Food Safety, Quality, and Ethics – A Post-normal Perspective

JEROME R. RAVETZ

FOOD SAFETY, QUALITY, AND ETHICS – A POST-NORMALPERSPECTIVE

(Accepted February 10, 2002)

ABSTRACT. I argue that the issues of food quality, in the most general sense includingpurity, safety, and ethics, can no longer be resolved through “normal” science and regula-tion. The reliance on reductionist science as the basis for policy and implementation hasshown itself to be inadequate. I use several borderline examples between drugs and foods,particularly coffee and sucrose, to show that “quality” is now a complex attribute. For inthose cases the substance is either a pure drug, or a bad food with drug-like properties;both are marketed as if they were foods. An example of the inadequacy of old ways ofthinking is obesity, whose causes are as yet outside the purview of medicine, while itseffects constitute an epidemic disease. The new drug/food syndrome needs a new sort ofscience, what we call “post-normal.” This is inquiry at the contested interfaces of scienceand policy; typically it deals with issues where facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakeshigh, and decisions urgent. With the perspective of post-normal science, we can betterunderstand some key issues. We see that “safety” is different from “risk,” being pragmatic,moral, and recursive. Also, we understand that an appropriate foundation for regulationand ethics is not so much “objectivity” as “awareness.” In an age when “consumers” arebecoming concerned “citizens,” the relevant science must become post-normal.

KEY WORDS: ethics, food safety, post-normal science, quality

INTRODUCTION: INSTRUCTIVE PARADOXES

I want to argue that the issues of food quality, in the most general senseincluding purity, safety, and ethics, can no longer be resolved through“normal” science and regulation. The reliance on reductionist science asthe basis for policy and implementation has shown itself to be inadequate.As we in Great Britain emerge from the latest of our ongoing series offood-related epidemics, there is a broad consensus for radical new thinkingabout food, its science and regulation, and its place in our culture. In intro-ducing my discussion of the post-normal approach, I will assume that thisrecent history is familiar to us all, and so I will refer to it rather than goingover it yet again. Instead, I will explore some paradoxical phenomena inthe food area. While paradoxes contribute less than scandals to our feelingsof self-righteousness, they do force us to ponder on our concepts and theirlimitations (Ravetz, 2001).

Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 15: 255–265, 2002.© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

256 JEROME R. RAVETZ

DRUGS AND FOODS

I would like us to consider the possibility that a large proportion of ourfood inhabits a sort of borderland between food and drugs. If so, then thetasks of ensuring safety and quality, and of maintaining ethics, require anenrichment of our traditional conceptions of regulation and of the relevantscience. Let me make it clear at the outset that I speak of enrichment ratherthan replacement. I believe that safety, quality, and ethics are real, althoughour grasp and management of them is conditioned by our complex envir-onment, with its technical, social, and cultural dimensions. In the limitingcases (which do occur on a large scale), people can really starve and bepoisoned. But before those limits are reached, the boundaries, and indeedthe definitions, of normality and pathology are to a significant extent nego-tiated. This is the essential difference between the post-normal and thepost-modern conceptions; for us, quality is real, however much it may becomplex, compromised, and corrupted.

To illustrate my theme, I would like us to consider a few examples ofsubstances that are in this borderland. Let’s start with coffee. In economicterms, this is one of the world’s most important foodstuffs, keepingeconomies afloat all over the Third World. But in what sense is coffeea food? To the best of our knowledge, it contributes nothing whatever tonutrition. It is, as we all know, a drug; or rather it is a convenient carrier forthe drug caffeine. It can be argued that this is a quite benign drug, bringinga modest pleasure at very low cost, and becoming harmful only in veryhigh doses. Yet coffee is marketed and regulated as just another food, inspite of its irrelevance to the processes of nutrition.

