Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (26 page)
Read Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety Online
Authors: Marion Nestle
Tags: #Cooking & Food, #food, #Nonfiction, #Politics
SOURCE:
Some of these suggestions are adapted from Taylor MR.
Food Technology
2002;56(5):190–194.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, efforts to prevent microbial contamination of the food supply continue to be held hostage to industries obstructing intervention, agencies competing for scarce resources, inspectors defending obsolete job descriptions, courts defending obsolete laws, and a Congress more anxious to protect the sources of campaign contributions than the health of the public. While many food safety problems have improved since the era of
The Jungle
, the solution to others continues to face formidable political opposition.
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.
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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.
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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.
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 this is done). We call foods containing the new genes by a variety of equivalent terms:
transgenic, bioengineered, genetically engineered (GE)
,
genetically modified (GM), genetically
modified organisms (GMO)
, and, occasionally, the pejorative
Franken-foods
.
2
These chapters refer to such foods interchangeably as
genetically modified, genetically engineered
, and
transgenic
.
The speakers at the Tufts conference were intoning the mantra of the food biotechnology industry, the
theoretical
promise that its products will solve world food problems by creating a more abundant, more nutritious, and less expensive food supply. I emphasize theoretical because this promise is not yet realized; the industry is still in its infancy. The speakers were right to be concerned about public acceptance. The commercial products of food biotechnology have caused no end of controversy. In the United States, and particularly in Great Britain, people view the new foods with suspicion, often with dread and outrage. The results: boycotts, destruction of plantings (“ecoterrorism”), legal bans, and trade disputes. Such reactions reflect misgivings about the risks of technological manipulations of food, not only to human health, but also to the environment, to the world economy, and to society as a whole. They also reflect distrust of the motives of the food biotechnology industry and of the ability of government to regulate that industry. This sense of unease—specific for some, vague for others—translates most easily to a simple response: rejection. As people often tell me, “I don’t want any GM in my food.”
To industry officials and scientists who view risk through a science-based lens, statements like that are antiscientific and irrational. In the early 1990s, they characterized
any
criticism of food biotechnology as ignorant, irresponsible, hysterical, or—my favorite—troglodyte, and as a prominent symptom of a new psychiatric disorder, biotechnophobia.
3
They lamented that well-funded activist groups were deliberately “interweaving political, societal and emotional issues . . . to delay commercialization and increase costs by supporting political, non-science-based regulation, unnecessary testing, and labeling of foods.”
4
In that tradition, the Tufts conference speakers complained about the generous funding available to Greenpeace, another irony in light of the disparity between that group’s resources and those of the agricultural biotechnology industry.
From its inception, food biotechnology has raised political, societal, and emotional issues: What are the risks of genetically modified foods? What are their benefits? How are risks and benefits distributed? Who makes decisions about them? How will genetically modified foods affect local, national, and international food systems and
economies? How should the foods be regulated? Should they be labeled? And: Is it ethical to create such foods in the first place? The questions about risk can be answered scientifically, but the other questions are value-based and
social
. Because questions about ethics and other social matters threaten the very foundation of food biotechnology, the industry and its supporters tend to restrict discussion to questions of safety. From a science-based perspective, if genetically modified foods are safe, there is no sensible reason for regulating, labeling, or opposing them.
The focus on science, safety, and risk obscures the social issues, particularly those having to do with the distribution of economic benefits. Food biotechnology is a huge business, and huge profits are at stake. To survive, the industry must make products that farmers or the public will buy. Politics enters the picture because other stakeholders in the food system have different agendas and hold different values. Scientists want to work on challenging problems that might produce health or economic gains, and, as a necessary benefit, research funding. Government regulators want to ensure that foods are safe, but they also want to avoid congressional intervention and industry lawsuits. As consumers, we all want food that is safe (or safe enough), but many of us also are concerned about social issues. Food biotechnology is political because basic questions—Who benefits? Who decides? Who controls?—require societal resolution and cannot be decided solely by the methods of science.
