Metabolising risk: food scares and the un/re-making of Belgian beef

In this paper we explore the event of foodscares as an example of what Callon calls 'hot situations', in which the landscape of competing knowledge claims is at its most molten, and alternative production and consumption practices galvanise new modes of sense-making against the market and state-sanctioned rationalities of industrialisation. Through a case study of the Belgian cooperative Coprosain and its meat products, we examine the 'stuff' of food as a ready messenger of connectedness and affectivity in which 'risk' is transacted as a property both of the growing distance between the spaces of production and consumption and of the enduring metabolic intimacies between human and nonhuman bodies. "the small habits of consumption, typically daily food habits, can perform a percussive role in organizing large-scale consumption patterns... made up of much more complex orders of repetition and improvisation.".