Adapting to food safety crises: Interpreting success and failure in the Canadian response to BSE

This paper explores processes of adaptation to food safety crises, and raises questions about what can be understood as success and failure in a crisis response. It presents the outcomes of a qualitative research study of Canada’s beleaguered beef industry, and investigates institutional learning and adaptation following an outbreak of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) in particular. The analysis is guided by a concern with tensions between stability and change in adaptation. It draws on conceptual research on risk and the construction of non-problematicity as a means of symmetrically investigating how risk responses to BSE both opened up and closed down reflexive scrutiny of food and food safety systems. Specific attention is paid to constraints on adaptation imposed by preoccupations with market-led regulation, scientific risk analysis and the maintenance of institutional relations in the face of a potential public controversy. The paper concludes that in order to contend with recurrent crises in modern food-safety systems it is necessary to widen adaptive strategies, and to scrutinise agricultural priorities and food policy as essential aspects of adaptation.