Food, Science, Policy and Regulation in the Twentieth Century

International and Comparative Perspectives

Jim Phillips, David F. Smith, Jim Phillips, David F. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135128609
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

This highly topical book offers a comprehensive study of the interaction of food, politics and science over the last hundred years. A range of important case studies, from pasteurisation in Britain to the E coli outbreak offers new material for those interested in science policy and the role of expertise in modern political culture.

1 Food policy and regulation: a multiplicity of actors and experts
David F. Smith and Jim Phillips

The world of food policy making and regulation is very complex. It is populated by a very wide range of actors, broadly classifiable into producers, consumers, and intermediaries, many of them playing more than one role. Relationships between actors are sometimes largely economic, as, for example, in the wholesaler — retailer link in the food chain. A wide variety of different dimensions are of greater importance at other points, for instance, in the provision of food by parents for their children. As every parent knows, for a child the rejection of food offered plays an important role in the development of personal autonomy and character: food likes and dislikes play an important role in the construction of personal identities.¹ In every food exchange, however, confidence in, and suspicions about the food in question, may condition the relationship, and in this context, expertise may play a role in negotiations about food quality, and in providing reassurance. This is true at every level, even within the family (‘look daddy's eating up his vegetables!’). But experts (including daddies) can only play an effective role when consensus exists among the parties concerned as to the validity and relevance of their expertise. Everyone eats, and numerous actors, including consumers, by virtue of their position, training or experience, lay permanent or strategic claim to expertise. It is often said by food reformers, frustrated by the resistance of the population to their prescriptions, that everyone thinks that they are an expert on their own diet: they know what they like and think they know what is best to eat for their personal well being. But deference to the views of others is also common. Religious, scientific, medical, or other authorities may be cited as justification for the food preferences, habits, rituals, regimes and dietary restrictions that form aspects of human culture everywhere. Within the interactions and negotiations that constitute more formal food policy making and regulation, actors also alternatively claim or deny expertise. At different times food manufacturers, politicians, and administrators may claim expertise or may defer to others, such as scientists or the public. Scientists may sometimes claim or accept the attribution of very broad expertise; at other times they will define their area of expertise very precisely. While the boundaries of the expertise claimed by actors vary over time, conflicts between experts, as this book demonstrates, seems so widespread in food policy making and regulation that they might fairly be described as endemic.

The complexity of food policy making and regulation reflects the complexity of, and the division of labour within, the modern food system. The economic sectors involved include agriculture, transport, food processing, wholesaling, retailing, advertising, and catering. Food-related activity in Western countries is now an important aspect of the leisure, entertainment and publishing industries, with best-seller lists frequently including cookbooks and other food-related titles. For many, food tourism is one of the most important constituents of their annual foreign holiday. Between holidays, millions of modern westerners regularly consume food in exotic or ‘ethnic’ restaurants. Equal numbers find themselves entertained by the methods, ingredients and menus demonstrated in popular cooking programmes on television. The diversity of the constituents of recipes in media cookery underlines the fact that the food system is now global. But the international food trade is not just a matter of satisfying the sophisticated tastes of Europeans and Americans. Through international markets in food commodities, the viability and survival of the agricultural and food industries in countries and regions can be influenced by innovations and other changes on the opposite side of the world. Such changes can be matters of economic and even actual life and death for some inhabitants of the planet.

Historical case studies

The rationale for this collection of essays is the premise that understanding the modern food system and the problems surrounding it may be enhanced by a greater appreciation of its historical development. This book contributes to that understanding by exploring the history of aspects of food policy making and regulation, with emphasis upon the role of expertise, both scientific and more generally defined. The food system is so complex that this historical enterprise must be multi-faceted, multi-dimensional and multi-disciplinary. Economics, political science, geography, sociology, media studies and other disciplines all have much to offer in this area. Theoretical ideas derived from such disciplines may provide useful frameworks for organising historical studies.² But the kind of empirical historical case studies that comprise the contents of this book also have a special contribution to make, especially at this early stage of the development of studies in the history of food policy making and regulation. The analyses presented in these chapters provide accounts, based on archival and other primary source-based research, of the nature of the activities constituting food policy making and regulation. They provide some of the evidence upon which ‘theory’ of food policy and regulation may be constructed and against which such theory must be tested. Although most of the case studies in this book do not devote space to explicit discussion of such theory, all contributors have clearly been influenced by developments in the sociology of science over recent decades. None of the authors suppose that the existence of scientific knowledge about food provides a sufficient condition for the construction and implementation of food policy. Most of the analyses are explicitly or implicitly informed by social constructionism: the notion that the production, as well as the application of scientific knowledge of food cannot be understood without reference to the social interests surrounding and permeating the process.³

