Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (6 page)

FIGURE 3. Environmental groups recognize political influences on science when they ask what happens when “biology meets big business,” as in this cover story from
Sierra
, July/August 2001. (Courtesy of
Sierra
magazine and the photographer, Philip Kaake. Reprinted with permission.)

A third theme is the food industry’s invocation of science as a rationale for self-interested actions. In the case of StarLink, Aventis used scientific arguments—that the protein was present in amounts too small to cause allergic reactions and that scientists could find no evidence of allergenicity—to divert attention from the ways in which it had ignored the terms of its EPA registration. This book explains how food companies use science as a political tool to oppose requirements to keep harmful microbes out of food, label genetically modified foods, or institute protective measures against bioterrorist threats.

A fourth theme has to do with the use of food safety as a means through which consumer advocacy groups raise issues about the self-interested exercise of corporate power, the imbalance in power between corporate and public interests, and the collusion of government policies with business interests. In the StarLink affair, consumer groups successfully used the EPA’s registration rules and uncertainties about allergenicity to challenge the marketing of genetically modified foods and to obtain a large judgment in a class-action lawsuit.
¹⁷
This book presents other examples of the ways in which advocacy groups use questions of safety to address much broader social and political concerns.

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.

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

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 from failing to see this.”
²⁰

The application of the two-culture problem to safety issues also has a long history. In 1979, Philip Handler, then president of the National Academy of Sciences, said, “The
estimation
of risk is a scientific question—and, therefore, a legitimate activity of scientists in federal agencies, in universities and in the National Research Council. The
acceptability
of a given level of risk, however, is a political question to be determined in the political arena.”
²¹
In 1991, Edward Groth, a scientist at Consumers Union, explained that public policy choices lie at the heart of safety debates about food. “Each dispute has two main components,
factual
issues and
value
issues. . . . Factual questions include: What risks are involved? How big are they? Who is at risk? These are scientific questions. The central value question is: Given those facts, what should society
do?
”
²²
A more detailed examination of the two approaches to evaluating risks—called, for lack of better terms, science-based and value-based—helps to explain why food safety issues are so political.

Much of what we know about the ways in which people assess safety risks comes from studies by experts in risk communication, a field that deals with questions about how the public is—and should be—informed about matters of potential harm. To explain science-based approaches, risk communication researchers begin by examining how scientists think. Ideally, science begins with an observation. Rather than accepting an observation as a universal truth, scientists question its accuracy, interpretation, and relevance; develop theories to explain its significance; and design and conduct experiments to test those theories. The quality of scientific research depends not only on the question under investigation (some research questions are more interesting and important than others) and the care (“rigor”) with which studies are conducted, but also on the ability of the studies to eliminate (“control for”) all possible causes of the observation other than the one being tested. Scientific methods also extend beyond observations to suggest probable causes, to exclude irrelevant causes (“confounding variables”), and to estimate the probability that a particular cause is the true reason for the observation of interest.

The point here is that probability is not the same as proof. Biological experiments in humans are complicated by genetic variation and behavioral differences, and study results nearly always depend on probabilities and statistics. This means that they are subject to
interpretation
and, therefore, to perception, opinion, and judgment. Scientists tend to minimize the subjective nature of interpretation and to view knowledge gained through the testing of theories as objective, accurate, evidence-based, hypothesis-driven, and rigorous. As one scientist who consults for the biotechnology industry explains, “The advantage of being a biologist comes not from what I know but from how I think. To me, the greatest value of scientific training is a proclivity for asking questions without being emotionally attached to a specific answer—a willingness to look objectively at data even if the facts contradict our preconceived notions.”
²³
Scientists who believe that such opinions are objective—and remain unaware of how self-interest might influence them—may well have trouble understanding why the “other culture” questions their impartiality.

In practice, a science-based approach to food safety is one that appears to focus exclusively on the characteristics of the risk itself: annual cases of illness, doctor’s visits, hospitalizations, deaths, costs to individuals and to society, the benefits of doing nothing about the risk, and the benefits and costs of risk reduction. From this perspective, risks are measurable and, therefore, “scientific” and “objective.” Researchers and federal officials evaluate potential hazards through a formal process of risk assessment that involves identifying the hazard, characterizing it, determining its degree of exposure in the population, and calculating the balance of risk to benefit and cost.
²⁴

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

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