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1、JEROME R.RAVETZFOOD SAFETY,QUALITY,AND ETHICS A POST-NORMALPERSPECTIVE(Accepted February 10,2002)ABSTRACT.I argue that the issues of food quality,in the most general sense includingpurity,safety,and ethics,can no longer be resolved through“normal”science and regula-tion.The reliance on reductionist
2、science as the basis for policy and implementation hasshown 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 inthose cases the substance is either a pure drug,or a bad food with drug-
3、like properties;both are marketed as if they were foods.An example of the inadequacy of old ways ofthinking is obesity,whose causes are as yet outside the purview of medicine,while itseffects constitute an epidemic disease.The new drug/food syndrome needs a new sort ofscience,what we call“post-norma
4、l.”This is inquiry at the contested interfaces of scienceand policy;typically it deals with issues where facts are uncertain,values in dispute,stakeshigh,and decisions urgent.With the perspective of post-normal science,we can betterunderstand some key issues.We see that“safety”is different from“risk
5、,”being pragmatic,moral,and recursive.Also,we understand that an appropriate foundation for regulationand ethics is not so much“objectivity”as“awareness.”In an age when“consumers”arebecoming concerned“citizens,”the relevant science must become post-normal.KEY WORDS:ethics,food safety,post-normal sci
6、ence,qualityINTRODUCTION:INSTRUCTIVE PARADOXESI want to argue that the issues of food quality,in the most general senseincluding purity,safety,and ethics,can no longer be resolved through“normal”science and regulation.The reliance on reductionist science asthe basis for policy and implementation has
7、 shown itself to be inadequate.As we in Great Britain emerge from the latest of our ongoing series offood-related epidemics,there is a broad consensus for radical new thinkingabout food,its science and regulation,and its place in our culture.In intro-ducing my discussion of the post-normal approach,
8、I will assume that thisrecent history is familiar to us all,and so I will refer to it rather than goingover it yet again.Instead,I will explore some paradoxical phenomena inthe food area.While paradoxes contribute less than scandals to our feelingsof self-righteousness,they do force us to ponder on
9、our concepts and theirlimitations(Ravetz,2001).Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 15:255265,2002.2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers.Printed in the Netherlands.256JEROME R.RAVETZDRUGS AND FOODSI would like us to consider the possibility that a large proportion of ourfood inhabits a sort of
10、 borderland between food and drugs.If so,then thetasks of ensuring safety and quality,and of maintaining ethics,require anenrichment of our traditional conceptions of regulation and of the relevantscience.Let me make it clear at the outset that I speak of enrichment ratherthan replacement.I believe
11、that safety,quality,and ethics are real,althoughour grasp and management of them is conditioned by our complex envir-onment,with its technical,social,and cultural dimensions.In the limitingcases(which do occur on a large scale),people can really starve and bepoisoned.But before those limits are reac
12、hed,the boundaries,and indeedthe definitions,of normality and pathology are to a significant extent nego-tiated.This is the essential difference between the post-normal and thepost-modern conceptions;for us,quality is real,however much it may becomplex,compromised,and corrupted.To illustrate my them
13、e,I would like us to consider a few examples ofsubstances that are in this borderland.Lets start with coffee.In economicterms,this is one of the worlds most important foodstuffs,keepingeconomies afloat all over the Third World.But in what sense is coffeea food?To the best of our knowledge,it contrib
14、utes nothing whatever tonutrition.It is,as we all know,a drug;or rather it is a convenient carrier forthe drug caffeine.It can be argued that this is a quite benign drug,bringinga modest pleasure at very low cost,and becoming harmful only in veryhigh doses.Yet coffee is marketed and regulated as jus
15、t another food,inspite 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 i
16、n many ways a very inferior sort of sugar for the bodysuse.In addition to being a bad food,I would argue that in its way sucroseis also a drug.It destabilizes the bodys metabolism and produces adversereactions that call for more sucrose for their relief.I confess to a mildaddiction to marmalade.The
17、combination of the citric acid hit with thesugar rush is quite sensational;in our kitchen an opened jar of marmaladeis soon emptied.So is sucrose just an unnecessary and harmful food,or isit rather a mild drug with long-term deleterious effects when taken as if afood?Certainly,when sucrose is taken
