Those producers then quite often take on additional standalone certifications at the behest of their retailer partners. In cases such as these where a farmer in my sample was certified to multiple standards, I have simplified the information I present by analyzing them based on the standalone standard they follow, on the assumption that that additional level of requirement beyond the baseline will be responsible for observed differences in practices. Additionally, there is a limitation of this method that must be explained: While I did interview several farmers who did not sell to retailers and thus did not carry the mandatory BRC and Red Tractor certifications, no UK farmer in my sample was certified to only one of those two standards, but not both at once. This is problematic because the BRC and Red Tractor are different in their style and focus, and fall into category 3 and category 4 of my typology, respectively. In order to faithfully represent my data with this overlap in mind, the data presented here assume that farmers certified to both of the pre-regulatory assessments can be represented under category 3 because of their BRC membership, grow trays while those additionally certified specifically to e.g. the Tesco NURTURE standard, are assigned to category 4 even though they also carry BRC and Red Tractor certifications.My top policy level hypothesis concerned process-oriented requirements in public regulation, which I expected to be used more in UK law than in US law.
Somewhat contrary to my expectations, UK and US styles of regulation for food safety are broadly similar. Both UK law and US law include regulatory goals at multiple levels, with more general process-oriented language at higher levels and more specific and prescriptive requirements conveyed at the local level. However, the EU policy influence on UK food safety laws is reflected by a strong emphasis on cooperative process and stakeholder education, and a conviction that food businesses are the actor group closest to the problem of food safety and therefore best situated to solve it. In comparison, the US model contains similar efforts toward cooperative education based regulation and process-oriented controls, but at the state rather than the federal level. Collaborative US efforts to educate at the state level are still back grounded by the context of inspection demands and punitive sanctions emanating from the federal level. In summary, my H1 hypothesis was not entirely borne out in the structure of the legal frameworks, but is more closely reflected in the way national level regulation is implemented. Regarding my second policy level hypothesis that the UK’s state regulatory model would show a greater and more broadly-ranging environmental focus than comparable US regulation, my data provide qualified support for this idea.
The UK legal framework under EU law contains an explicit focus on use of the precautionary principle in food safety regulation, and specific requirements relating to traceability, both of which are not emphasized to a comparable degree by US laws. Pesticide residues also loom large in EU consciousness, making their way to member state regulatory frameworks and down to farmers, retailers and the consumer public. My interviews with US retailers and growers suggest that the US produce market by contrast has a narrower focus on pathogens, because that is where the majority of US regulatory pressure falls. Priorities such as chemical safety may not occupy center stage in the face of industry-led safety standards that place greatest importance on microbiological threats. My third policy level hypothesis was also well supported. The regulatory model evidenced by the UK’s due diligence framework acts to protect food businesses from threats beyond the realm of reasonable caution, while motivating broad-based action to control all reasonable avenues of risk. Food businesses know that they must prove they did what they could, so they cover their bases widely. By contrast, the punitive legalistic mobilization of the US’s Park Doctrine in food safety court cases implies that neither ignorance nor due diligence can protect the individual from bearing responsibility. Risk managers under this framework seek to complete specified requirements, and to move remaining potential responsibility for mistakes as far back along the supply chain as possible.
As a result, primary agricultural producers bear both the stress and the costs of complying with checklist standards. My first hypothesis at industry level concerned the breadth of food safety framings and use of process-oriented vs. prescriptive controls in food safety standards. Echoing results at policy level, the set of standards followed by farmers in my sample indicated that food safety is indeed managed in a more holistic way by private standards active in the UK than by those operating in CA. Standards commonly followed by my UK interviewees included a range of additional values such as environmental health, social justice concerns, animal welfare, and chemical safety alongside food safety requirements. Conversely, food safety standards followed by my California interviewees exhibited a narrower focus on foodborne pathogens, and contained few, if any, mentions of other concerns. The second part of this hypothesis, was borne out with striking simplicity. Among the four categories that I created to describe the types of standards active among the farmers I interviewed, standards active in California were the most prescriptive and the most narrowly safety oriented, belonging to my categories 1 and 2, and extending to just one standard in category 3. By contrast, standards followed by my UK sample were largely from the most balanced category reflecting both process and prescriptive controls and a shared focus on food safety and environmental concerns. My second hypothesis at industry level was also potentially borne out, although it is impossible in this study to fully separate individual variables responsible for the effect. The standards evaluated as being most balanced did correlate with most positive farmer opinions about the safety of certified produce and satisfaction with the multi-layered public-private regulatory process. However, different types of standards also corresponded among my farmers with two distinctly different structures of fresh leafy greens supply chains between the two nations, which altered social forces of power and responsibility belonging to various actors in the supply chain. As a result, these supply chain differences may be partly or wholly responsible for making the negative aspects of overlapping standards more noticeable for CA farmers than for UK farmers, potentially increasing the negative feelings observed more often from CA farmers. Additional research would be needed to separate these variables and understand precisely why these effects were observed. My final hypothesis expressed the view that farmers certified to standards with more of an environmental focus and more process-based clauses would be more likely to engage in environmental conservation behaviors, while remaining more satisfied with the food safety regulatory process and its effectiveness. Farmers certified to the most balanced standards from category 4 were more likely to engage in beneficial environmental practices, and less likely to engage in environmentally impactful food safety practices. Although this was strongly borne out, the differences also broke down along national lines. Thus, dry racks for weed there is an unknown degree of effect from national origin, and it is possible that either national attitudes are responsible for the differences that were observed, or that the differences are to some degree responsible for shaping different framings of environmental issues among the two populations. Additional research would be needed to test and confirm these conclusions.