Let me try another example, perhaps more controversial: sucrose.Although this substance has some metabolic functions, it is not at all neces-sary for nutrition. All starches are turned into sugars instantly on ingestion,but sucrose is in many ways a very inferior sort of sugar for the body’suse. In addition to being a bad food, I would argue that in its way sucroseis also a drug. It destabilizes the body’s metabolism and produces adversereactions that call for more sucrose for their relief. I confess to a mildaddiction to marmalade. The combination of the citric acid hit with thesugar rush is quite sensational; in our kitchen an opened jar of marmaladeis soon emptied. So is sucrose just an unnecessary and harmful food, or isit rather a mild drug with long-term deleterious effects when taken as if afood? Certainly, when sucrose is taken in excess, it contributes strongly toobesity.

This last condition is another of those new policy-critical entities thatdefies scientific compartmentalization. On the one hand, obesity (nowincreasing rapidly and becoming endemic) is recognised as a medical

FOOD SAFETY, QUALITY, AND ETHICS 257

problem, for it leads to some quite well understood illnesses and diseases.But obesity itself is not a “disease;” and, in the UK at least, the standardtraining of doctors includes nothing whatever about nutrition or malnutri-tion. So the doctors are eventually brought in to solve a massive medicalproblem, about whose origins they are officially quite ignorant. Hencethere is no effective medical opposition to the junkfood pushers, inflictingsucrose, fats, and salt on their victims from the earliest age. Some UKgovernment agencies say boring sensible things about balanced diets;but there is no assistance to schools that wish to escape the junkfoodpromotions aimed at their pupils (Hart, 2001).

I hope I have shown that the simple distinction between food anddrugs is not tenable for policy purposes; some important areas lie on thecomplex and contested borderland between them. I believe these para-doxical examples establish my case that the quality, safety, and ethics offood are no longer straightforward problems for solution by science andregulation. It is no longer enough for food science to establish that inany given sample of food the good things are present and that the badthings are absent. What is “good” and what is “bad” depends partly on thecontext, and on the scale-level at which the judgment is being made. Mostnoticeably during our frequent epidemics in Britain, the relevant sciencebecomes post-normal. For it has fitted perfectly to the defining rubric:“facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent.”But even whenever broader questions of food policy are being discussed,we are faced with severe uncertainties and serious value-loading. Howproblems are defined, who defines them, and who regulates the regulators,are now questions that both provide the context for the scientific practiceof food quality and, more important, determine its shape. This is whatpost-normal science is all about.

AN APPROPRIATE SCIENCE FOR THE NEW DRUG/FOODSYNDROME

It is difficult for some to appreciate the nature of the changes that arerequired of science in the new post-normal age. Science, after all, isscience; facts are facts. But in reality it is not so simple; sciences comein a great variety, and necessarily some sciences are judged to be morescientific than others. What is the best, typical, paradigmatic science?For a long time, the quantitative-experimental sciences, on the modelof Victorian physics, have been supreme. All others have suffered from“physics-envy.” In some cases this has distorted their research programs,


in others (as in the mathematized behavioral sciences) it has producedgrotesque caricatures of knowledge.

As these reductionist sciences have been built into technologies, theyhave accelerated both our dominance over nature, and the reaction thatnature is preparing against us. They are characterized by the “technicalfix” and the “Faustian bargain,” ideas that were first articulated in connec-tion with long-lived nuclear wastes. Closer to our present theme, wehave a fine example of a reductionist solution to a systemic problem,in the management of the global epidemic of Type II Diabetes, causedby excess carbohydrates among unprotected populations going over toWestern foods. Instead of a change in lifestyles to include sensible eatingand exercise, the industry focuses on drugs that interfere with the metabolicpathways of insulin production (O’Connell, 2001).

