Revisiting the BSE experience: Hindsight and the politicization of food

This review essay on risk, politics and food focuses particularly on an important new insider account of how the BSE crisis was managed by one of the main civil servants involved. The management of BSE remains a decisive experience in the modern politics of risk that cautions generally against ever downplaying possible risks, and more specifically doing anything 'unnatural' with food. It led to the contemporary politicization of food and with it the insistence on only the organic, local and sustainable. What emerges from this new account is how the interpretation of the BSE experience on which current assumptions rest is very selective and laden with hindsight bias. Through revisiting BSE and the real contexts in which decisions were made, this essay raises important questions both about the politics of risk in general and the new consumer lifestyle politics of 'only natural.'