Cultural Politics of Food Safety - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 562

events and historical contexts ( events ). It is common to find accounts that assume that
food safety risks exist as scientifically objective facts and then seek to account for differ-
ent responses using one or more of these approaches. Policymakers typically attribute
consumer concerns to their ignorance, whereas the media often discuss national differ-
ences in culture (e.g., attitudes and values surrounding food, agriculture, and technol-
ogy). Many scholarly works highlight political struggles among stakeholders, cultural
differences (e.g., trust in authorities, attachment to traditional ways), events (e.g., food
scandals like BSE), or a combination of these (see, e.g., Gaskell, Thompson, and Allum
2002; Bonny 2003; Vogel and Lynch 2001; Vogel 2003; Schurman and Munro 2009;
Bernauer and Meins 2003; Maclachlan 2006). These factors all mattered to the cases at
hand, but our emphasis is on chronicling how products of genetically engineered crops
developed differently as a cultural category in different national settings. Furthermore,
we seek to understand how this development affected degrees and kinds of significance
attached to GM food's safety per se. This cultural politics approach sees the develop-
ment of the category itself not as self-evident or universally agreed to, but as the result
of dynamic processes, wherein various factors contributed, including those of the more
common approaches mentioned above.1 Rather than regarding culture to be static and
deterministic, as in purely culturalist approaches, we seek to find out how such change-
able cultural elements as boundaries, terms of debates, and symbolic meanings of GM
food developed in different national contexts.
France
The French government long considered agricultural application of rDNA technology
as a highly promising new area for the country's competitive edge in science, agricul-
ture, and industry. Over a short period in the late 1990s, however, it became a major
public issue that mobilized a variety of political actors, and the country's long-standing
pro-GMO policy quickly turned into a decidedly cautious one. In this politicization
of GM food, concerns about ecological risks preceded and facilitated the rise of food
safety concerns and other issues. The first key opposition to GM food came from envi-
ronmentalists, and the general policy reversal was first triggered by environmental risk
concerns. At the same time, the heightened public awareness about food safety that fol-
lowed a series of food crises like BSE also contributed to this initial politicization: envi-
ronmentalists began to effectively highlight food safety and consumer choice as areas of
contention, and consumer and farmer groups then became active in the opposition. This
development helped raise the general public awareness of GM food rapidly, expanding
the debates and the opposition. By the time alternative globalization activists joined the
opposition, the issue of GM food encompassed wider debates about democratic deci-
sion processes, the future of European agriculture, and French identity and ways of life.
In sum, food safety concerns in France constituted only one aspect of this mul-
tifaceted, multivocal issue from the beginning. Various framings of GM food