Bee Wilson on milk and food safety
Bee Wilson brings a historian’s eye to the problem of the adulteration of milk in China in an op-ed in the New York Times. It’s based on research she did for her most recent book, Swindled, which is a very readable and and well-researched introduction to food frauds in Europe and the United States over the past couple of hundred years.
(By the way, for those of you who don’t know Bee’s work, look out for her column in the Telegraph. Here’s a recent column on hospital food).
Food safety is something that is incredibly hard to ensure demanding constant vigilance. We’ll never be able to achieve total safety in food or in any other area of life. The question we all have to ask is how we balance increasing cost (which vigilance necessarily means) against safety. So how much are we willing to spend? How do we as societies deal with the fact that some of us are more averse to risk than others? All very difficult questions.
Thanks for the interesting links, Rachel.
Milk ‘fixing’ is also a problem here; one has to be very careful where the milk comes from, though it’s generally only water added.
Regulation of milk reminds me of Julie Guthman’s book on organic farming in California, in which she argues that the regulatory environment that has developed for organics has actually helped to move what were to be alternative agr. practices back into mainstream agribusiness – or to that effect.
Food regulation has both good and negative outcomes, the latter often neither forseen nor intended.
My experience in Africa and the Middle East suggests that – in areas where there is relatively little commercialization of food products and correspondingly high levels of family farms and local-level food processing – small and micro-enterprises specializing in food products (like cheeses, condiments, jams, smoked fish, etc) generally produce items that are quite ok (= ‘safe’) to eat. Here in Burundi, I rarely hesitate purchasing locally-processed foods that are sold in the market or in small alimentary shops.
Where these items seem to take a turn towards being potentially dangerous, appear linked to larger production / sales and-or producers not really being completely familiar with the processing technique.
Does that make some sense?
Lots of sense. Let me respond to three issues–all interlinked of course.
1. Fixing milk. This must be universal. Compared to, say, grains or roots, it’s so easy to do. Add a bit of water and your yield goes up. I fulminated as a child when my father forbade us to take cream from the top of the churns. He said he was supposed to sell whole milk and nothing else. In short, it’s very, very tempting to adulterate milk.
2. Safer on the small scale. Probably, yes. I don’t worry too much about buying artisanal sweets or jams or fried pork skin (chicharron).
I’m not sure that milk is not a special case. When I see the small dairies here that supply the small cheese makers I’m often shocked. I must try to get out and take a photo. Cows kept in filthy conditions and I am sure not properly cleaned up before milking.
3. Larger production and safety. Safety costs. In the history of technology it was a truism that the clean up following the meat packing scandals in Chicago resulted in the success of larger firms and the consolidation of the industry. The costs are at least three fold (1) the cost of testing itself (2) the cost of producing to standards and (3) the cost of reporting on all this.
It seems to me an unresolved problem for the virtuous food movement. They want small and they want safe. There’s a tension there.
What’s your experience in Burundi?
3.
I haven’t read Bee’s new book yet (but are looking forward to doing so).
Cookery books from the 19th century (especially the early to mid century) are often full of methods to detect adulteration of food stuffs, especially in milk and bread. In some cases cows milk is equated with poison, unless you actually see it come out of the cow itself. For this reason there were inner city cows in London where you could buy a glass of freshly produced milk.