ABSTRACT
Food scares are the order of the day: salmonella in eggs and chickens, scrapie in lamb, BSE in beef and beef products, pesticide residues in fruit and vegetables, hormone-disrupting chemicals in baby milk-the list is far from complete, indicating merely the range of food hazards that have arisen in the UK since 1988. The increasing incidence of these health threats from food is indisputable; the scale of the problem impressive. Each one of these hazards is associated with the industrial production of food on farms and in the chemistry ‘kitchens’ of large corporations. Each one is invisible. All of them are time-space distantiated, thus difficult to tie down, establish causal connections, secure scientific certainty. Helplessness marks the reactions of the public, food producers, politicians, and scientists. The bewilderment, as I show in Chapter 5 with reference to BSE, is of course expressed very differently in each of these social spheres: politicians instigating one panic measure after the other; scientists disagreeing with each other and contradicting themselves in public; food producers worrying about their livelihoods, anxiously awaiting guidance and financial safety nets; consumers turning cynical or resigned, assigning blame to everyone but themselves and oscillating between abstinence from meat eating, opportunity buying and shutting the problem out altogether, wishing that it would go away, hoping that the timebomb was ticking in someone else’s body.
