食品安全质量和道德后标准观点.pdf

JEROME R RAVETZ FOOD SAFETY QUALITY AND ETHICS A POST NORMAL PERSPECTIVE Accepted February 10 2002 ABSTRACT I argue that the issues of food quality in the most general sense including purity 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 has shown 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 in those 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 of thinking is obesity whose causes are as yet outside the purview of medicine while its effects constitute an epidemic disease The new drug food syndrome needs a new sort of science what we call post normal This is inquiry at the contested interfaces of science and policy typically it deals with issues where facts are uncertain values in dispute stakes high and decisions urgent With the perspective of post normal science we can better understand some key issues We see that safety is different from risk being pragmatic moral and recursive Also we understand that an appropriate foundation for regulation and ethics is not so much objectivity as awareness In an age when consumers are becoming 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 sense including purity safety and ethics can no longer be resolved through normal science and regulation The reliance on reductionist science as the basis for policy and implementation has shown itself to be inadequate As we in Great Britain emerge from the latest of our ongoing series of food related epidemics there is a broad consensus for radical new thinking about 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 this recent history is familiar to us all and so I will refer to it rather than going over it yet again Instead I will explore some paradoxical phenomena in the food area While paradoxes contribute less than scandals to our feelings of self righteousness they do force us to ponder on our concepts and their limitations Ravetz 2001 Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 15 255 265 2002 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers Printed in the Netherlands 256JEROME R RAVETZ DRUGS AND FOODS I would like us to consider the possibility that a large proportion of our food inhabits a sort of borderland between food and drugs If so then the tasks of ensuring safety and quality and of maintaining ethics require an enrichment of our traditional conceptions of regulation and of the relevant science Let me make it clear at the outset that I speak of enrichment rather than replacement I believe that safety quality and ethics are real although our grasp and management of them is conditioned by our complex envir onment with its technical social and cultural dimensions In the limiting cases which do occur on a large scale people can really starve and be poisoned But before those limits are reached the boundaries and indeed the defi nitions of normality and pathology are to a signifi cant extent nego tiated This is the essential difference between the post normal and the post modern conceptions for us quality is real however much it may be complex compromised and corrupted To illustrate my theme I would like us to consider a few examples of substances that are in this borderland Let s start with coffee In economic terms this is one of the world s most important foodstuffs keeping economies afl oat all over the Third World But in what sense is coffee a food To the best of our knowledge it contributes nothing whatever to nutrition It is as we all know a drug or rather it is a convenient carrier for the drug caffeine It can be argued that this is a quite benign drug bringing a modest pleasure at very low cost and becoming harmful only in very high doses Yet coffee is marketed and regulated as just another food in spite of its irrelevance to the processes of nutrition Let me try another example perhaps more controversial sucrose Although this substance has somemetabolic functions itisnot atall 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 s use In addition to being a bad food I would argue that in its way sucrose is also a drug It destabilizes the body s metabolism and produces adverse reactions that call for more sucrose for their relief I confess to a mild addiction to marmalade The combination of the citric acid hit with the sugar rush is quite sensational in our kitchen an opened jar of marmalade is soon emptied So is sucrose just an unnecessary and harmful food or is it rather a mild drug with long term deleterious effects when taken as if a food Certainly when sucrose is taken in excess it contributes strongly to obesity This last condition is another of those new policy critical entities that defi es scientifi c compartmentalization On the one hand obesity now increasing rapidly and becoming endemic is recognised as a medical FOOD SAFETY QUALITY AND ETHICS257 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 standard training of doctors includes nothing whatever about nutrition or malnutri tion So the doctors are eventually brought in to solve a massive medical problem about whose origins they are offi cially quite ignorant Hence there is no effective medical opposition to the junkfood pushers infl icting sucrose fats and salt on their victims from the earliest age Some UK government agencies say boring sensible things about balanced diets but there is no assistance to schools that wish to escape the junkfood promotions aimed at their pupils Hart 2001 I hope I have shown that the simple distinction between food and drugs is not tenable for policy purposes some