating it. Many people, however, evaluate risks not only for their potential to cause health problems but also from the standpoint of personal beliefs and values that depend on a host of psychological, cultural, and social factors. These personal perspectives about food have also been studied extensively. Anthropologists, for example, tell us that the act of consuming food—taking it into our bodies—is so primal that societies create myths to explain the transformation of food into us. Because, in that sense, we truly are what we eat, food raises questions of intimacy and identity and provokes feelings of anxiety. People do not necessarily want food to be perfectly safe (or we would never eat wild mushrooms or raw oysters). We are just more comfortable knowing what we are eating. As the French sociologist Claude Fischler explains, people have an innate tendency to view food as UFOs—unidentified food objects (objets comestibles non identifiés). At some deep psychological level, “If we are what we eat, and we don’t know what we are eating, then do we still know who we are?”27
Specialists in risk communication are well aware of the importance of such anxieties in assessment of safety risks. Paul Slovic and his colleagues, for example, have asked people to rank potential hazards according to the degree of perceived harm. Their findings: people worry most about risks perceived as highly dangerous, particularly to pregnant women and small children (a science-based concept), but they