Making Food Safety an Issue: Internationalized Food Politics and French Public Health from the 1870s to the Present

Abstract

Food safety is an ever more conflictive issue receiving media attention. “The increased activity of interest groups, the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy and changes in the retail economy have combined to transform [a relatively closed] food policy community into an issue network”. This account of recent changes lacks the historical dimension that might endow it with meaning. It is hardly appropriate to describe the current situation as a reawakening after a long slumber. In France at least, complaints about food safety voiced in numerous newspaper articles echo enduring concerns and a permanent sense of alarm. In 1957, Demain ran a catalogue of food scares: industrial bread causing eczema; wine adulterated with sulphur anhydride (for safe transportation); eggs and milk feared by doctors to be toxic (because chickens were being fed with chemicals or fish, and cattle with ground up rubbish); and filthy conditions on cattle and poultry farms. Much the same sort of list could have been drawn up early in the century during meetings of the Société Scientifique d'Hygiène Alimentaire (created in 1904), or run in the press following passage of the 1905 Food Adulteration Act, or printed in popular pamphlets such as Dr Raffray's Le péril alimentaire (1912). As the Common Market took shape in the 1960s, repeated articles in the daily newspapers relentlessly focused on the issue of food and public health. In France, arguments were continually framed in the language of the 1905 act.