Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [21]
Such comments reveal that much of the controversy about food safety appears as a conflict between a strictly scientific assessment of risk and an approach that also considers a much broader range of issues that affect society. Underlying the controversy, as this book explains, are industry concerns about economic self-interest as opposed to concerns of consumer advocates about the distribution of risk, benefit, and control in matters of public policy. We will see how scientific decisions about food safety cannot be separated from such political and social matters.
ABOUT THIS BOOK
This book traces the interweaving of science, values, and politics through an examination of three broad areas of food safety: bacteria, biotechnology, and bioterrorism. The first part of the book examines the politics of foodborne microbial illness. These chapters describe government attempts to force food producers, particularly those that slaughter and process meat, to take steps to prevent bacterial contamination of their products, and they explain how those industries consistently resist such safety measures. From a science-based approach to risk assessment, food-borne illness is the single most important food safety problem; it is responsible for millions of cases of stomach upset and thousands of deaths each year. Bacteria rank low on the dread-and-outrage scale, however, because meat is familiar, eating it is voluntary, food “poisonings” are common, and most people survive them. Politics enters this picture at the level of responsibility for preventing foodborne illness. We will see how the meat industry exploits the relatively low level of organized public outrage about microbial safety to oppose federal regulations and, instead, to argue that consumers bear the principal burden of ensuring safe food. Part 1 also describes the fragmentation of government oversight as a basis for developing a more coherent approach to dealing with problems of food safety.
Part 2 shifts the discussion to a different issue: genetically modified foods. By the standards of scientific risk assessment—counting cases of illness and death—such foods appear no less safe than foods developed through traditional plant genetics, but, as the StarLink affair indicates, they present many reasons for distrust and alarm. These chapters describe how the food biotechnology industry, in dismissing dread-and-outrage factors as emotional and unscientific, lobbied for—and won—a largely science-based approach to regulation of its products. The chapters explain how the dismissal of consumer concerns about value issues related to food biotechnology forced advocacy groups to use safety as the only “legitimate” basis of discussion. In the StarLink affair, for example, advocates could not use concerns about corporate control of the food supply as an argument against approval of genetically modified foods. They could, however, use the remote risk of allergenicity as a basis for opposition because of the double negative: it is not possible to prove that the StarLink protein is not allergenic. These chapters describe the origin of disputes about genetically modified foods that arise from conflicting interests and values.
The concluding chapter takes up a third area: food bioterrorism—the deliberate poisoning or contamination of the food supply to achieve some political goal. Questions about food bioterrorism take us into the realm of emerging food safety hazards that might be used as biological weapons: mad cow disease, foot-and-mouth disease, and anthrax. From a science-based perspective, these problems