Overall, my research reveals strong or qualified support for several of my hypotheses, suggesting that process-based controls correlate with more positive farmer experiences, and that standards which use a balance of approaches and an expansive view of food safety correlate with both positive farmer experiences and more environmentally friendly landscape practices. In the chapter that follows, I will discuss current and future trends in private food standards in both nations and internationally. I will explore the interaction of effects observed in this chapter with historically-mediated differences in environmental attitudes and differential framings of food safety problems, pointing a way forward for effective co-management of food safety and environmental conservation.During my interviews, a simple difference in the marketing information that reveals supplier relationships in the US and UK lettuce markets appeared to have important effects for how food safety goals are approached in each location. In each nation, perceived public responsibility for food safety falls on a different actor in the produce supply chain, altering the solutions pursued by that actor to ensure it. UK leafy greens sold by the largest grocery retailers are typically sold under the retailer’s own brand name and packaging, with messaging consistent across the full range of food products marketed by that retailer. The brand visible to the consumer on a bag of ready-to eat salad greens is the retail brand; this brand visibility invokes for the consumer the marketing promises, values and reputation for quality which the retailer has worked hard to cultivate. It is this hard-won reputation that is then particularly at stake if food products emblazoned with a retail brand name make consumers sick. Consumers buying California lettuce products, however, are shown a subtly different picture: CA-grown leafy greens are most often sold under individual brand names that either correspond to the actual grower , or to a processing company that provides finished products to large agribusiness brands such as Dole. Although many US grocery retailers also market self-branded product lines carrying the name and logo of their retail chain, self-branded offerings are one of many on the shelf, rather than representing most—or even all— of the fresh produce available in a UK retailer’s produce section. This seemingly small difference has existed for some time, with important effects for food safety risk management . The retailers and farmers I spoke with in both locations agreed that the name on a consumer package has the important effect of defining which actor in the supply chain is seen as being most immediately responsible when a problem such as a food safety outbreak occurs. Because their own brand name appears on the package, UK retailers publicly carry the responsibility for failures and oversights that may result within the supply chain. In my 1 UK interviews, retail representatives perceived great pressure to complete solid due diligence for produce food safety, pressure which they indicated came both from the requirements of UK law and from the need to preserve consumer trust and avoid a very public loss of face in a country with significant, widely shared consumer concerns about product safety dating back to the late 1980s. Conversely, attention after a food safety debacle in the US can often largely bypass the retailer or retailers who sold the affected food, centering quickly on the specific agricultural supplier responsible for producing the contaminated items. This difference in how food safety issues are approached is in part an example of the continuing impact of the BSE crisis in British beef, and the ensuing public relations nightmare and large scale loss of public trust that followed on its heels. British retailers grew to their current-day prominence in part because they offered the consumer brand-based extra protections and guarantees in the wake of the scandal over inadequate regulatory hygiene controls and a flawed government response to the issue. As a result, UK consumers have come to trust retailers more than government, basing their trust on a retailer’s track record of safety and quality . Because US consumers never experienced a similar widespread destruction of consumer confidence in the guarantees offered by science-based public regulation , US retailers 2 do not approach food safety as an arena in which they must regain the hearts of their customers and actively protect themselves from catastrophic losses of consumer trust. Instead, food safety is presumed for all products and all retailers. Retail competition centers around price, freshness, nutrition, and other social values sought by US grocery shoppers. No US retailer wants to be associated with a food safety scare, but if one happens and it can be verified to have come from a specific type of food, the focus of public attention is not usually the name of the retailers. Rather, attention centers generally on the food class responsible, the geographic location of that food’s original harvest or production, and, if known, the brand name of the grower or packer whose name appears on the consumer package . 3 During my fieldwork, I found it interesting that I observed this difference despite the strong UK focus on ready traceability of foodstuffs.