18、in excess,it contributes strongly toobesity.This last condition is another of those new policy-critical entities thatdefies scientific compartmentalization.On the one hand,obesity(nowincreasing rapidly and becoming endemic)is recognised as a medicalFOOD SAFETY,QUALITY,AND ETHICS257problem,for it lea
19、ds to some quite well understood illnesses and diseases.But obesity itself is not a“disease;”and,in the UK at least,the standardtraining of doctors includes nothing whatever about nutrition or malnutri-tion.So the doctors are eventually brought in to solve a massive medicalproblem,about whose origin
20、s they are officially quite ignorant.Hencethere is no effective medical opposition to the junkfood pushers,inflictingsucrose,fats,and salt on their victims from the earliest age.Some UKgovernment agencies say boring sensible things about balanced diets;but there is no assistance to schools that wish
21、 to escape the junkfoodpromotions aimed at their pupils(Hart,2001).I hope I have shown that the simple distinction between food anddrugs is not tenable for policy purposes;some important areas lie on thecomplex and contested borderland between them.I believe these para-doxical examples establish my
22、case that the quality,safety,and ethics offood are no longer straightforward problems for solution by science andregulation.It is no longer enough for food science to establish that inany given sample of food the good things are present and that the badthings are absent.What is“good”and what is“bad”
23、depends partly on thecontext,and on the scale-level at which the judgment is being made.Mostnoticeably during our frequent epidemics in Britain,the relevant sciencebecomes post-normal.For it has fitted perfectly to the defining rubric:“facts are uncertain,values in dispute,stakes high and decisions
24、urgent.”But even whenever broader questions of food policy are being discussed,we are faced with severe uncertainties and serious value-loading.Howproblems are defined,who defines them,and who regulates the regulators,are now questions that both provide the context for the scientific practiceof food
25、 quality and,more important,determine its shape.This is whatpost-normal science is all about.AN APPROPRIATE SCIENCE FOR THE NEW DRUG/FOODSYNDROMEIt is difficult for some to appreciate the nature of the changes that arerequired of science in the new post-normal age.Science,after all,isscience;facts a
26、re facts.But in reality it is not so simple;sciences comein a great variety,and necessarily some sciences are judged to be morescientific than others.What is the best,typical,paradigmatic science?For a long time,the quantitative-experimental sciences,on the modelof Victorian physics,have been suprem
27、e.All others have suffered from“physics-envy.”In some cases this has distorted their research programs,258JEROME R.RAVETZin others(as in the mathematized behavioral sciences)it has producedgrotesque caricatures of knowledge.As these reductionist sciences have been built into technologies,theyhave ac
28、celerated both our dominance over nature,and the reaction thatnature is preparing against us.They are characterized by the“technicalfix”and the“Faustian bargain,”ideas that were first articulated in connec-tion with long-lived nuclear wastes.Closer to our present theme,wehave a fine example of a red
29、uctionist solution to a systemic problem,in the management of the global epidemic of Type II Diabetes,causedby excess carbohydrates among unprotected populations going over toWestern foods.Instead of a change in lifestyles to include sensible eatingand exercise,the industry focuses ondrugs that inte
30、rfere withthe metabolicpathways of insulin production(OConnell,2001).In striking contrast to the high-tech,high-capital,globalized sciences,we have the newer sciences of“cleanup and survival.”Typically,they areless matured theoretically and socially,and less endowed with resourcesand prestige.But al
31、l those concerned with food safety will agree thatthis is a critical area for policy,which requires an appropriate sort ofscience.My colleague Silvio Funtowicz and I searched long and hard fora name for this.After several tries,we decided to call it“post-normal.”This has two sorts of connotations.Fi
32、rst,that the times we are livingin are no longer“normal,”for straightforward technical solutions willnot suffice for our major problems.We face problems on a global scale,ranging from climate change to AIDS and endocrine disrupters,whichare qualitatively different even from the great epidemics of th
33、e past.Inresponse,the scientific effort that is required can no longer be based onwhat Thomas Kuhn called“normal science.”In that,the practitioners did“puzzle-solving,”in blinkered ignorance of the broader issues of theirwork,be they methodological,social,or ethical.Now the crucial areas forinquiry
