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Although this chapter has focused on U.S. food safety matters, it begins and ends by recognizing that domestic food safety—like many other political matters—cannot be discussed in isolation from its international dimensions. The safety of the foods we import depends not only on the quality standards set by our trading partners but also on international decisions that might seem only peripherally related to the food supply. Thus, an additional alternative surely should be to insist that the United Nations agencies dealing with trade issues—the Codex Commission and, as discussed in the next part of this book, the World Trade Organization—consider health and safety first in making rules about trade barriers.

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, several European countries have reduced outbreaks of foodborne disease by instituting control measures similar to Pathogen Reduction: HACCP. In response to food catastrophes such as mad cow disease in Great Britain and foot-and-mouth disease in cattle throughout Europe, countries such as Canada, Denmark, Ireland, and Great Britain have taken steps to consolidate their food safety activities into single agencies. The European Union has also created a unified Food Safety Authority.64 The reasons for taking this approach vary from one country to another and may well be designed to promote the interests of food companies and regulators rather than those of the public, as all seem driven primarily by the need for greater efficiency and reduced cost.65 Although it is too soon to know whether they will also reduce episodes of foodborne illness, these experiments are of great interest. They hold the promise of solving coordination problems as well as providing the strength and flexibility to deal with emerging food safety challenges such as bioterrorism.

International concerns also dominate discussions of food biotechnology, as countries throughout the world grapple with decisions about whether to accept genetically modified food crops produced in the United States. In part 2, we will see that the debates over such foods depend to some extent on safety considerations but relate even more to societal implications. Whether an independent food agency might be more effective in dealing with this broader range of considerations will be taken up in the concluding chapter, as will some thoughts on how the various stakeholders—government, food producers, and consumers—might make food safety issues less political and more focused on health.

PART TWO

SAFETY AS A SURROGATE

THE IRONIC POLITICS OF FOOD BIOTECHNOLOGY

LATE IN THE FALL OF 2001, I ATTENDED A TUFTS UNIVERSITY conference on agricultural biotechnology sponsored by corporations such as Aventis (producer of StarLink corn) and Monsanto (producer of genetically modified cow growth hormone, corn, soybeans, and cotton). Speaker after speaker made the same three points: (1) the number of people in the world is increasing rapidly and food production must increase to keep them from starvation; (2) because the land available for growing food is limited, biotechnology—and only biotechnology—can increase food productivity; and (3) the main barrier to producing genetically modified foods is public doubt about their safety, particularly as expressed by unscientific activist groups such as Greenpeace.1 Anyone not actively tracking the politics of food biotechnology might be surprised to learn that the chief impediment to eliminating world hunger is a consumer group best known for its opposition to nuclear weapons testing, but this topic is replete with such ironies.

To explain why the ironic politics of food biotechnology deserves attention in a book about food safety, we must begin with some definitions: biotechnology and its synonym, genetic engineering, are processes by which scientists move genes (DNA) from one organism to another to transfer desired traits. Agricultural biotechnologists move genes from bacteria, viruses, or plants into food plants (the appendix explains how