important areas lie on the complex and contested borderland between them I believe these para doxical examples establish my case that the quality safety and ethics of food are no longer straightforward problems for solution by science and regulation It is no longer enough for food science to establish that in any given sample of food the good things are present and that the bad things are absent What is good and what is bad depends partly on the context and on the scale level at which the judgment is being made Most noticeably during our frequent epidemics in Britain the relevant science becomes post normal For it has fi tted perfectly to the defi ning 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 How problems are defi ned who defi nes them and who regulates the regulators are now questions that both provide the context for the scientifi c practice of food quality and more important determine its shape This is what post normal science is all about AN APPROPRIATE SCIENCE FOR THE NEW DRUG FOOD SYNDROME It is diffi cult for some to appreciate the nature of the changes that are required of science in the new post normal age Science after all is science facts are facts But in reality it is not so simple sciences come in a great variety and necessarily some sciences are judged to be more scientifi c than others What is the best typical paradigmatic science For a long time the quantitative experimental sciences on the model of Victorian physics have been supreme All others have suffered from physics envy In some cases this has distorted their research programs 258JEROME R RAVETZ in others as in the mathematized behavioral sciences it has produced grotesque caricatures of knowledge As these reductionist sciences have been built into technologies they have accelerated both our dominance over nature and the reaction that nature is preparing against us They are characterized by the technical fi x and the Faustian bargain ideas that were fi rst articulated in connec tion with long lived nuclear wastes Closer to our present theme we have a fi ne example of a reductionist solution to a systemic problem in the management of the global epidemic of Type II Diabetes caused by excess carbohydrates among unprotected populations going over to Western foods Instead of a change in lifestyles to include sensible eating and exercise the industry focuses ondrugs that interfere withthe metabolic pathways 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 are less matured theoretically and socially and less endowed with resources and prestige But all those concerned with food safety will agree that this is a critical area for policy which requires an appropriate sort of science My colleague Silvio Funtowicz and I searched long and hard for a 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 living in are no longer normal for straightforward technical solutions will not suffi ce for our major problems We face problems on a global scale ranging from climate change to AIDS and endocrine disrupters which are qualitatively different even from the great epidemics of the past In response the scientifi c effort that is required can no longer be based on what Thomas Kuhn called normal science In that the practitioners did puzzle solving in blinkered ignorance of the broader issues of their work be they methodological social or ethical Now the crucial areas for inquiry are at the contested interfaces between science and policy that is what we call Post Normal Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993 Ravetz 2000 There are two respects in which these post normal sciences of safety will differ from the more conventional varieties They relate to uncertainty and complexity respectively My education in the former area came from a researcher at the National Radiological Protection Board in England My colleagues and I were preparing a pedigree format for radiological data and we started by adapting the pedigree matrix for Research data When our respondent saw that we gave Laboratory data a higher ranking than Field Historical data she protested vigorously She explained that the hardest part of her job is putting off the enthusiastic scientists who come over from the next building proudly bearing values of parameters derived FOOD SAFETY QUALITY AND ETHICS259 from rigorous physiological experiments For these derived from unnatur ally pure stable and controlled experimental contexts totally unlike the real world in which radioactive substances are taken up and metabolized Coarse data from a fi eld with real whole plants and animals is more useful for these purposes than refi ned data from a sanitary lab Sothe sciences that deal with real world complex problems fi nd that the price of experimental rigor is loss of practical realism Awareness ofthe interaction between uncertainty and values is theother great divide between post normal science and the conventional sort Our understanding of science is still largely in the grip of the naive positivist faith in the objectivity of science and its freedom of contamination by values Thisillusion is all the more remarkable because itis contradicted by the daily practice of elementary statistical testing Without going into technicalities we may say that any statistical test might be overly selective rejecting causal correlations that are probably real or it might be overly sensitive accepting causal correlations that are probably accidental This balance is most frequently expressed through a confi dence limit