34、are at the contested interfaces between science and policy;that iswhat we call“Post-Normal”(Funtowicz and Ravetz,1993;Ravetz,2000).There are two respects in which these post-normal sciences of safetywill differ from the more conventional varieties.They relate to uncertaintyand complexity,respectivel
35、y.My education in the former area came froma researcher at the National Radiological Protection Board in England.Mycolleagues and I were preparing a“pedigree”format for radiological data,and we started by adapting the pedigree matrix for Research data.Whenour respondent saw that we gave“Laboratory”d
36、ata a higher ranking than“Field/Historical”data,she protested vigorously.She explained that thehardest part of her job is putting off the enthusiastic scientists who comeover from the next building,proudly bearing values of parameters derivedFOOD SAFETY,QUALITY,AND ETHICS259from rigorous physiologic
37、al experiments.For these derived from unnatur-ally pure,stable,and controlled experimental contexts,totally unlike thereal world in which radioactive substances are taken up and metabolized.Coarse data from a field with real,whole plants and animals is more usefulfor these purposes than refined data
38、 from a sanitary lab.Sothe sciences thatdeal with real-world,complex problems find that the price of experimentalrigor is loss of practical realism.Awareness ofthe interaction between uncertainty and values is theothergreat divide between post-normal science and the conventional sort.Ourunderstandin
39、g of science is still largely in the grip of the naive positivistfaith in the“objectivity”of science and its freedom of contamination by“values.”Thisillusion is all the more remarkable,because itis contradictedby the daily practice of elementary statistical testing.Without going intotechnicalities,w
40、e may say that any statistical test might be overly selective,rejecting causal correlations that are probably real;or it might be overlysensitive,accepting causal correlations that are probably accidental.Thisbalance is most frequently expressed through a“confidence limit,”wherea high confidence lim
41、it protects against over-sensitivity but makes the testvulnerable to over-selectivity.What is appropriate for a laboratory experi-ment,where the main concern is protecting the research literature fromspurious results,may be quite inappropriate for exploratory or monitoringresearch,where weak signals
42、 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“normalscience”practitioners have no knowledge or concern of the source of theparticular value of the confidence limit that is standa
43、rd for their field,they are involved in making a choice between the two types of error.Theresult 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 des
44、igned toprevent over-sensitivity,are actually giving aid and assistance to those whodemand the right to pollute the planet until it is rigorously proved that theyare doing harm.Both of these considerations come into play when we consider themanagement of“anecdotal”evidence.This is at the heart of ma
45、ny publicdebates on quality and safety,concerning drugs(both sorts)and food.Ordinary people have vivid experiences of benefit and harm;and theyare outraged when the regulators and scientists dismiss their reports as“merely anecdotal.”Of course,by definition,anecdotes are uncontrolled,and to a degree
46、 unreliable;in effect they are invitations to the error of over-sensitivity.But they reflect the lived experience of a complex world out260JEROME R.RAVETZthere,rather than one governed by the artificial conventions of epidemi-ology or the theoretical blinkers of lab-based science.Even ordinarylabora
47、tory science encounters anecdotal data,in the“outliers”that requirejudgments of a post-normal character for their management.Hence todismiss anecdotal evidence it to make a commitment to the sort of realitythat is being managed by the regulators and their associated scientists:thatis one where accid
48、ents never happen.These methodological lessons may come hard to scientists who havepursued a dedicated career to working for the public good within anabstracted and insulated laboratory environment.But I fear that there isworse to come.If we consider a major policy issue,such as“obesity”or“sucrose a
49、buse”or Type II Diabetes in our present discussion,then it isclear that these are complex problems involving commerce,society,andculture as well as individual psychology and physiology.The scientificinput will be limited in its scope and influence,both because of the lack ofrealism of its database a
50、nd the lack of certainty in its conclusions,and alsobecause of the presence of alternative perspectives and value-commitmentsamong the participants in the dialogue.This situation is quite familiar toscientists working in an industrial context;what makes their contributionworthwhile there is the succ