Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (3 page)

I hope that
Safe Food
will interest consumer advocates, students, college and university instructors, people who work for food companies, those employed in government agencies, and everyone else who is concerned
about matters of food, nutrition, health, international trade, and, in these difficult times, “homeland security.” If, as I argue, food safety is as much a matter of politics as it is of science, then food safety problems require political solutions. My deepest hope for the book is that it will encourage readers to become more active in the political process.

THE GENESIS OF THIS BOOK LIES WITH WARREN BELASCO, JOAN
Gussow, and Sheldon Margen, who read the manuscript of
Food Politics
and argued that the food safety material would work better as a separate entity. My dear sponsor at the University of California Press, Stan Holwitz, agreed to take on this second project. The formidable editor John Bergez guided the manuscript reconstruction; I could not have a better writing teacher. Extraordinarily generous friends, colleagues, and relatives read and commented on specific chapters or sections of the manuscript at various stages of preparation: Philip Benfey, Jennifer Berg, Elinor Blake, Lee Compton, Laramie Dennis, Beth Dixon, Carol Tucker Foreman, Jeffrey Fox, Mark Furstenberg, Janna Howley, Kristie Lancaster, Trish Lobenfeld, Mimi Martin, Margaret Mellon, Richard Novick, Domingo Piñero, Robert Moss, and Fred Tripp. I am greatly indebted to Joanne Csete, Ellen Fried, and Rebecca Nestle, who read the
entire
draft of the book—acts of courage that extended well beyond the demands of friendship, collegiality, and filial affection.

Many people provided information or documents to which I might not otherwise have had access: James Behnke, Jennifer Cohen, Dennis Dalton, Caroline Smith DeWaal, Carol Tucker Foreman, Rebecca Gold-burg, Karen Heisler, Michael Jacobson, James Liebman, Charles Margulies, Robert Marshak, George Pillsbury, Sarah Pillsbury, Krishnendu Ray, Michael Taylor, Catherine Woteki, Annette Yonke, and Lisa Young. For several years, Christine McCullum has been forwarding information on biotechnology gleaned from the Internet, carefully filtered to include just what I most needed to know. Kristie Lancaster, Domingo Piñero, and
Sheldon Watts graciously dropped whatever they were doing to help me deal with computer emergencies. Rob Kaufelt (Murray’s Cheese) and Peter Kindel (Artisanal) asked questions about cheese, and Sara Firebaugh helped answer them. I also thank all the other contributors of information and materials who preferred to remain anonymous. Finally, I “borrowed” the title of this book from
Safe Food: Eating Wisely in a Risky World
(Living Planet Press, 1991, but now sadly out of print), for which I thank Michael Jacobson and his colleagues at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

At a particularly difficult moment during the manuscript revision, Margaret Mellon provided inspiration. For encouragement throughout I am grateful to my agent, Lydia Wills; to Wendel Brunner, Loma Flowers, Ruth Rosen, JoAnn Silverstein, and Sam Silverstein; to my Moss cousins, and to my children and their partners: Rebecca Nestle and Michael Suenkel, and Charles Nestle and Lidia Lustig. I owe special thanks to my extraordinary colleagues in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU for their forbearance and assistance and review of the manuscript at every stage of preparation, particularly to Alyce Conrad for designing several of the more complicated illustrations, Fred Tripp for his daily clipping service to the
Wall Street Journal
, Ellen Fried for expert research assistance and review of the manuscript at every stage of preparation, and Jessica Fischetti and Kelli Ranieri for office life support. Dean Ann Marcus granted sabbatical leave, and Deans LaRue Allen, Gabriel Carras, and Thomas James granted much else in the way of encouragement. I recognize and very much appreciate the unusual level of care and attention given to
Safe Food
by the production and design teams at the University of California Press and BookMatters. Preparation of this book was supported in part by research development grants from New York University and its Steinhardt School.

Additional abbreviations are defined in the Notes.

FOOD SAFETY IS A MATTER OF INTENSE PUBLIC CONCERN, AND
for good reason. Food “poisonings,” some causing death, raise alarm not only about the food served in restaurants and fast-food outlets but also about the food bought in supermarkets. The introduction in the 1990s of genetically modified foods—immediately dubbed “Franken-foods”—only added to the general sense of unease. Finally, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon further heightened such concerns by exposing the vulnerability of food and water supplies to food bioterrorism.

