Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [19]
With respect to food, acceptance of risk depends far more on perception of the number and intensity of dread-and-outrage factors than it does on the number of cases of illness. Scientists can identify the probable extent of a foodborne illness in the population, for example, but interpreting what that probability means for the health of any one individual is quite another matter. On a population basis, microbial contaminants unquestionably pose the most prevalent foodborne threat to health. The public, however, also ranks chemical pesticides and additives, irradiation, and genetic engineering high on the list of perceived risks, largely because exposures to them are invisible, involuntary, imposed, and uncontrollable. People make clear, predictable, and understandable distinctions between risks they knowingly accept and those they do not. Many people find the benefits of eating raw fish or raw milk cheeses to greatly exceed the small but finite risk of ingesting harmful microbial contaminants; the choice is voluntary, and the foods are familiar. In contrast, the health risks of genetically modified foods (however remote they may be) are hidden and undemocratically applied—witness StarLink—and as a result are far less acceptable.
Because questions of who imposes risks and who takes risks are crucial in assessing whether a risk is acceptable, decisions about food safety take on political dimensions. During the mid-1990s, when the FDA applied a solely science-based approach to approval of genetically engineered foods, Commissioner David Kessler recognized the political implications of excluding value-based considerations when he told a reporter, “Weighing risks against benefits sounds great, but the truth is there is no magic formula, especially when the risks are taken by one group and the benefits by another.”29
A comparison of the two approaches to assessing risk explains why whenever someone invokes science in discussions of food safety, we can be reasonably certain that questions of self-interest are at stake but are excluded from debate. Scientists talk about risk as a matter of illness and death. The public wants dread-and-outrage factors to be considered as well. In this book, we will see how the failure of food companies, scientists, and government agencies to recognize the need to address values as well as science in matters of food safety leads to widespread distrust of the food industry and its regulators. When officials and experts dismiss dread-and-outrage concerns as emotional, irrational, unscientific, and indefensible, they raise questions about their own credibility and competence. They fail to recognize their own biases as well as the predictability of public responses to food safety risks. In 1987, Peter Sandman explicitly made this point: “When a risk manager continues to ignore these factors—and continues to be surprised by the public’s response of outrage—it is worth asking just whose behavior is irrational.”30
The Precautionary Principle: Look Before You Leap
The differences in the two approaches to food safety risk have an additional political dimension. They imply different expectations for the ways in which authorities make decisions about the release of new foods and ingredients. The science-based approach works on the proposition “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” Regulators determine as well as they can whether a food or ingredient is likely to cause harm and permit those that seem reasonably safe to enter the food supply.