Resilience in the US red meat industry: the roles of food safety policy

Abstract

We use the case of red meat food safety to illustrate the need to problematize policy. Overtime, there have been numerous red meat scandals and scares. We show that the statutes and regulations that arose out of these events provided the industry with a means of demonstrating safety, facilitating large-scale trade, legitimizing conventional production, and limiting interference into its practices. They also created systemic fragility, as evidenced by many recent events, and hindered the development of an alternative, small-scale sector. Thus, the accumulated rules help to structure the sector, create superficial resilience, and are used in place of an actual policy governing safety. We call for rigorous attention to not only food safety, but also the role and effect of agrifood statutes and regulations in general, and engagement in policy more broadly.

Consumers' perceptions of food risk management quality: Chinese and Korean evaluations

“…in order to maintain the consumer trust, a coherent system of risk regulation may need to entail the social and political considerations and should be based on the negotiation and deliberation with the civil society. A comprehensive food safety policy may need to consider and incorporate socially significant concerns about the agri-food system-justice, equity, democracy and transparency, sovereignty and sustainability, responsibility and accountability (Worosz et al 2008); and capture the structural complexities of the agri-food system, while embodying the moral and cultural values that matter most (Burstein 1991;Thonney and Bisogni 1991).…”

“…over the last 20 years, the issues surrounding food and health have received am increasing public attention, in the policy, consumer and media arenas (Kramer 1990;Sparks and Shepherd 1994;hughes 1995;Kafka and von Alvensleben 1998;Micklitz 2000;Meijboom et al 2006;Worosz et al 2008). one of the major drivers of the public policy interest in this area is an increase in the consumer's concern that is attributable to health and safety related causes.…”

Meeting Consumer Concerns for Food Safety in South Korea: The Importance of Food Safety and Ethics in a Globalizing Market

“…When BSE was detected in the U.S. in 2003, the USDA downplayed the threat and rejected calls for more extensive testing due to the industry pressures, which may have led to loss of trust from the import countries such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. Worosz et al (2008) state that the insufficiency of the U.S. food safety system, as it is composed of dozens of statues and countless regulations, but there is no systematic, comprehensive policy on food safety. They describe the U.S. system as ad hoc, reactive, unsystematic, and often derivative of other policies and it has largely been designed in accordance with dominant economic policies-facilitating international trade.…”

“…They describe the U.S. system as ad hoc, reactive, unsystematic, and often derivative of other policies and it has largely been designed in accordance with dominant economic policies-facilitating international trade. In particular, the red meat industry in the U.S., in alliance with government, has been able to mask its fragility through rule creation and compliance, and to convince the public that the agrifood system is resilient; however, the type of resilience created is shallow (Worosz et al 2008). Thus, short-term political pressures do not always influence policies for the better and lead to ad hoc regulatory interventions that focus on and stigmatize new techniques, and that duplicate existing systems and lead to needless bureaucracy and the occasional trade dispute (Johnston 1999).…”

Risk, anti-reflexivity, and ethical neutralization in industrial food processing

“…While some scholars have convincingly argued that current efforts to address food safety will remain inadequate (Juska et al 2003;Dunn 2007), we will examine the specific organizational flaws that render current approaches ineffective. Other work has critiqued responses to outbreaks and food safety governance (Konefal et al 2005;Worosz et al 2008a;DeLind and Howard 2008;Tanaka 2008); however, we will explore how powerful actors resist efforts to better address food safety and will apply new concepts to help explain their continued success. While a growing number of US consumers identify processing plants as a major source of food safety problems (Roseman et al 2005), processing designs remain largely unchanged.…”