Reconceiving Danger: Molecularizing Meat Inspection

• In Event: Governing Food - I

Abstract

The US meat inspection system is increasingly structured around a molecular vision of food safety, management, and politics. 25 years ago, the Food Safety Inspection Service of the USDA began to shift from older organoleptic inspection standards – based on sight, smell, and touch – to newer standards based on scientifically validated process controls and audit. This shift accompanies a change in vision from wholesomeness to microbiological safety.

Molecularization in food governance is literal, in the use of micro-assays and whole genome sequencing, but also figurative in the shift to frames of surveillance and intervention that are micro, hidden, and require microbiological and technical expertise and mediation extending beyond the senses.

A number of scholars have pointed to the molecularization of politics as a mode of changing governmentalities of modern life. Meat governance is no exception. This shift in vision has facilitated a new regime of formal governance, but is also tied up with broader struggles over what we govern when we govern food.

This talk maps out a variety of changes in the government of meat that accompany this shift in vision from sense to process. What is governed differently? Meat processors and their processes, meat inspectors, microbes (and our relation to them), workers, consumer expectations and practices, risks and dangers, information, systems of trust, markets, animals, and, of course, meat itself.

Author

• Saul Halfon, Virginia Tech