In striking contrast to the high-tech, high-capital, globalized sciences,we have the newer sciences of “cleanup and survival.” Typically, they areless matured theoretically and socially, and less endowed with resourcesand prestige. But all those concerned with food safety will agree thatthis is a critical area for policy, which requires an appropriate sort ofscience. My colleague Silvio Funtowicz and I searched long and hard fora name for this. After several tries, we decided to call it “post-normal.”This has two sorts of connotations. First, that the times we are livingin are no longer “normal,” for straightforward technical solutions willnot suffice for our major problems. We face problems on a global scale,ranging from climate change to AIDS and endocrine disrupters, whichare qualitatively different even from the great epidemics of the past. Inresponse, the scientific effort that is required can no longer be based onwhat Thomas Kuhn called “normal science.” In that, the practitioners did“puzzle-solving,” in blinkered ignorance of the broader issues of theirwork, be they methodological, social, or ethical. Now the crucial areas forinquiry are at the contested interfaces between science and policy; that iswhat we call “Post-Normal” (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1993; Ravetz, 2000).

There are two respects in which these post-normal sciences of safetywill differ from the more conventional varieties. They relate to uncertaintyand complexity, respectively. My education in the former area came froma researcher at the National Radiological Protection Board in England. Mycolleagues and I were preparing a “pedigree” format for radiological data,and we started by adapting the pedigree matrix for Research data. Whenour respondent saw that we gave “Laboratory” data a higher ranking than“Field/Historical” data, she protested vigorously. She explained that thehardest part of her job is putting off the enthusiastic scientists who comeover from the next building, proudly bearing values of parameters derived


from rigorous physiological experiments. For these derived from unnatur-ally pure, stable, and controlled experimental contexts, totally unlike thereal world in which radioactive substances are taken up and metabolized.Coarse data from a field with real, whole plants and animals is more usefulfor these purposes than refined data from a sanitary lab. So the sciences thatdeal with real-world, complex problems find that the price of experimentalrigor is loss of practical realism.

Awareness of the interaction between uncertainty and values is the othergreat divide between post-normal science and the conventional sort. Ourunderstanding of science is still largely in the grip of the naive positivistfaith in the “objectivity” of science and its freedom of contamination by“values.” This illusion is all the more remarkable, because it is contradictedby the daily practice of elementary statistical testing. Without going intotechnicalities, we may say that any statistical test might be overly selective,rejecting causal correlations that are probably real; or it might be overlysensitive, accepting causal correlations that are probably accidental. Thisbalance is most frequently expressed through a “confidence limit,” wherea high confidence limit protects against over-sensitivity but makes the testvulnerable to over-selectivity. What is appropriate for a laboratory experi-ment, where the main concern is protecting the research literature fromspurious results, may be quite inappropriate for exploratory or monitoringresearch, where weak signals of harm may be all that we have.

It is impossible to design a statistical test that avoids both types of error;there must be a choice, made by someone, somewhere. Even if “normalscience” practitioners have no knowledge or concern of the source of theparticular value of the confidence limit that is standard for their field,they are involved in making a choice between the two types of error. Theresult of that value-laden choice shapes both our knowledge and our ignor-ance. It is ironic that those who proclaim the necessity for old-fashioned“sound” science, accepting only the orthodox research that is designed toprevent over-sensitivity, are actually giving aid and assistance to those whodemand the right to pollute the planet until it is rigorously proved that theyare doing harm.

Both of these considerations come into play when we consider themanagement of “anecdotal” evidence. This is at the heart of many publicdebates on quality and safety, concerning drugs (both sorts) and food.Ordinary people have vivid experiences of benefit and harm; and theyare outraged when the regulators and scientists dismiss their reports as“merely anecdotal.” Of course, by definition, anecdotes are uncontrolled,and to a degree unreliable; in effect they are invitations to the error of over-sensitivity. But they reflect the lived experience of a complex world out


there, rather than one governed by the artificial conventions of epidemi-ology or the theoretical blinkers of lab-based science. Even ordinarylaboratory science encounters anecdotal data, in the “outliers” that requirejudgments of a post-normal character for their management. Hence todismiss anecdotal evidence it to make a commitment to the sort of realitythat is being managed by the regulators and their associated scientists: thatis one where accidents never happen.

