Quality in the food industry is viewed at once as both a standard of excellence to be reached and... more Quality in the food industry is viewed at once as both a standard of excellence to be reached and as an attribute, characteristic, or property to be imbued in products and people. In contemporary China, quality is further divided into suzhi or “human” quality reserved to describe embodied characteristics with a range of other terms used to describe the attributes of institutions, objects, and other non-human entities. This article explores how various ideas of quality transfer or circulate among people, places, and things. I consider the manner in which various activities—such as milking cows, producing indigenous foods, and advertising—stabilize notions of quality through their attachment to particular objects and practices. Using data collected within China’s dairy industry before and after the industry’s epic 2008 melamine adulteration scandal, I revisit the notion of human quality and examine it in dialogue with Callon’s work on the qualification of objects.
Fermentation is the product of microbial relations that mediate, or foment, relationships between... more Fermentation is the product of microbial relations that mediate, or foment, relationships between bodies and food products. Using cases of food fermentation made with microbes from ruminants’ stomachs and women’s vaginas, we denaturalize the idea of bodies’ mammalian capacity as linked to particular food relations and explore the traction of gendered ideologies that order exchanges between microbial life to result in such food. This essay first outlines our core argument by situating fermentation within the emergent science on bodily microbial relations, or microbiomes. Incorporating science and technology studies literature together with the feminist literature, we note that the association with lactating, first, aligns one gender more closely with nature and, thus, the other with culture while also leading to the conflation of the feminine with the mammalian. Additionally, this structural alignment with species’ nature ignores that making food from bodies requires culture—both in the sense of culturing microbes and in being reliant on technoscientific processes. We then present two seemingly binary case studies, which are together analyzed through their ability to enroll gender and/or disavow gender in order to produce legitimate food products. We conclude by showing how attention to the ordering and disordering work of microbial relations in the fermentation process both opens up new possibilities for recognizing the way that sex and gender materialize in the capacity of mammalian bodies to ferment and emphasizes that fermentation is always entangled with multiple layers of reproductive labor. Ultimately, such analysis extends food studies scholarship about fermentation into the microbial materiality of gender and food.
In September 2008, revelation of melamine-contaminated milk supplies in China’s dairy industry ro... more In September 2008, revelation of melamine-contaminated milk supplies in China’s dairy industry rocked its manufacturing sector still reeling from highly publicized food and safety scandals in 2007. Despite state and corporate interventions, regulatory and quality management issues highlighted in these earlier scandals remained. Local government and corporate actors’ attempts to suppress information about the scandal highlighted concerns about transparency, accountability, and corruption. This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in 2009 and 2010 in Beijing and Shanghai and across 2012 and 2013 in Beijing and China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. My goals are twofold. First, I seek to move forward discussions of transparency in China, which often suffer from easy dismissals by academics, the media and the public alike. Second, I aim to broaden our understanding of transparency as not just fulfilling multiple functions but also as multimodal in that it is actively produced across different scales of experience and through diverse mechanisms. Using data focused on the production and monitoring of food safety, I describe the structural challenges that led to the 2008 scandal, the measures implemented in the industry to prevent future problems, and the broader discussions and interventions designed to improve China’ s overall food safety record.
The issue of economy of scale exists both in terms of the quantity of agricultural production and... more The issue of economy of scale exists both in terms of the quantity of agricultural production and also in its quality aspect. From the perspective of production cost, we build an agrifood quality- cost function and its elasticity estimation model and then empirically estimate this model in China's dairy industry. Analysis of survey data, estimation results of raw milk quality-cost elastic- ity and quantity-cost elasticity indicate that, in current factors market and under current policy environment, an economy of scale for raw milk quality does not exist and the economic incentive to improve raw milk quality is not enough. In contrast, raw milk quantity exhibits an economy of scale, and increasing the production scale is profitable. This provides a theoretical basis for explaining why improving raw milk quality is much more difficult than increasing quantity. Accordingly, in order to fundamentally improve the overall level of quality of raw milk, changing the status of diseconomy of scale should be the primary strategy.
Technical innovations like ultra-high temperature processing and aseptic packaging increase liqui... more Technical innovations like ultra-high temperature processing and aseptic packaging increase liquid milk’s portability and its safety, making milk available to more consumers worldwide than in the past. Though intended to seal out threats to human health, these procedures also seal in other qualities. Drawing on ethnographic research with four of China’s national dairy corporations and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region’s certification office for China’s trademarked “Green Food” products, I explore the conversion of place-based qualities constructed as an inherent part of the land into products that can be packaged and moved across the nation. I demonstrate how qualities akin to that of the French term terroir are bundled together and thus enable their circulation with the physical product.
