“Don’t pack a pest”: parts, wholes, and the porosity of food borders
Name
Don't Pack a Pest FCS final revision.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
305.65 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
978912cf076df3b5d8958e440310cd80
Author(s)
Paxson, Heather Anne
Date Issued
July 2019
Journal
Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Citation
Paxson, Heather. '“Don’t pack a pest”: parts, wholes, and the porosity of food borders.' Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 22, 5 (July 2019): 657-673. © 2019 Association for the Study of Food and Society
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Food retailers, restaurateurs and transnational families rely on continual border-crossings for the global circulation of foodstuffs. Those crossings are highly regulated. Not everything gets in. This paper provides an overview of how food safety is (unevenly) enacted at U.S. ports of entry. Where government regulators and enforcement agents perceive in certain foods danger of adulteration or contamination, importers and producers also experience threat to customary practices of foodmaking, provisioning and commerce. Synecdochic, part-for-whole, reasoning guides food journeys and helps determine the fate of perishable foods as they attempt to cross semi-permeable thresholds that delineate and connect nation-states, and that make possible, even as they also restrict, the flow of international trade.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Anthropology
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2019.1638136
