Illicit food: Canadian food safety regulation and informal food economy

Abstract

Food economies that take place informally or ‘under the table’ can offer interesting insights into relationships that people have with their food, and with social and institutional frameworks that shape their food systems. Relying on data from 14 in-depth interviews conducted in Nova Scotia in 2013, this paper interrogates the tensions between everyday eating practices and food safety regulations. Specifically, I examine how informal economic activities related to food expose some of the (perceived) shortcomings of those regulations. The stories that the participants shared offer a glimpse into the world of meaning attached to a range of practices that exist on the margins of contemporary food and public health systems. These stories and the associated practices challenge current regulatory policies as scale-inappropriate, and criticize the industrial food system as inadequate for meeting the needs of contemporary eaters. My analysis offers a cultural studies perspective on food safety regulation and on ideological resistance embedded in informal food economies. I illustrate this with a specific example of raw milk to further probe how people engage with their food and how they navigate through the world of food safety – and more generally public health – regulations.

Keywords:

• informal food economy
• food safety regulation
• public health policy
• alternative food networks
• raw milk

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Patty Williams, who supervised this study and provided valuable suggestions and corrections. Barb Anderson offered numerous thoughtful ideas and insights. Christopher Hardy assisted with the literature review and Christine Johnson, Peter Andrée and Av Singh, all helped with the study design and feedback at various stages of this work. I am especially grateful to the participants for sharing their time for this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In social sciences, at least we are increasingly aware that risk, science and ‘objective’ knowledge are themselves social constructs. These ideas are already eloquently discussed elsewhere; see, for example, Latour and Woolgar (1979), Miller (1999) and Lupton 1999).

2. Food safety may not be a familiar territory for such an approach, but it is no stranger in other areas of public health and safety. For example, for some health care agencies, like the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, harm-reduction is a preferred approach in the area of substance abuse – as opposed to control and enforcement approaches commonly used in the past (Erickson et al. 2002).

3. Some practices have economic value and are informal, but are not illegal – for example, food or tool/equipment sharing. Others, such as drug trafficking, are actual criminal offences, as opposed to just civil infractions that are illegal but not criminal. In between are activates like sales of raw milk in Canada, which are informal and illegal, but not criminal.

4. As a postdoctoral researcher, I coordinated some of the research for Nova Scotian participatory project Activating Change Together for Community Food Security (see http://foodarc.ca/actforcfs/overview-purpose/ for more information)

5. While outside of the scope of this study, a comparison with European Union’s regulation and its impact on small-scale producers would be a useful future project. While European approaches to food systems are often celebrated by critical North American consumers (participants in this study being no exception, see Discussion), my previous work indicates that the European Union’s efforts to at least deplete, if not eradicate, small-scale producers in post-socialist Europe are both systematic and relentless (Knezevic 2014).

6. That perception is at least in part reflective of the history of food safety regulation – early regulatory frameworks were developed in response to the concerns brought on by the industrial-scale production and processing. The birth of food safety regulation is usually credited to Upton Sinclair’s 1906 The Jungle, a fictionalized tale of Chicago’s meatpacking district, which prompted public concerns and early regulation in the USA and then elsewhere. See Young (2014) for more on that.

7. It is not clear which of Shiva’s works this participant referred to, although there a couple of possible sources (see Shiva 1988 or 2000).

8. At the time of writing, the high-profile case of Ontario dairy farmer Michael Schmidt, who sold raw milk directly to his customers, has finally ended after 8 years – in August of 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada (the country’s highest judicial body) refused to hear his appeal of the lower court’s conviction under the provincial Health Protection and Promotion Act. Since 2006, when his farm was raided leading to charges, Schmidt’s case has been a centerpiece of raw milk debates, as it was considered the litmus test of the regulatory flexibility. The finality of the Supreme Court decision has for now closed the legal discussion of raw milk in Canada, leaving it with a status of an illegal substance.

9. It is of note that the evidence of risk in this report curiously included: (1) historical data (from the early 1900s); (2) ‘Bulk tank test’ results from conventional dairies; and (3) studies linking illness to raw milk from Ontario and Australia (places where raw milk is not legal) and the USA (where raw milk has a mixed though largely illegal status).

10. Scale is a concept much better developed in social geography literature and is not as frequently discussed in cultural studies. For more on scale as an analytical and conceptual tool, see Brown and Purcell (2005) and Widgren (2012).

11. Both of these limitations are already being partly addressed by a current collaborative project of the Nourishing Communities research group (nourishingcommunities.ca), The social economy of food: Informal, under-recognized contributions to community prosperity and resilience.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation [grant program Scotia Support]; Activating Change Together for Community Food Security project (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada); and by FoodARC research center at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Notes on contributors

Irena Knezevic

Irena Knezevic is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Ottawa’s Carleton University. She studies communication, culture and health, focusing on: food systems, food labeling, health communication and advertising, health equity, informal economy in everyday practices, and the discourse of food and health regulations.