This article focuses on the 2008 global dairy scandal sparked by the distribution of milk adulter... more This article focuses on the 2008 global dairy scandal sparked by the distribution of milk adulterated with the industrial chemical melamine in the People’s Republic of China. In China, roughly 300,000 children were suspected of having melamine-related illnesses and six children died. Subsequent court proceedings showed that the addition of melamine to the nation’s milk supply was an open secret in the industry. Just months before, Western media had applauded China for relatively open access during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the Olympic Games. The scandal called into question this apparent rise of transparency in China. How is it that a common household substance like melamine ‘jumped’ from everyday object to a substance with severe effects on hundreds of thousands of bodies? This ‘jump’ offers an opportunity to consider melamine transductively – to examine these leaps across scales of experience and between particular modes of knowledge. Transduction refers to the conversion of one type of signal into another (e.g. sound into electrical energy). A transductive account of the melamine scandal focuses attention on melamine’s materiality, its circulation through various media and experiences, and its transformation through and on these media. This transformative potential, melamine’s mutability, is what allows it to hold social and political resonances.
In 2012, the Beijing First Intermediate Court’s ruling reignited public controversy over a 2010 r... more In 2012, the Beijing First Intermediate Court’s ruling reignited public controversy over a 2010 revision of China’s national raw milk standard. A consumer rights activist filed an open information application, requesting that China’s Ministry of Health disclose meeting minutes related to the revision. His request hinged on public perception that China’s dairy corporations helped lower quality and safety thresholds for domestic raw milk supplies, while the country still reeled from the 2008 melamine scandal. The case re-emerged as Chinese policymakers, seeking to strengthen and respond to domestic and international food safety concerns, crafted and revised standards and restructured government agencies to address shortcomings in the 2009 Food Safety Law. As the case unfolded, China was flexing its international power in standards-setting despite criticism of its domestic standards regime. Grounded in fieldwork conducted during this period, I trace the intersection and dissonance betw...
In September 2008, following the New Zealand prime minister's noti-fication to Beiji... more In September 2008, following the New Zealand prime minister's noti-fication to Beijing officials, China's Sanlu Dairy Group acknowledged that its dairy products were contami-nated with the industrial chemical melamine.1 Within the month Sanlu halted production, scores ...
Based on field research in Beijing and in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the People'... more Based on field research in Beijing and in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China, this study examines the intersection of the governance of food quality and public hygiene with individual and corporate management of risk and well-being. ...
Fermentation is the product of microbial relations that mediate, or foment, relationships between... more Fermentation is the product of microbial relations that mediate, or foment, relationships between bodies and food products. Using cases of food fermentation made with microbes from ruminants’ stomachs and women’s vaginas, we denaturalize the idea of bodies’ mammalian capacity as linked to particular food relations and explore the traction of gendered ideologies that order exchanges between microbial life to result in such food. This essay first outlines our core argument by situating fermentation within the emergent science on bodily microbial relations, or microbiomes. Incorporating science and technology studies literature together with the feminist literature, we note that the association with lactating, first, aligns one gender more closely with nature and, thus, the other with culture while also leading to the conflation of the feminine with the mammalian. Additionally, this structural alignment with species’ nature ignores that making food from bodies requires culture—both in ...
as ever, and the obligatory hand-washing when entering a building has petered out. However, the n... more as ever, and the obligatory hand-washing when entering a building has petered out. However, the news media has continued to publish information about SARS research while the government maintains a low-level public health and sanitation campaign. Moreover, some commercial sectors in China have utilized the public’s greater attention to the food, environment, and health nexus to promote their own products and ideas. One such sector is the “Green Food” (lüse shipin) industry that concentrates on the development of pesticidereduced and chemical additive-reduced products. In conversations with representatives of a few Green Food corporations and with the Green Food Development Center just after the height of the SARS virus, I found expectations were high that experiences from this period would aid in the promotion of their products. In my more recent exchanges, Green Food representatives have begun to downplay the impact of SARS, but have emphasized the industry’s continued commitment to...
Quality in the food industry is viewed at once as both a standard of excellence to be reached and... more Quality in the food industry is viewed at once as both a standard of excellence to be reached and as an attribute, characteristic, or property to be imbued in products and people. In contemporary China, quality is further divided into suzhi or “human” quality reserved to describe embodied characteristics with a range of other terms used to describe the attributes of institutions, objects, and other non-human entities. This article explores how various ideas of quality transfer or circulate among people, places, and things. I consider the manner in which various activities—such as milking cows, producing indigenous foods, and advertising—stabilize notions of quality through their attachment to particular objects and practices. Using data collected within China’s dairy industry before and after the industry’s epic 2008 melamine adulteration scandal, I revisit the notion of human quality and examine it in dialogue with Callon’s work on the qualification of objects.
