Policing the natural

Environment and Planning D-society & Space, 2007

Unlike most foods, milk is produced fresh at least twice every day, thus recreating over 700 times a year a commodity “designed” by the combination of nature, commerce and law. The paper is a study of the ontogenesis of this commodity in Britain since 1800, stressing the emergence of two new objectivities: dairy science and the law on adulteration. In the words of Christopher Hamlin, what mattered was the “manufacture of certainty, however flimsy that certainty might later be shown to be”. This was achieved by the collection of samples, the generation of facts by the deployment of the laboratory technologies of physics and chemistry, and a semi-monopoly over the truth-power of dairy science gradually built up by the large commercial companies. A foundation of state-sponsored regulation provided an official legitimation of compositional standards that suited the interests of capital but ignored “natural” variations in quality and often pilloried innocent producers. The public eventually became accustomed to the regulated quality of the milk in their “pinta” and assumed it to be natural. Even the standardization of composition since 1993 has caused very little disquiet among the consuming public, although milk is now a fully constructed commodity like any other dairy product. Mechanical modernity has at last triumphed over a century of “milk as it came from the cow”.

This article centres on a particularly intense debate within British analytical chemistry in the late nineteenth century, between local public analysts and the government chemists of the Inland Revenue Service. The two groups differed in both practical methodologies and in the interpretation of analytical findings. The most striking debates in this period were related to milk analysis, highlighted especially in Victorian courtrooms. It was in protracted court cases, such as the well known Manchester Milk Case in 1883, that analytical chemistry was performed between local public analysts and the government chemists, who were often both used as expert witnesses. Victorian courtrooms were thus important sites in the context of the uneven professionalisation of chemistry. I use this tension to highlight what Christopher Hamlin has called the defining feature of Victorian public health, namely conflicts of professional jurisdiction, which adds nuance to histories of the struggle of professionalisation and public credibility in analytical chemistry.

This article aims to show how elements from the work of Michel Foucault and actor network theory can be used as complementary strategies for grasping the constitution of the ‘subject’ and the ‘social’ through political technologies. In particular, I try to show that the ontological separation of human from nonhuman and culture from nature is enacted within specific techniques of government, which can therefore be seen as ontological political technologies. This theoretical agenda is worked through empirical case materials in the form of a historical study of the British milk trade, which offers one particular example of how ‘the social’ has been inscribed within political assemblages. Using documentary analysis I examine the period from around 1890 to 1920 in dairy agriculture, showing how the modern ‘social’ was enacted within the sanitary drive for clean milk in the towns and cities, and especially within the struggle against zoonotic tuberculosis transmissible through dairy milk. In this sense my analysis is both a contribution to the theorisation of political technologies and an attempt to shift the terms of debate on these technologies substantially towards the ontological politics of knowing, classifying, and policing the human/social vis-à-vis the nonhuman Other.

Food, science, policy and regulation in the 20th century, 2000

This paper seeks to build upon the recent, heightened interest in our food environment by demonstrating that one of the most controversial of present-day issues about food standards, whether milk should or should not be compulsorily pasteurized, had a prehistory before the Second World War. This was part of a general debate about the role of the state in food systems, when government, in both its central and local forms, was becoming actively involved in regulating food production and sale, and in setting minimum standards of hygiene, composition and purity. The state response at that time was uneven, depending upon the particular characteristics of the foodstuff concerned and upon the nature of the pressure which was exerted on the policy-makers by interest groups. As Giddens (1996) has noted, assessing and coping with risk is a highly political activity, due to the assignment of values and prioritizing of responses. The regulation of the food industry in the twentieth century provides many examples of this.

Social History, 1991

In England there is an 800-year history of food control. In the early centuries this was mainly with respect to price and fair measure, poor quality and deliberate adulteration being much more difficult to police. From the mid-eighteenth century both the problem and the public response were heightened. The greater separation of the producer from the consumer, which was the inevitable result of urbanization and the increased specialization of industrial and commercial functions, provided fertile soil for the growth of fraud. Fresh food was less readily available, and the urban diet gradually comprised a higher proportion of processed foods. Town dwellers were less familiar with the genuine output of agriculture than their rural forebears and perhaps therefore more gullible, but a more likely reason for their submission to a ‘sophisticated’ diet was that their choice of alternatives and room for complaint were constrained.

Unpublished, 2005

Present day concerns with food safety have thrown into relief the history of quality and authenticity in food systems. This paper seeks to add a comparative dimension to our understanding of the emergence of a food supply free of adulteration and falsification by discussing the historical similarities and differences between France and Britain. They were amongst the vanguard of countries seeking to act against food frauds in the half century or so before the First World War and we consider the impact of their legislative and regulatory regimes. The commodity we look at is milk because this was seen by contemporaries as the most liable to manipulation by actors in the food chain, from the cowkeeper through to the wholesaler and retailer. Our conclusion is that the seller of milk was compelled, by a combination of improved technologies of detection and tighter state controls, to modify the mode and reduce the amount of falsification. In addition, we note that the normative ambitions of the authorities led, particularly in Britain, to a need to define what was meant by genuine whole or separated milk and thereby to introduce a regulatory and administrative commentary on the ‘natural’. Such definitions and the legal consequences that followed were strongly contested on both sides of the Channel.

On 24 April 1856, the Brussels mayor proposed the creation of a chemical laboratory for analyzing food. With those of Turin and London, this was one of the first municipal, i.e. official, laboratories in the world. The laboratory’s launch was accompanied by a discourse in which the Brussels inhabitants had a central position. The background to this was the age-old fear of the common people’s insurrection against traders and authorities. The local government wished to give an active role to the inhabitants, not as informants as had been the case in eighteenth-century Paris, but as proactive and responsible citizens. We wish to investigate this alleged move towards the more active role of shoppers: may this be seen as a step toward a modern, post-1920 consumer society in Europe?