The debates about food biotechnology are especially complicated because the science itself is so complicated. That most people cannot understand the science behind genetically modified foods is a given. But anyone, trained in science or not, can grasp whether democratic political processes are at work in making decisions about these foods. We will see how questions of democracy—and the lack of an institutional venue for debating the social implications of food biotechnology—underlie much of the distrust of the industry and its government regulators. The desire for democratic processes and the trust they inspire explain why the lack of labeling of genetically modified foods is such a critical point of debate. Labeling places the power to make decisions in the hands of consumers, not the industry.
Although the safety of genetically modified foods is an important issue, it is not the only one of interest. But because safety appears to be the only
legitimate
ground for criticism, it acts as a surrogate for
concerns about democratic processes and social implications. The StarLink corn affair is an example of the use of safety as a surrogate; the arguments focused on allergenicity (science), but the real issues had to do with the company’s control over the food supply and evasion of democratic processes of government oversight (social values). The politics of food biotechnology matter because the disputes shift attention away from the underlying issues. If, for example, the roots of world hunger lie in poverty, we should be debating options for redressing economic imbalances. If we want to meet the food needs of the twenty-first century, we ought to be considering a broad range of alternatives, among which biotechnology may or may not be the best. Social problems are manifestly difficult to address, as their causes are multiple and complex. It is understandable that we might find simple, “reductionist” approaches to such problems—like genetically engineering vitamins into rice—preferable to the messy business of political action to address world poverty.
This part of the book deals with how and why the safety of genetically modified foods became a surrogate for concerns about larger social issues.
5
In telling this story, these chapters continue many of the themes noted earlier: industry promotion of economic self-interest at the expense of health and safety, the industry’s political efforts to prevent imposition of regulatory controls and labeling requirements, the fragmentation and consequent weakness of government oversight, the imbalance in power between corporate and public interests, and the use of science as a rationale for self-interested actions.
The discussion of these themes begins in
chapter 5
with an introduction to the food biotechnology industry—its methods, promises, and realities. Much of the chapter is devoted to a discussion of the “poster child” for the benefits of genetically modified foods, Golden Rice, a rice bioengineered to contain beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A.
Chapter 6
evaluates the benefits claimed for genetically modified foods, as well as their safety risks: allergenicity, antibiotic resistance, and environmental impact. In
chapter 7
, I discuss the politics of government oversight of genetically modified foods and describe how the industry convinced federal regulatory agencies to use a strictly science-based approach to risk evaluation, thereby allowing companies to plant first,
then
deal with problems (rather than requiring premarket testing).
Chapter 8
focuses on the important societal issues that spark protests against genetically modified foods: consumer
choice at the marketplace (labeling), inequities in ownership of plant resources (intellectual property rights or “biopiracy”), the accidental movement of transgenes into conventional crops (“genetic pollution”), and corporate control of the food supply (globalization). Overall, these chapters provide an analysis of where the issues raised by food biotechnology stand today, and how industry, scientists, government, and the public might deal with the ongoing disputes about genetically modified foods.
PEDDLING DREAMS
PROMISES VERSUS REALITY
BIOTECHNOLOGY COMPANIES HAD BEEN WORKING ON AGRICUL
tural projects for 10 years or more when, in 1992, I received a last-minute invitation to talk about the labeling of genetically modified foods at a conference organized by Public Voice, a consumer advocacy group for food and health policy in Washington, DC. As a trained molecular biologist—though a long lapsed one—I was intrigued by the possibilities of the technology. I had not been following the field very closely and was puzzled about why an advocacy group might be concerned about labeling products that were still hypothetical. As it happened, I was not unprepared to address the question. For teaching purposes, I routinely collect scientific articles and newspaper clippings on nutrition topics, and I had accumulated a thick file on food biotechnology. The invitation provided an excuse to see what was in it.