Fermentation is the product of microbial relations that mediate, or foment, relationships between... more Fermentation is the product of microbial relations that mediate, or foment, relationships between bodies and food products. Using cases of food fermentation made with microbes from ruminants’ stomachs and women’s vaginas, we denaturalize the idea of bodies’ mammalian capacity as linked to particular food relations and explore the traction of gendered ideologies that order exchanges between microbial life to result in such food. This essay first outlines our core argument by situating fermentation within the emergent science on bodily microbial relations, or microbiomes. Incorporating science and technology studies literature together with the feminist literature, we note that the association with lactating, first, aligns one gender more closely with nature and, thus, the other with culture while also leading to the conflation of the feminine with the mammalian. Additionally, this structural alignment with species’ nature ignores that making food from bodies requires culture—both in the sense of culturing microbes and in being reliant on technoscientific processes. We then present two seemingly binary case studies, which are together analyzed through their ability to enroll gender and/or disavow gender in order to produce legitimate food products. We conclude by showing how attention to the ordering and disordering work of microbial relations in the fermentation process both opens up new possibilities for recognizing the way that sex and gender materialize in the capacity of mammalian bodies to ferment and emphasizes that fermentation is always entangled with multiple layers of reproductive labor. Ultimately, such analysis extends food studies scholarship about fermentation into the microbial materiality of gender and food.
In September 2008, revelation of melamine-contaminated milk supplies in China’s dairy industry ro... more In September 2008, revelation of melamine-contaminated milk supplies in China’s dairy industry rocked its manufacturing sector still reeling from highly publicized food and safety scandals in 2007. Despite state and corporate interventions, regulatory and quality management issues highlighted in these earlier scandals remained. Local government and corporate actors’ attempts to suppress information about the scandal highlighted concerns about transparency, accountability, and corruption. This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in 2009 and 2010 in Beijing and Shanghai and across 2012 and 2013 in Beijing and China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. My goals are twofold. First, I seek to move forward discussions of transparency in China, which often suffer from easy dismissals by academics, the media and the public alike. Second, I aim to broaden our understanding of transparency as not just fulfilling multiple functions but also as multimodal in that it is actively produced across different scales of experience and through diverse mechanisms. Using data focused on the production and monitoring of food safety, I describe the structural challenges that led to the 2008 scandal, the measures implemented in the industry to prevent future problems, and the broader discussions and interventions designed to improve China’ s overall food safety record.
The issue of economy of scale exists both in terms of the quantity of agricultural production and... more The issue of economy of scale exists both in terms of the quantity of agricultural production and also in its quality aspect. From the perspective of production cost, we build an agrifood quality- cost function and its elasticity estimation model and then empirically estimate this model in China's dairy industry. Analysis of survey data, estimation results of raw milk quality-cost elastic- ity and quantity-cost elasticity indicate that, in current factors market and under current policy environment, an economy of scale for raw milk quality does not exist and the economic incentive to improve raw milk quality is not enough. In contrast, raw milk quantity exhibits an economy of scale, and increasing the production scale is profitable. This provides a theoretical basis for explaining why improving raw milk quality is much more difficult than increasing quantity. Accordingly, in order to fundamentally improve the overall level of quality of raw milk, changing the status of diseconomy of scale should be the primary strategy.
Technical innovations like ultra-high temperature processing and aseptic packaging increase liqui... more Technical innovations like ultra-high temperature processing and aseptic packaging increase liquid milk’s portability and its safety, making milk available to more consumers worldwide than in the past. Though intended to seal out threats to human health, these procedures also seal in other qualities. Drawing on ethnographic research with four of China’s national dairy corporations and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region’s certification office for China’s trademarked “Green Food” products, I explore the conversion of place-based qualities constructed as an inherent part of the land into products that can be packaged and moved across the nation. I demonstrate how qualities akin to that of the French term terroir are bundled together and thus enable their circulation with the physical product.
This article focuses on the 2008 global dairy scandal sparked by the distribution of milk adulter... more This article focuses on the 2008 global dairy scandal sparked by the distribution of milk adulterated with the industrial chemical melamine in the People’s Republic of China. In China, roughly 300,000 children were suspected of having melamine-related illnesses and six children died. Subsequent court proceedings showed that the addition of melamine to the nation’s milk supply was an open secret in the industry. Just months before, Western media had applauded China for relatively open access during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the Olympic Games. The scandal called into question this apparent rise of transparency in China. How is it that a common household substance like melamine ‘jumped’ from everyday object to a substance with severe effects on hundreds of thousands of bodies? This ‘jump’ offers an opportunity to consider melamine transductively – to examine these leaps across scales of experience and between particular modes of knowledge. Transduction refers to the conversion of one type of signal into another (e.g. sound into electrical energy). A transductive account of the melamine scandal focuses attention on melamine’s materiality, its circulation through various media and experiences, and its transformation through and on these media. This transformative potential, melamine’s mutability, is what allows it to hold social and political resonances.