There is one exception to the general lack of any detailed discussion of theory: Chapter 6, by Harmke Kamminga, on popularisation of vitamins prior to the Second World War. She frames her account within a discussion of Ludwik Fleck's theories of the popularisation of science, which were published during the period she considers. Her use of Fleck demonstrates that many of the elements of modern sociology of science were present in this continental theoretical tradition during the 1930s. Kamminga focuses upon the role that vitamins played in the publications of a variety of scientists, science writers, radical intellectuals and activists from Britain, Germany and the United States during the inter-war period. She considers their works aimed at readerships outside the specialised research communities. She points out that as these actors deployed scientific knowledge of nutrition in more popular arenas, the ‘facts’ of nutrition, which in some cases were still very controversial in the technical journals, were ‘hardened’. Kamminga also shows that the popular writings on vitamins performed a variety of functions. The aim of some authors was to help consolidate the field and status of vitamin research within biomedical research. Other authors attempted to deploy knowledge of vitamins in the pursuit of a variety of political agendas. The processes that Kamminga describes are clearly at play in many of the episodes described in this book. These include: the enlistment of a wide range of organisations in support of the bovine tuberculosis campaign of the People's League of Health described by Margaret Barnett in Chapter 5; the deployment of vitamin supplementation in support of America's war effort, discussed by Rima Apple in Chapter 9; and the widespread acceptance of the paramount nutritional importance of the ‘protein gap’ between developed and less developed countries during the 1950s to the early 1970s, discussed by Josh Ruxin in Chapter 10.

This volume has been developed partly as the result of a conference held at the University of Aberdeen in April 1999. The notion of ‘popularisation’ was one of the threads that ran through the discussion and the programme included a screening of the documentary film The World is Rich (1947) which was introduced by Tim Boon, of the Science Museum. Boon argued that the film, which features the World Food Plan of nutritionist John Boyd Orr, first director of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, should not be seen as an uncomplicated act of popularisation, but as a highly mediated product of prior agreement between its creators, including the director, Paul Rotha, and Orr. Kelly Loughlin, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in commenting on the film and reflecting upon the uses of scientific knowledge in the advancement of a wide range of interests, suggested, as an alternative to ‘popularisation’, the notion of active strategic ‘mobilisation’ of science. Clearly, the theoretical tools that may be brought to bear upon the complex history of food policy making and regulation are many and varied. It is not possible, within the confines of an introductory chapter such as this one, to attempt any new theoretical synthesis. This synthesis would need to draw upon a wide range of literatures including those dealing with broader questions of policy making and other areas of policy making in modern societies.⁴ For this reason our remarks will be largely confined to drawing out similarities between and special features of the chapters, in the process highlighting features which must be taken into account in any more theoretical enterprise. This emphasis will also raise aspects of importance to any participant or observer who seeks a practical understanding of the processes of food policy making and regulation today.