These methodological lessons may come hard to scientists who havepursued a dedicated career to working for the public good within anabstracted and insulated laboratory environment. But I fear that there isworse to come. If we consider a major policy issue, such as “obesity” or“sucrose abuse” or Type II Diabetes in our present discussion, then it isclear that these are complex problems involving commerce, society, andculture as well as individual psychology and physiology. The scientificinput will be limited in its scope and influence, both because of the lack ofrealism of its database and the lack of certainty in its conclusions, and alsobecause of the presence of alternative perspectives and value-commitmentsamong the participants in the dialogue. This situation is quite familiar toscientists working in an industrial context; what makes their contributionworthwhile there is the success of the product in which it is embedded. Ineffect, the peer community for evaluating industrial research is extendedto include managers and ultimately consumers.

The essential message of Post-Normal Science is that, in policy-relatedscience, there must be an analogous extension of the peer-community,moving outwards from the accredited scientists and regulators, to includeall those with a concern for resolving the issue. Such an “extended peercommunity” is now widely accepted as necessary for the improvementof the legitimacy of the policy process and hence the authority of itsoutcome. But I argue further: the extension of the peer community actuallyimproves the quality of its scientific aspects. What happens “out there,”where manufacturers’ instructions are misunderstood or disobeyed, andwhere government regulations are evaded or flouted, is essential for under-standing what the policy problem is really about and what sort of sciencewill contribute to its resolution. If there were any lingering doubts aboutthe relevance of the imperfections of the real world to science policyadvice, the Stewart report on the BSE disaster should have dispelled them(IEGMP, 2000).

Also, the new extended peer community must be real; unless thescientists discover that they have something to learn from others with acomplementary knowledge and expertise, the process will be a sham andquickly exposed as such. It cannot be denied that this extension is itself a


political act, since there will always be vested interests, on both industrialand government sides, who very much prefer a sanitized version of theproblems, studied on the basis of the fiction that the world is like the lab.But as we have seen, the work of the lab must be enhanced and enrichedby a constant dialogue with its context in nature and human society.

QUALITY AND SAFETY: THE LESSONS OF COMPLEXITY

I should remark briefly on these two attributes, as they form the core of thetheme of the 3rd EurSafe Congress. Some might say that I have “relativ-ized” scientific knowledge in the policy context; I would rather say that Ihave “complexified” it. That is, I have shown that scientific informationis embedded in complex systems, or rather, reflexive complex systems(Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1994). These are characterized by the presenceof different scale levels, and of subsystems that are not totally subor-dinate, having purposes of their own as well as functions in the broaderscheme of things. Such systems grow and evolve, and they can also decayand collapse. Quality is easily understood as a systemic property, just byconsidering the Latin motto: “quis custodiet custodes ipsos?” – who guardsthe guardians? This states a recursive property, with no apparent end; andthe guardianship, or quality-control function, will depend on its recursivelevel for its proper form. At the workbench it may be routine; but higher upit becomes more professional, and ultimately it is political. Its performancedepends on a consensus between controllers and the controlled; and it iseasily subverted by incompetence or corruption. These latter phenomenamay be considered as evils when they affect a particular quality-assurancesocial system; but it is better to see them as characteristic imperfectionsof any system, caused not so much by bad people as by mismatched ordysfunctional structures. All this analysis applies directly to food. Now wehave not merely the classic and still widespread practices of faking andadulteration; but also the new, profound questions of the full meaning of“quality” when applied to coffee or sucrose. Thus in the broader questionsof food quality, lifestyle is not at the periphery as in a “normal” situation,but at the heart of the matter.

