And for every thwarted disease outbreak, how many heartbreaks do food confiscations generate?

Regarding notions of food safety, purity and contamination as serving national narratives through the (micro)biopolitics of custom conditions, perception of appetite and food A Heartbreak for Every Thwarted Desease Outbreak asks what else is put at risk by labeling some food items as permissible while other as impermissible to cross national borders? 

The modern nation has been conceptualized as a body with organs, including digestive organs. The definition of ‘good food’, understood to appropriatly satisfy ‘civilized’ appetites and nourish healthy bodies has served “as both the creation and defense of national identity” (DuPuis, Garcia, and Mitchell 2017, 3).  

As Paxon writes, food systems reflect the paradoxical logics of national narratives and that “border operations deem some edible materials as appropriate for absorption by the national body politic while rejecting others as filthy, adulterated, infected, misbranded or otherwise unfit”. Through highlighting these judgments “as the result of synecdochic reason – and more precisely, of competing regimes of synecdochic connection that qualify (different) parts differently to arrive at contingent assessments of wholes” this work offers to rethink cross-border politics and food safety systems and to re-assess embedd perceptions, administrative and procedural assessements as socially and politically relevant with direct impact on perceptions of appetite, food and taste pallets.