Food Safety Standards, Scientific Knowledge, and the Moral Economy of Meatpacking

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PROJECT ABSTRACTSES 0240347"Food Safety Standards, Scientific Knowledge, and the Moral Economy of Meatpacking"Elizabeth Dunn, University of ColoradoIn July, 2002, the ConAgra meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado, recalled 19 million pounds of beef potentially contaminated with E.coli. Journalists wrote vivid prose about the stench of the feedlots and the horrifying conditions in the packing plant, but this was only one of many recent, widely publicized global meatpacking disasters. In recent years, thousands of cattle with Mad Cow disease have been destroyed; hundreds of thousands of sheep and pigs with Foot and Mouth disease have been slaughtered; and widespread discussion has arisen about meat irradiation, the labeling of organic meats, and the safety of meat imports. All of these controversies hinge on the creation and enforcement of standards for food production.But what exactly do standards regulate? The proposed research investigates standards not simply as technical rules but as aspects of a moral economy that governs industrial sectors, firms, and people (Thompson 1971, Busch 2000). How do national or global standards shape local places? The PI has developed a standards chain methodology to trace standards from their production in technical committees, through the global and national institutions that introduce and enforce them, down to the people who make their livelihoods from meat. This research will compare the deployment of scientific knowledge in two standards-writing bodies: Codex Alimentarius and the US Department of Agriculture. It will also examine how new regulations shape meat production in Poland and the United States and explore their effects on the people of two meatpacking towns: Greeley, Colorado, and Sanok, Poland.Standardization is a crucial means of governance in the world economy. Yet, we know very little about how the ostensibly objective and scientific knowledge employed in the organizations that produce standards are entwined with the locally specific interests of the people who, in producing food, are coerced or entrusted to use standards. How are the farmers, firms, and workers who produce and process food represented in the process of creating standards?Given the institutional constraints firms face, how do they respond to those standards? The stakes in standardization are not trivial: a miniscule change in a single standard might force smaller processors and farmers out of business (Gmyrek 2001), cost larger producers millions of dollars in lost revenue (Wilson and Otsuki 2001), or restructure sectors of the food system along industrial lines (Busch 1997, Flynn et. al. 1994).Investigating standards as elements of a moral economy means asking not only how they shape large-scale economies but also how they transform the micropractices of the workplace. How do people such as Poland's small-hold farmers or Greeley's immigrant meatpackers perceive and experience these global forms of regulation? What cultural resources do they use to modify, resist or circumvent regulation (Scott 1998)? By comparing Poland, which was shaped by state socialism, with the United States, which has faced consolidation of capitalist agribusiness, the research asks how standards interact with regimes of accumulation, or large- scale patterns of economic institutions, and the mode of social regulation, or the social norms, values, and habits that govern individuals, economic actions. The broader impacts of this research include contributions to the public debate over food safety (Turner 2001) and suggestions of ways to include underrepresented groups such as Polish farmers or Mexican immigrant workers in the standards-writing process. The research will be shared with standards producers in the hope that it will also introduce into public policy an awareness of the wider social impacts of standardization.