ICON S Conference 17 – 19 June 2016 Humboldt University Berlin

36 CONSTRUCTING BORDERS
AND OTHERNESS THROUGH
FOOD REGULATION
Food has the power to bring people together, but also
to set them apart. This panel will explore how different
legal systems conceptualize “us” and “them” through
laws and court decisions concerning the production,
consumption, and sale of food products, elucidating the
ways in which legal actors use food regulation to think
about “otherness.” Anthropologists have long shown
that food is symbolic of social relationships, reflecting
the various gender, race, and socio-economic hierarchies
found in a given culture. As panelists will argue,
more often than not, the regulation of food is a mirror
image of a society’s otherness anxieties, whether the
problematic “other” are people eating different foods
(immigrants, racial and religious minorities, low income
populations), non-human animals (eaten by some, revered
by others), or substances found in foods which do
not belong there (e.g. pesticides in crops, silicon in milk).
Participants
Name of Chair
Room
Mathilde Cohen
Lara Fornabaio
Margherita Poto
Yofi Tirosh
Diana R.H. Winters
Aeyal Gross
Alberto Alemanno
BE2 E34
Mathilde Cohen: The Comparative Constitutional
Law of Cows and Milk: India and the United States
India and the US appear to have dramatically different
constitutional regimes related to cows. The US
Constitution does not mention cows, but the Supreme
Court has developed an elaborate case law on milk.
Yet, none of these cases exhibits concern for cows’
welfare. By contrast, the Indian Constitution declares:
“the State shall take steps for prohibiting the slaughter
of cows and other milk and draught cattle.” This paper
makes two contributions. First, despite seemingly opposed
constitutional regimes, similarities can be found
in the ways in which India and the US negotiate cows’
status. Both are interested in cows qua milk producers
rather than non-human animals whose welfare is of
independent value. Second, the constitutional predilection
for cows and milk has failed to meet its promise
to benefit humans. In both countries, milk and cows
feature as components of an exclusionary politics used
to oppress “others” reinforcing inequities between racial,
social, and religious groups.
Lara Fornabaio and Margherita Poto: The New
Frontiers of Food Identification: Shaping a Better
World Through Food Choices
Food identifies us, as it is interlaced with social
fabric and lifestyle. We have been experiencing an
evolution from a model based on an almost perfect
overlap between food production and food culture, to
a new one, in which food is more related than ever to
economics, technology and science. While in the past,
people were able to personally ascertain whether their
food was safe, nowadays, we are no longer able to
judge our food. We need governments to ensure the
safety of the food supply, as the less we know about
what we eat, the more our food becomes “other”. The
presentation discusses the needs for a shift from consumer-oriented
marketing strategies and top-down
regulations toward a new paradigm, focused on effective
sustainability. The role of public law in this new
model will be examined: on the one hand it supports
grass-roots initiatives, on the other hand it fosters information
labeling, which enables consumers to identify
environmentally detrimental foods.
Yofi Tirosh: The Law and Disgust Debate Revisited:
A Case Study of Contaminated Milk
Disgust is a complex emotion. It repeatedly moves
between the universal essentialist and bodily on the
one hand and the culturally specific and value-laden
on the other hand. These movements blur the distinctions
between nature and culture mind and body
and universal and relative. These qualities of disgust
challenge the law whose modus operandi is based on
clear-cut analytical categorization. Whether disgust
should be part of legal discourse and doctrine has
been a subject of heated debates by legal philosophers.
Even those who like Martha Nussbaum strongly object
allotting disgust a place in law concede that disgust
should be legally recognized as long as it is carefully
restricted to its core universal and value-free formation.
This paper contributes to the disgust debate by
conducting an extensive analysis of one Israeli case
which concerned the selling of milk that turned out to
be tainted with silicon.
Diana R.H. Winters: The Fragmentation of Food
Policy
The regulation of food in the United States is exceedingly
complex. Local, state, and federal regulation
all coexist, and common law remedies supplement
positive law. Strata of regulation are necessary because
patterns of production and consumption vary
by region and demographic, while federal regulation
provides regulatory uniformity.
Local bodies struggle to sustain autonomy in response
to local preference while working within a centralized
system, federal agencies struggle to maintain
regulatory uniformity to foster a national marketplace,
and the result is often friction between regulatory
spheres. This is because these spheres of authority
Concurring panels 68