As to Safety, all the above holds, but with some extras. There has beenan attempt in recent years at a scientific takeover of safety. All the scientiststalk about “risk,” for which reductionist measures can be attempted withsome plausibility. They deal with “zero risk” or “acceptable risk,” as ifall that concerned the public were details of the possible harms and theirprobabilities. But the major regulatory agencies are not devoted to riskbut rather to safety. What is the difference? Safety depends partly on risk,


but it is a richer concept. It is pragmatic, for it relates to action: is it “allright” to do something or to be somewhere, given all the circumstances?The judgment of safety need bear little relation to the magnitude of risk;thus in the UK the railways are considered unsafe in spite of having muchlower fatalities than roads. The reasons for the discrepancy may indeedbe ascribed to the psychology of perception. But there are others, relatedto the moral dimension of risk. For “safety” relates to the question, “AmI being protected?” The hazards out there are known; the protection canalways fail. But a system is safe when it operates with integrity. Thus theBritish public has been dismayed and sickened, not by the quite infrequentoccurrence of incompetence among doctors or surgeons, but rather by thequite regular occurrence of cover-up of their faults, and the denigration oftheir critics and victims, by the institutions that employ and regulate them.

The use of the term “risk” effectively sanitizes the problem and reducesit to expert assessment of harms and probabilities. We should bring back“safety,” as a reminder that the essence of the matter lies in integrity andtrust. It should not require explanation at this stage, that the science asso-ciated with safety is necessarily a post-normal science. Restricted peercommunities are all too vulnerable to the pressures that produce corrup-tion; only the extension to all the parties concerned will let the sunlightin, and prevent the horrors that have now become a regular feature of theBritish scene wherever professionals are involved.

ETHICS AND AWARENESS

Finally, I would like to offer a post-normal perspective on the issues ofethics in relation to the science and regulation of food for safety andquality. First, as we have seen both from the recent scandals and alsofrom my paradoxical examples, the ethics of food quality and safety canno longer rest on the simple principles of doing good and avoiding evil.The problems are now complex, both socially and conceptually; and so wemust achieve an awareness of an appropriate sort.

The first important lesson is how scientists of impeccable personalintegrity can be suborned and effectively corrupted by a system that playsthe game of manipulation with skill and ruthlessness. This was the fateof the British scientists involved in advising on the BSE epidemic. Quitesystematically, their Ministerial minders fed them with artfully designedquestions, and then doctored their answers, so that the politicians couldeventually blame it all on the scientists who advised them. Some wereaware, to some extent, that they were being used; but their training asscientists, and even their experience of the politics within the scientific


community, gave them little preparation for playing in that particularlynasty game. It all began when they were asked about the potential risk ofBSE to humans. They replied that to the best of their knowledge it wasremote, but that if they were wrong the consequences could be serious.They may have discovered that their caveat was removed from the text thatwent to the Minister; but by then it was too late. They were bound by theirgentlemanly code and also by the Official Secrets Act. The BSE scandal isperhaps unique in its catastrophic consequences; and in its aftermath therehas been a great effort at reforming the system of science advice to govern-ment in the UK. But aside from the new commissions where transparencyis the founding principle, it is hard to imagine civil servants completelyabandoning their old ways in a sudden conversion to democratic principles.

I would like to suggest that we look again at the foundations of theethics of regulators and scientists, under these new post-normal conditions.Let me try an idea: that the old basis of ethics of regulation was “aliena-tion”: Looked at from the perspective of other cultures, Max Weber’sideal bureaucrat is someone who puts his institution ahead of his family,someone who wouldn’t do a favor for a cousin. Correspondingly, theideal scientist was “objective”: he excluded, and then guarded against,his personal values and prejudices. Indeed it was a fundamental articleof faith that science itself is value-free. The caricatured expression of thisobjectivity is the use of the passive voice in scientific writing. The dissidentscientist Rupert Sheldrake has recently remarked on this cultural aberration(2001), and how from the end of the nineteenth century onwards it hasbeen used to convey a sense of objectivity, both for the audience and for theresearcher himself. It still survives in schools, because teachers believe thatexaminers and universities want it, in spite of its obvious harmful effectson comprehension and enthusiasm among students.