where a high confi dence limit protects against over sensitivity but makes the test vulnerable to over selectivity What is appropriate for a laboratory experi ment where the main concern is protecting the research literature from spurious results may be quite inappropriate for exploratory or monitoring research 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 normal science practitioners have no knowledge or concern of the source of the particular value of the confi dence limit that is standard for their fi eld they are involved in making a choice between the two types of error The result 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 to prevent over sensitivity are actually giving aid and assistance to those who demand the right to pollute the planet until it is rigorously proved that they are doing harm Both of these considerations come into play when we consider the management of anecdotal evidence This is at the heart of many public debates on quality and safety concerning drugs both sorts and food Ordinary people have vivid experiences of benefi t and harm and they are outraged when the regulators and scientists dismiss their reports as merely anecdotal Of course by defi nition anecdotes are uncontrolled and to a degree unreliable in effect they are invitations to the error of over sensitivity But they refl ect the lived experience of a complex world out 260JEROME R RAVETZ there rather than one governed by the artifi cial conventions of epidemi ology or the theoretical blinkers of lab based science Even ordinary laboratory science encounters anecdotal data in the outliers that require judgments of a post normal character for their management Hence to dismiss anecdotal evidence it to make a commitment to the sort of reality that is being managed by the regulators and their associated scientists that is one where accidents never happen These methodological lessons may come hard to scientists who have pursued a dedicated career to working for the public good within an abstracted and insulated laboratory environment But I fear that there is worse 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 is clear that these are complex problems involving commerce society and culture as well as individual psychology and physiology The scientifi c input will be limited in its scope and infl uence both because of the lack of realism of its database and the lack of certainty in its conclusions and also because of the presence of alternative perspectives and value commitments among the participants in the dialogue This situation is quite familiar to scientists working in an industrial context what makes their contribution worthwhile there is the success of the product in which it is embedded In effect the peer community for evaluating industrial research is extended to include managers and ultimately consumers The essential message of Post Normal Science is that in policy related science there must be an analogous extension of the peer community moving outwards from the accredited scientists and regulators to include all those with a concern for resolving the issue Such an extended peer community is now widely accepted as necessary for the improvement of the legitimacy of the policy process and hence the authority of its outcome But I argue further the extension of the peer community actually improves the quality of its scientifi c aspects What happens out there where manufacturers instructions are misunderstood or disobeyed and where government regulations are evaded or fl outed is essential for under standing what the policy problem is really about and what sort of science will contribute to its resolution If there were any lingering doubts about the relevance of the imperfections of the real world to science policy advice the Stewart report on the BSE disaster should have dispelled them IEGMP 2000 Also the new extended peer community must be real unless the scientists discover that they have something to learn from others with a complementary knowledge and expertise the process will be a sham and quickly exposed as such It cannot be denied that this extension is itself a FOOD SAFETY QUALITY AND ETHICS261 political act since there will always be vested interests on both industrial and government sides who very much prefer a sanitized version of the problems studied on the basis of the fi ction that the world is like the lab But as we have seen the work of the lab must be enhanced and enriched by a constant dialogue with its context in nature and human society QUALITY AND SAFETY THE LESSONS OF COMPLEXITY I should remark briefl y on these two attributes as they form the core of the theme of the 3rd EurSafe Congress Some might say that I have relativ ized scientifi c knowledge in the policy context I would rather say that I have complexifi ed it That is I have shown that scientifi c information is embedded in complex systems or rather refl exive complex systems Funtowicz and Ravetz 1994 These are characterized by the presence of different scale levels and of subsystems that are not totally subor dinate having purposes of their own as well as functions in the broader scheme of things Such systems grow and evolve and they can also decay and collapse Quality is easily understood as a systemic property just by considering the Latin motto quis custodiet custodes ipsos who guards the guardians This states a recursive property with no apparent end and the guardianship or quality control function will depend on its recursive level