On experts in policy making and their organisation

The qualifications of experts who staff and provide external advice to, and otherwise influence, departments of national governments and international agencies that deal with food issues, are many and varied. This book forms a sequel to Nutrition in Britain, edited by David Smith, which was about the ‘processes by which scientists, doctors, activists and politicians have sought to generate, modify, and apply nutritional knowledge, policies and practices — processes which have involved the construction, modification, and breaking of alliances between individuals, groups, and institutions’.⁵ As well as focusing more on countries other than Britain, and on international issues, the current volume also combines interests in the role of science and scientists in policy making, with the broader interests of the second editor, Jim Phillips. These interests are represented by his recently published volume, co-authored with Michael French, Cheated Not Poisoned? Food Regulation in the United Kingdom, 1875–1938, which examines the social, economic and business context of policy development and enforcement.⁶ While Nutrition in Britain concentrated substantially upon questions of interactions between nutrition experts of various descriptions and others, the current volume gives greater consideration to issues of food composition and safety and covers the provision and regulation of food in a broader sense. This wider approach encompasses a broader definition and range of ‘expertise’ in the field of policy making than that featured in the previous volume. The ‘experts’ in the current volume are not only actors with a scientific training, but also include those with practical experience within the food system, along with journalists and other media agents. Food manufacturers and retailers are frequently accorded authority to make ‘objective’ judgements during policy making exercises, as shown by French and Phillips in Chapter 2, in their study of the proceedings of a British committee of inquiry on food standards during the 1930s, known as the Willis Committee. They show that actors such as industrialists may at times willingly take on the role of experts, while at other times preferring strategically to attribute expertise to others. Industrialists who are resistant to the imposition by government of compositional regulations may credit consumers, and particularly housewives, with the expertise to discriminate between good and bad products. A similar point is made in the concluding discussion of Chapter 14, where Hugh Pennington reflects upon the roles played by expert committees. He suggest that civil servants, who often lay claim to administrative expertise which allows them to identify the impracticalities of particular proposals, at other times may postpone action by deferring to the views of others: external experts must first be consulted before any action can take place.

The range of professional groups who become involved in food policy is wide, and includes chemists and medical personnel. Such experts may work directly for central government departments or international agencies, and may therefore be regarded as insiders in the policy making process, or may work in industry, or for local authorities, research institutes and universities. They may be members of professional groups that engage in occasional or sustained lobbying for changes in food policy and regulation. In the USA, as Suzanne Junod shows in Chapter 11, the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists played an important role in food policy during the early decades of the century.⁷ Similarly, French and Phillips show that in Britain, the chemists' organisation, the Society of Public Analysts, lobbied for the introduction of food compositional standards over a prolonged period. The medical profession is represented in Britain by the British Medical Association, but earlier the more specialised Society of Medical Officers of Health played an important role. In Chapter 13 Mark Bufton and Virginia Berridge reflect on the impact of reports produced in many countries by elite organisations of the medical profession in the 1960s and 1970s: these played an important role in the formation of consensus about the relationship between diet and heart disease.

Besides medical personnel, the professional groups involved in food policy making also include veterinarians. The role of the veterinary profession in food policy and regulation has, to date, received little attention, but several chapters in the current volume deal with aspects of their activities. These include Chapter 4 by Peter Koolmees, one of the few authors to have written about the history of veterinary public health.⁸ Koolmees discusses the history of the veterinary profession's role in meat inspection in The Netherlands, and compares it with the development of meat inspection in various European countries. He argues that the political economy of each country has played an important role in determining the relative success of the veterinary profession of that country in winning a role in food regulation. The role of veterinarians is also considered in Chapter 13 by Lesley Diack and her colleagues, in their discussion of the implementation of one of the recommendations of the enquiry into the Aberdeen typhoid outbreak of 1964. They show how the marginal position and the ambitions of this professional group in Britain interacted with rivalry between government departments to condition the response to the recommendation in question.

While professional associations participate in food policy making, organisations have also been established to present the corporate views of manufacturers in discussions with the state. Junod highlights the roles of such groups as the National Preservers' Association and the National Canners' Association in the USA before the Second World War. In Britain, as French and Phillips show, during the same period the Food Manufacturers' Federation and the Manufacturing Confectioners' Alliance participated in debates about pricing and made representations to the Willis Committee. Despite their evident and direct material stake in the subject, the industrialists' views were accorded far greater weight by the committee than those of the chemists, represented by the Society of Public Analysts: it was the chemists who were regarded as the people with an ‘axe to grind’. This is a reflection of the role often accorded to scientific experts in inter-war Britain, which made ...