ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the more well-known food scares to gain a deeper understanding about the common features that link all the food 'crises' together. Understanding the root causes of food contamination is instructive, as the links to illness and death create, to say the least, an unpredictable and ambivalent relationship between eaters and their food. The chapter focuses on insights from the green neo-Marxist perspective and research in Actor Network theory (ANT). Returning to the beginning of the chapter and the engagement with the concept of food as actor, the translation of the circumstances surrounding the disease is a critical point. Bird flu is the scandals that have played out time and again with other sectors of the transnational food industry, from mad cow disease to Star Link maize. The Avian Flu threatened pandemic reveals fascinating tensions between the global poultry trade and small-scale family farmers around the world.
