“Don’t pack a pest”: parts, wholes, and the porosity of food borders

ABSTRACT

Food retailers, restaurateurs and transnational families rely on continual border-crossings for the global circulation of foodstuffs. Those crossings are highly regulated. Not everything gets in. This paper provides an overview of how food safety is (unevenly) enacted at U.S. ports of entry. Where government regulators and enforcement agents perceive in certain foods danger of adulteration or contamination, importers and producers also experience threat to customary practices of foodmaking, provisioning and commerce. Synecdochic, part-for-whole, reasoning guides food journeys and helps determine the fate of perishable foods as they attempt to cross semi-permeable thresholds that delineate and connect nation-states, and that make possible, even as they also restrict, the flow of international trade.

KEYWORDS:

• Food safety
• biosecurity
• borders
• trade
• gastro-politics

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Rachel Vaughn and Sarah Tracy for inviting me to participate in the workshop, “Edible Feminisms: On Discard, Waste, and Metabolism,” sponsored by UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women, and to feedback that they and other attendees provided on an earlier draft. I am grateful to the insightful comments of two anonymous reviewers for Food, Culture and Society. Thanks, too, to Alex Blanchette, Deborah Heath, Stefan Helmreich, Hannah Landecker, Marianne Lien, Amy Moran-Thomas, Harris Solomon, Emily Yates-Doerr and Carlos Yescas for comments and encouragement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In Banu Subramaniam’s telling, the Asian longhorned beetle’s story as a global “invasive” originates in China’s policy decision to plant monocultures of poplar trees to mitigate soil erosion and correct for deforestation (2014, 147). The Asian longhorned beetle, partial to poplars, then thrived. When, in the 1970s and 1980s, global trade “opened up,” this opened a growing market for pallets and crates to facilitate the shipping of goods. Along with those goods, burrowed in the wooden infrastructure of commerce, Asian longhorned beetle larvae traveled the world and began to infect Western lumber industries. The “problem” of the Asian longhorned beetle thus arose as a direct effect of the very trade it purportedly threatens today.

2. As Lampland and Star note, “The push to standardize presumes the ability to constrain a phenomenon” (2009, 14).

3. Any shipment found to have live pests is rejected prior to prophylactic irradiation.

4. Port Authority of NY & NJ December 2015 Traffic Report.

5. See also Federal Register 84 (71): 15028–15036. April 12, 2019.

6. Later, I learned a more complicated story. The E153 issue arose, first, because the Danish firm lists its carbon product through different sales divisions: as a colorant (E153) and as a cheese product (without an E-number). E153 started to flag holds in the US when a Chinese pet food was discovered to be “made of what goes into tires” – i.e., the E153 colorant had been tarnished by a case of (pet) food fraud. European cheesemakers were getting caught up by the food fraud case when they bought vegetable carbon from the colorant department (carrying that E153 number) instead of the cheese department. “The problem isn’t the ash,” I was told. It’s the paperwork!

7. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for the notion of “(palletable) access.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heather Paxson

Heather Paxson, William R. Kennan, Jr. Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America (California, 2013). She served as Area Editor on the James Beard award-winning Oxford Companion to Cheese (2017) and is co-editor of Cultural Anthropology (2019-2022).