In both of these cases, science and regulation, the foundation of ethicswas a vision of the real and the good that was impersonal and essen-tially simple. Now, that old world is severely compromised, certainly forscience in the policy domain. Publics do not trust scientists who have apossible “conflict of interest,” and they actively distrust those who seem toconceal those conflicts. The scientist may well believe himself to be totallyobjective and unbiased, but in the policy context, such a belief now turnsout to be counterproductive.

As a basis for a reformed ethics, I would suggest “awareness.” Weall come with baggage, even the critics and the philosophers. As theQuakers say, we should start by knowing that we could be wrong, and thatour opponent has something real to say. Only then will dialogue amongparticipants become real. This can be very hard for scientists, who (as


Kuhn realized) receive a training that truncates their awareness down tothe minimal level necessary for puzzle-solving. Their whole intellectualformation has enshrined the assumption that for every problem there isone and only one correct solution. From their teachers, they learned thatwhen I am in possession of the truth, all who persist in disagreeing with meare defective, mentally and perhaps morally as well. It was such attitudesthat enabled competent and leading scientists in democracies, in all goodconscience, to perform harmful experiments on people considered inferiorby reason of intelligence or race, continuing even after the gas chambers(Weinstein, 2001).

Under present conditions, sophisticated lay participants are quick todetect the scientific self-confidence that breeds self-righteousness, which,when challenged, breeds what is perceived as arrogance. Scientists whohave never previously had the occasion to become aware of their faith intheir perfect objectivity are particularly vulnerable to this process. When itgoes to completion, the consequences for their work, and for their persons,can be very severe. The myths of objectivity that once sheltered scientistsfrom the complexities of the real world are no longer effective; and thosethat cling to them will become their victims. Integrity, which is the realissue, is no longer easily achieved, but depends on awareness of the moralcomplexities of all activities, including research into the natural world.

A CONCLUDING REMARK

Not long ago there was a worry that citizens had become mere consumers.The democratic polity had become a marketplace, or even a shoppingmall. Now there is another worry, among politicians, that consumers arebecoming demanding and aggressive citizens. Increasingly, issues of foodquality, safety, and ethics are becoming practical politics, sometimes morereal than the charade of the formal parties. It also involves a challenge toour established scientific culture, as when consumers increasingly ignoreofficial advice and turn to organic food and complementary medicine. Thedangers in this development, in the compromising of the regulation ofsafety and quality, are obvious. But, representing an extension of demo-cratic participation beyond the formal political processes into issues oflifestyle and values, it can be one of the most hopeful developments inour civilization. It is hard to imagine another impetus for a reaction againstthe unsustainable economic and cultural system that increasingly threatensus all. Food, along with health, is at the heart of this cultural healingprocess. The post-normal science of food safety and quality will make itscontribution.


REFERENCES

Funtowicz, S. and J. R. Ravetz, “Science for the Post-Normal Age,” Futures 25(7) (1993),735–755.

Funtowicz, S. and J. R. Ravetz, “Emergent Complex Systems,” Futures 26(6) (1994), 568–582.

Hart, S., “Selling Junk is Child’s Play,” The Big Issue (London), 25 June (2001), pp. 22–23.IEGMP (Stewart Inquiry), www.iegmp.org.O’Connell, S., “The Deadliest Diet in the World,” The Independent (London), 20 July

(2001), Friday Review p. 8.Ravetz, J. R., “What is Post-Normal Science?” Futures 31(7) (2000), 647–654.Sheldrake, R., “Personally Speaking,” New Scientist, 21 July (2001), pp. 48–49.Weinstein, M., “A Public Culture for Guinea Pigs: US Human Research Subjects after the

Tuskegee Study,” Science as Culture 10(2) (2001), 194–223.

JEROME R. RAVETZ

The Research Methods Consultancy Ltd.106 Defoe HouseBarbican, London EC2Y 8NDUKE-mail: [email protected]

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Food Safety, Quality, and Ethics – A Post-normal Perspective