In 2012, the Beijing First Intermediate Court’s ruling reignited public controversy over a 2010 r... more In 2012, the Beijing First Intermediate Court’s ruling reignited public controversy over a 2010 revision of China’s national raw milk standard. A consumer rights activist filed an open information application, requesting that China’s Ministry of Health disclose meeting minutes related to the revision. His request hinged on public perception that China’s dairy corporations helped lower quality and safety thresholds for domestic raw milk supplies, while the country still reeled from the 2008 melamine scandal. The case re-emerged as Chinese policymakers, seeking to strengthen and respond to domestic and international food safety concerns, crafted and revised standards and restructured government agencies to address shortcomings in the 2009 Food Safety Law. As the case unfolded, China was flexing its international power in standards-setting despite criticism of its domestic standards regime. Grounded in fieldwork conducted during this period, I trace the intersection and dissonance betw...
In September 2008, following the New Zealand prime minister's noti-fication to Beiji... more In September 2008, following the New Zealand prime minister's noti-fication to Beijing officials, China's Sanlu Dairy Group acknowledged that its dairy products were contami-nated with the industrial chemical melamine.1 Within the month Sanlu halted production, scores ...
Based on field research in Beijing and in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the People'... more Based on field research in Beijing and in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China, this study examines the intersection of the governance of food quality and public hygiene with individual and corporate management of risk and well-being. ...
Fermentation is the product of microbial relations that mediate, or foment, relationships between... more Fermentation is the product of microbial relations that mediate, or foment, relationships between bodies and food products. Using cases of food fermentation made with microbes from ruminants’ stomachs and women’s vaginas, we denaturalize the idea of bodies’ mammalian capacity as linked to particular food relations and explore the traction of gendered ideologies that order exchanges between microbial life to result in such food. This essay first outlines our core argument by situating fermentation within the emergent science on bodily microbial relations, or microbiomes. Incorporating science and technology studies literature together with the feminist literature, we note that the association with lactating, first, aligns one gender more closely with nature and, thus, the other with culture while also leading to the conflation of the feminine with the mammalian. Additionally, this structural alignment with species’ nature ignores that making food from bodies requires culture—both in ...
as ever, and the obligatory hand-washing when entering a building has petered out. However, the n... more as ever, and the obligatory hand-washing when entering a building has petered out. However, the news media has continued to publish information about SARS research while the government maintains a low-level public health and sanitation campaign. Moreover, some commercial sectors in China have utilized the public’s greater attention to the food, environment, and health nexus to promote their own products and ideas. One such sector is the “Green Food” (lüse shipin) industry that concentrates on the development of pesticidereduced and chemical additive-reduced products. In conversations with representatives of a few Green Food corporations and with the Green Food Development Center just after the height of the SARS virus, I found expectations were high that experiences from this period would aid in the promotion of their products. In my more recent exchanges, Green Food representatives have begun to downplay the impact of SARS, but have emphasized the industry’s continued commitment to...
The revitalization of fermentation projects during COVID-19 raises questions about the preservati... more The revitalization of fermentation projects during COVID-19 raises questions about the preservation of the pandemic’s material and ephemeral effects – a topic that heritage policy is well equipped to engage. These activities also emphasize the necessity of engaging with heritage practices as a kind of care, encompassing both methods of safekeeping and practices of empathy. In addition, heritage ferments prove “good to think” around themes of loss and preservation, the interpretation of novel viruses through traditional food practices, and the coupling of heritage to microbes. Connecting microbes with heritage allows us to consider points of overlap: as bearers of patrimony with cultural and material lineages, as central to heritage tastes, and as open to geographical indications or other protections to further a kind of microbial resource management. Despite the pandemic’s devastating impact, consideration of heritage ferments points to both emancipatory and constraining outcomes fo...
Quality in the food industry is viewed at once as both a standard of excellence to be reached and... more Quality in the food industry is viewed at once as both a standard of excellence to be reached and as an attribute, characteristic, or property to be imbued in products and people. In contemporary China, quality is further divided into suzhi or “human” quality reserved to describe embodied characteristics with a range of other terms used to describe the attributes of institutions, objects, and other non-human entities. This article explores how various ideas of quality transfer or circulate among people, places, and things. I consider the manner in which various activities—such as milking cows, producing indigenous foods, and advertising—stabilize notions of quality through their attachment to particular objects and practices. Using data collected within China’s dairy industry before and after the industry’s epic 2008 melamine adulteration scandal, I revisit the notion of human quality and examine it in dialogue with Callon’s work on the qualification of objects.
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