ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how metrics and standards deployed by states to govern food systems are negotiated and challenged by citizens. In conditions of risk and uncertainty, measures are intended to guide the activities of producers and consumers, categorizing practices and substances as safe or unsafe, good or harmful, and ensuring the maintenance of a stable and predictable pattern of life. In post-2011 Japan, government efforts to establish safe levels of radiation in food can be seen to participate in this stabilization, which both reproduces the existing economy and the political system in the face of a radical participant: the radionuclide. Yet, people are not passive participants in their governance, and have established their own ways of navigating food safety in opposition to government standards. In this chapter, we suggest that those who must live by the numbers may also negotiate their relationship with, and define themselves against, these values. In this way, numbers can be seen to instigate dissent, distinction and deliberation, as participants strive to establish their authenticity outside reductionist parameters. Taking an assemblage approach to state defined safe radiation levels in Japan, this chapter discusses the ways that numbers are actively engaged with to create and vocalize a more emancipatory political subjectivity through the assemblage of deliberative publics.
