Introduction

Like many Irish country women, mother used the words‘it's a crime’ to describe particular kinds of badthings. These were bad things that unjustifiablyharmed someone or something in a significant way,but were not against the law. Transgressions thatwere crimes in the eyes of the justice system didnot need mother to name them as such. Such crimescalled for remedy, but she had only her words. It iswith this colloquial community sense of crime thatthis discussion of food crimes and the shadow sidesof ‘agri-food safety governance’ is situated.

Unlike the justice system's concept of crime,‘colloquial crimes’ do not necessarily involve anidentifiable criminal or individual agent. The caseagainst agri-food safety governance will enlist newfeminist materialisms that offer innovative ways ofthinking about safety in terms of the often‘unpredictable and unwanted actions and exchangesbetween human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecologicalsystems, chemical agents, and other actors’ (Alaimo,2010, p 2). This conceptual assistance is invaluablefor ensuring future food is safe and also good.These new ontologies embody a post-human turn inthat they collapse the radical distinction betweensociety and nature, subject and object, humanity andmatter. Alaimo offers the concept oftrans-corporeality to theorise ‘interchanges andinterconnections between various bodily natures … ofhuman corporeality with the more-than-human worldand the often-invisible material flows and forcesbetween people, nature, places, political andeconomic systems’ (2010, p 9). As a concept,trans-corporeality shifts understandings ofagri-food safety governance away from individualhealth toward understanding human health asinseparable from the ‘health’ of the eco-system andthe more-than-human. Policies that pursue individualhuman health or food safety in isolation from theentanglements of people, natures, things andinstitutions are misguided. Much agri-food safetygovernance operates within outdated modernisthuman/nature stuff framings – framings that nowthreaten earthly survival in the Anthropocene(Haraway, 2008).

Yet agri-food safety is so intuitively sensible. Timidinterjections at meetings with food safety andagri-food governance regulatory authorities, atfarmers’ market meetings or food security roundtables are often met with discomfort, if nothostility.