Discussions of food safety in the media and elsewhere tend to focus on scientific aspects: the number of illnesses or deaths, the level of risk, or the probability that a food might cause harm. Such discussions overlook a central fact: food safety is a highly political issue. Preventing food-borne illness involves much more than washing hands or cooking foods to higher temperatures. It involves the interests of huge and powerful industries that use every means at their disposal to maximize income and reduce expenses, whether or not these means are in the interest of public health. Like other businesses, food businesses put the interests of stockholders first. Because food is produced, processed, distributed, sold, and cooked before it is eaten, its safety is a shared responsibility, meaning that blame also can be shared. Any one company in the food chain can deny responsibility and pass accountability along to another. Furthermore, food companies can and do use their considerable financial power to influence government regulations that might affect balance sheets, again whether or not such influence is in the public interest. Although consumer groups
concerned about food safety also participate in these political processes, they rarely have equivalent resources or the ability to gain similar levels of attention. In this book, we will see how conflicts between business and consumer interests involve politics in three areas of food safety: foodborne illness, food biotechnology, and food bioterrorism.

To illustrate the many ways in which food safety is as much a matter of politics as it is of science, I begin this book with a familiar example: the front-page disclosure late in 2000 that a prohibited variety of genetically engineered corn—StarLink—had turned up in supermarket taco shells. The StarLink example reveals many of the themes that recur throughout this book and sets the stage for the rest of our discussion.

Our story opens on September 18, 2000, with a report from the
Washington Post
: a group called Genetically Engineered Food Alert discovered genetic traces of StarLink corn in taco shells made by Taco Bell. StarLink was not supposed to be in the human food supply. Two years earlier, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) allowed Aventis CropScience, the owner of the genetic engineering technology for this corn, to grow StarLink—but only for animal feed. The EPA wanted Aventis to prove that StarLink corn would not cause allergic reactions before allowing it in the human food supply. If supermarket foods contained StarLink, something had gone wrong with the regulatory system.

As events unfolded, the StarLink affair displayed all the hallmarks of classic political scandals: new information dribbling out one fragment at a time, lies, cover-ups, and finger-pointing. During the next year or so, international trading partners refused to buy U.S. corn, farmers hesitated to plant genetically modified corn varieties, and Canada spent nearly a million dollars to keep StarLink out of its food supply. Aventis took StarLink off the market, sold off its agricultural division, and owed millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements. Anyone following these events could see that genetically modified corn not only pervaded the U.S. food supply but also grew in places where it was not supposed to be—in fields of conventional corn, organically grown corn, and native corn grown in remote regions of Mexico. The StarLink affair had political consequences.

The StarLink affair also had political causes. For reasons of politics, federal regulatory agencies operate under policies designed to promote the food biotechnology industry, not to obstruct it with demands for extensive safety testing before products get into the food supply or for labeling
of these products. In a different regulatory environment, the fact that the key protein in StarLink corn appeared similar to other proteins known to cause allergic reactions (allergenic proteins, or allergens) might have forced Aventis to find out whether this corn caused allergic reactions before allowing it anywhere near the food supply. Instead, the EPA authorized StarLink corn to be grown as food for animals. EPA officials reasoned that animals would be likely to digest the protein and destroy its function; they did not think the intact protein would get into meat. In splitting its decision, however, the EPA assumed that corn grown for animal feed could be segregated—kept separate—from corn intended for human consumption. As later chapters explain, the EPA should have known better, and its decision to permit StarLink to be grown at all suggested that the agency was partial to the interests of Aventis. Because this history is complicated,
table 1
provides a chronological outline of the more important events.
¹

To understand why the safety of a genetically engineered corn might be political, we must look back to the early 1990s, when federal agencies ruled that such crops did not raise any special safety considerations and permitted them to be widely grown (
chapter 7
discusses these decisions in some detail). Among the more successful of such crops is corn engineered to contain a gene from a species of common soil bacteria,
Bacillus thuringiensis
(
Bt
). The
Bt
gene provides the information needed to make a crystalline protein that is toxic to insect pests. Organic farmers have used the
Bt
protein toxin for decades in the form of a spray that washes off in the rain and decomposes rapidly. Agricultural biotechnologists thought the
Bt
toxin might work even better if it could be genetically engineered into the tissues of the plant. In the mid-1990s, a Belgian firm, Plant Genetic Systems, developed the trademarked StarLink variety of corn. StarLink contains the gene for a novel form of the
Bt
toxin—called Cry9C (for crystalline protein #9C)—that is especially effective against moths, corn borers, bollworms, cutworms, and other destructive insects in their larval stages.
²