4:00 – 4:50 pm
Food Production beyond Technology: Risks, Fears, Environment, and Labor
A program on food law would naturally begin with food production. Increasingly, consumers are interested in how food was produced, demonstrating that food production is more than agricultural and scientific techniques. Food production raises value-laden questions of identity, personal autonomy, and concern for culture. In addition, advancing technology implicates uncertainty and risk. This panel presents several points of focus on values in food production, approaches to risk and uncertainty in food production, and the appropriate roles for governmental intervention. The program will follow a traditional format– each panelist speaks for 7 to 10 minutes, followed by about 10 minutes of panel discussion and audience participation.
Food safety regulation development and confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) sitting management may seem to be widely disparate subjects, but Professor Tai will bring these together by focusing on the tensions between public participation and scientific expertise in these two different contexts. Rather than providing normative recommendations regarding these issues, however, the focus is on recognizing the implications of public participation structures for the epistemic nature of the scientific information used by agencies in reaching their regulatory decisions.
Agricultural laws affect more than food. Professor Luna will discuss globalization of the agricultural workforce and its impact on domestic Indians and the Purepecha Indians from Mexico. The Purepecha are farmworkers residing on the Cahualla Indian Reservation in California and in difficult housing conditions. The immediate intent is not to lay blame on the tribe housing the farmworkers; but to illustrate how agricultural laws are directly harming both groups with further attendant harm on the environment of an Indian nation.
Professor Chen will discuss the mass marketing of foods derived from organisms modified through recombinant DNA technology which has put extreme pressure on the interpretation and implementation of the United States' basic food safety law, the venerable Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act. In its classic form, the FD&CA reflects its Progressive and New Deal roots. It vests enormous trust in a specialized agency, the Food and Drug Administration, which is presumed to have nonpareil expertise over food safety. The political reality of GM foods, however, has placed the FD&CA and its implementation by the FDA in severe tension with the Organic Foods Production Act and with commercial speech doctrine.
Fear about food is one of the most deeply seated forms of behavioral protection against the natural world. It is precisely here, where food comes into contact with notions of good and evil, that the classic regulatory state must take its stand. The FDA's regulation of foods using rDNA technology upholds the best of the Progressive regulatory tradition and deserves to survive the challenge posed by the OFPA, the revived commercial speech doctrine, and contemporary consumer distrust of governmentally supervised review of science and safety.
Ms. Coit will address local food systems, farm to school programs, zoning issues affecting urban farming.
4:55 - 5:25 pm
The Role of Governments – Labels, Regulation, Economy, and Safety
The Obama administration seems to be taking a more aggressive approach with respect to controlling the food industry through increased regulation. States and local governments are also taking a more pro-active approach. One area where regulation has an obvious role is labeling. Food labeling should be a way to provide consumers with the opportunity to make decisions about what they eat - decisions that may be based not only on safety or nutrition but on other factors such as social or economic issues. But, how can the law better assure that food labels serve these larger purposes? How do other countries address these issues? Each panelist speaks very briefly (5-7 minutes), followed by discussion among the panelists,
Professor McCabe will address the relationship between scientific certainty, food label claims, and consumer information. She will use the gluten-free definition as an example of how Congress asked FDA for a definition in the FALCPA, but that FDA interprets this mandate to require comprehensive review of the status of science on celiac disease as well as product testing.
Professor Hamilton will talk about his perspective from the Obama/Vilsack administration. As you may know he chaired the Iowa Food Policy Council for six years under then Governor Vilsack and am now serving as an informal adviser to him and USDA on various issues - including the new Know Your Farmer Know Your Food effort as well as the People's Garden project.
Professor Wilson will provide a view from across the pond. He started the online Food Law Certificate Program at Michigan State and was chair of the Institute of Food Technologists food law committee for a year as well. But more recently Professor Wilson has lived in Europe working with the Food Directorates in the Netherlands.
5:30 – 6:00 pm
Food Law, Food Law Scholarship and where we go from here.
One of the driving notions behind the open-source program idea is to get folks together who often think about disparate things that bear some relation to food law. Although many of you have been writing about food law for a long time, others of us are moving into the area (I, for example, from natural resources). This suggested topic area will provide a chance for us to discuss, albeit briefly, where we, as legal scholars, see our particular niche (or niches) in the development/transformation of food policy. Two panelists will each briefly present a global perspective, followed by panel reactions.
Professor Schneider will address from agriculture to food. The LLM program at Arkansas recently began to offer “food law” courses. When is agricultural law food law? This shift in focus to consumer-driven issues with value-packed cultural implications is bringing food law issues into the spotlight.
Professor Birdsong will address Critical Rice Theory. What is the role of the academy? Are we asking the right questions? The food choices that are available to us as individuals and collectively are bound up with our system of food law. Law shapes and informs those choices, and the food system shapes and informs the law. The enterprise for legal scholars should be to explore the interlinking web of law and food, taking into account the wide array of values that food and food production systems implicate, and suggest improvements that can help to transform the system into one that is more balanced, just, and sane.
Large Panel -- Where do we go from here? Any or all can chime in.