UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 19

first century, however, a growing and diverse segment of the U.S. population, from liberal to libertarian,
suburban soccer moms to rural survivalists, aging hippies to young urban elites, didn't share the food
industry's confidence.
Prompted by the very real failings of a scientific regulatory system effectively controlled by powerful
corporations, they sought alternative ways of knowing that their food was safe. Rather than rely on form-
al procedures and government audits, they wanted to know more intimately where their food came from.
“People around here like farmers' markets,” the past director of my local farmers' market told a pub-
lic gathering, “because you never know what those Third World people are putting in imported food.”
Less xenophobically, my food politics students trust the meat from Walla Walla's organic grass-fed beef
producer, not because they've checked the ranch's paperwork, but because they've gotten to know the
owner and toured the operation.
I find this logic convincing and appealing, but what does it leave out? Among other gaps, reducing
food safety to consumer-owner relations ignores a whole world of food chain workers—the people who,
in most cases, actually grow, pick, process, and pack our food. This, despite the fact that the intense sys-
tematic pressures to cut corners that lead to contaminated food are often inseparable from the forces that
make food chain work the most exploited and dangerous sector of the U.S. economy. As Eric Schlosser
argues in Fast Food Nation , worker safety concerns are food safety concerns and vice versa. 60 The al-
ternative food movement has had a hard time grappling with this idea. When we seek out “where our
food comes from,” we want to see a smiling farm-owning family, not a poor immigrant labor force. As
Slow Food USA president Josh Viertel acknowledged in 2009, “Historically this movement has focused
on the environment, health and preserving small farms. But we've completely missed the boat when it
comes to work.” 61
Some segments of the diverse alternative food movement have, in fact, found ways to incorporate
labor into their agrarian vision of good food. Others at least pay lip service to workers, but hope that a
new system of local farms would make them redundant. In the worst cases, however, food safety con-
cerns react with racism and xenophobia to enflame hatred. As in the case of my local farmers' market
director, it is sometimes hard to separate food safety concerns from fear of strangers. Noted raw milk
advocate Dr. William Campbell Douglass, for example, issued a widely cited statement in 2008 arguing
that dirty illegal immigrant food chain workers were making Americans sick, infecting the country's
sustenance with diseases ranging from tuberculosis to leprosy to STDs. That these diseases are not typ-
ically spread through food didn't matter. Douglass had touched a deep chord in American history. As so-
ciologists Lourdes Gouveia and Arunas Juska discovered, well-meaning activism against contaminated
meat in the 1990s often had the unintended side effect of fueling fear of “dirty” immigrant meatpack-
ers. 62
Food purity discourses may achieve wide-ranging improvements in the health and security of a
defined population (typically wealthy white consumers), but they are not innocent. They structure the
world of life into comparable ranks and actionable hierarchies, safeguarding privileged spheres while
targeting outliers as enemies. There is nothing particularly wrong with this on a certain level—who
mourns the elimination of typhus from milk? What becomes clear from the story of bread, however,
is that fears of threat to the social body don't remain neatly moored in purely alimentary realms. They
overflow, combine with larger social anxieties, and reinforce other kinds of exclusion and distract from
root causes.
Perhaps what is needed in the face of this is a new model of food safety—one that doesn't just flip
the old model around, privileging the dream of small-scale producers over large-scale, raw over pas-
teurized, while retaining the same underlying architecture of purity and contagion. We need a vision of