Food Safety and Expertise

Trichinosis led to a ban on the importation of American cured meats in several European countries, including France, throughout the 1880s. Although members of the scientific community proposed contradictory hypotheses on the stability and reliability of epidemiological knowledge, history shows us that scientific uncertainty concerning food safety is more often the rule than the exception. The result is reinforced by the increasingly common ground between science and economic activity (scientific farming, feeding processes, food conservation, etc.) on the one hand, and between science and state activity on the other (expertise). The trichinosis crisis would have been impossible without the unstable nature of the markets and without the rise of the welfare state in a majority of European countries. This is why the solutions proposed were either a total ban or the establishment of a system of controls

Animal welfare · Biology · Development economics · Economics · Economy · Food safety · Political science · Scientific evidence · State (computer science) · Trichinosis · Ecology · Food Science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History of Science and Medicine · Medicine