The object of regulation: Tending the tensions of food safety

Abstract

"I'm struggling to see what it actually is", says Alison, peering into a colander of defrosting meat. What 'it' is, we propose in this paper, is helpfully thought of as 'the object of regulation' in at least three senses which together signal both our inheritance of a Foucauldian problematic and our departure from it. Our suggestion is that much of even the best work on biopolitics, biopower, and biosecurity that has been inspired and informed by these writings has replicated Foucault's own struggle to get to grips with the complexity of matters that he variously refers to as "natural" or "artificial" "givens". By following science and technology studies scholars in using broadly ethnographi..