How Is Food Political? Market, State, and Knowledge - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 17

quickly claimed that a black market was emerging in junk food, much like that in alco-
hol in areas of prohibition (Mallen 2014).
This sketch of a narrow food consumption issue illustrates elements of importance
in understanding interactions among food, politics, and society that run through
the Handbook . We noted that interests are mediated by both knowledge and institu-
tional structure. We saw how consumer behavior in markets prompted state inter-
vention; necessary conditions for intervention included settled nutritional knowledge
and institutional commitment to a public interest. Yet the mechanism for alleviat-
ing a public bad turned out to be markets—raising prices of sugary things to damp
consumption. The parallel to a carbon tax in the context of new knowledge about
global warming is readily apparent. As with climate change, transnational advocacy
networks increasingly impinge on national decisions of this kind; in Mexico, social
movement interests coincided with the state's logic of public welfare. Convergence of
this kind anchors one end of the food politics spectrum. At the other end of the spec-
trum are spheres of food politics where knowledge and interests diverge to polarized
positions.38 The perfect storm of global food politics illustrates with special clarity the
importance of these factors merging the three fundamental questions into one con-
flict: GMOs.
The Perfect Storm: GMOs
The most intense controversies around food now center on genetic engineering.
Conflicts extend beyond technology of plant breeding per se: i.e., the “ how ” of pro-
duction. Genetic engineering in applications other than food and agriculture raises
no special mobilizations or contentious politics. In pharmaceuticals, medicine, and
industrial applications, recombinant DNA technology has been widely accepted as
providing useful tools; in agriculture, products using these same tools have been
coded as producing “GMOs,” evoking almost universally an aura of unique risk and
special regulation (Ho 2000; McHughen 2002). Agricultural biotechnology pivots on
this framing to a degree matched by few other contentions. The most striking confir-
mation of this proposition is the fact that genetic engineering is controversial only
in crop production and nowhere else (Herring 2008). Protagonists evoke alternative
ideas of risk, uncertainty, and unsettled science. Richard Lewontin (2001) wrote in
“Genes in the Food!”:
The introduction of methods of genetic engineering into agriculture has caused a
public reaction in Europe and North America that is unequaled in the history of
technology. Not even the disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were suffi-
cient to produce such heavy and effective political pressure to prohibit or further
regulate a technology, despite the evident fact that uncontained radioactivity has
caused the sickness and death of very large numbers of people, while the dangers of
genetically engineered food remain hypothetical.