Regardless of one’s political persuasion, there are a few basic tasks that most citizens would consider to be “essential” functions of government, and food inspection counts among them. Publicly mandated inspections served various functions over the decades: to prevent fraud and establish confidence in the marketplace, to ensure orderly marketing through quality assessment and grading, and to protect consumers from potentially hazardous or unsafe products. From milk to meat, fertilizer to fruits, inspections of food and other agricultural commodities became a widely accepted—and important—function of governments well before the twentieth century.1 Even in the infamous “America First” budget of 2017, which proposed billions in cuts across a swath of nonmilitary government programs, the Trump administration proposed a “fully funded” Food Safety and Inspection Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).2 Food inspectors have worked through government shutdowns and global pandemics; inspection is unquestionably “essential work.” Yet citizens frequently disagree over what inspection should mean, who should carry it out, and how they should accomplish that task. In “The Fox Guarding the Henhouse,” I analyze the prospects and limits of business selfregulation in food safety inspection through a study of the growth and development of the American poultry industry. Drawing on archival records, original field interviews, newspapers, periodicals, and government documents, I show how the debate over how to achieve “safe” and “inspected” chicken influenced not just the laws and regulations but also the organizational structure of firms, the nature of market competition, the trajectory of technological innovations, and even the biology of meat-type chickens. The project also reveals how an emerging system of international trade affected post-1945 developments in U.S. law and policy, and how American business leaders worked alongside regulators to reshape global standards at the turn of the twenty-first century. The dissertation begins in the mid-1950s, when an unlikely coalition of consumer advocates, organized labor, and a nascent poultry industry mobilized their congressional representatives to establish mandatory government inspection of poultry products in interstate commerce. This broad consensus around the need for “government inspection” of food

中文翻译：

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守卫鸡舍的狐狸：1946-2002 年食品安全中的共同监管和消费者保护

不管一个人的政治主张如何，有一些基本任务被大多数公民认为是政府的“基本”职能，食品检验就是其中之一。几十年来，公共强制检查服务于各种功能：防止欺诈和建立市场信心，通过质量评估和分级确保有序营销，以及保护消费者免受潜在危险或不安全产品的侵害。从牛奶到肉类，从化肥到水果，食品和其他农产品的检查早在 20 世纪之前就已成为政府广泛接受且重要的职能。 1 即使在臭名昭著的 2017 年“美国优先”预算中，该预算提出了数十亿跨越一系列非军事政府项目，特朗普政府提议在美国农业部 (USDA) 设立“资金充足”的食品安全和检验服务机构。2 检查无疑是“必不可少的工作”。然而，公民经常在检查的含义、应该由谁执行以及他们应该如何完成这项任务上存在分歧。在《守鸡场的狐狸》中，我通过对美国家禽业的成长和发展的研究，分析了企业自律在食品安全检查中的前景和局限性。利用档案记录、原始实地采访、报纸、期刊和政府文件，我展示了关于如何实现“安全”和“经过检验”的鸡肉的争论不仅影响了法律法规，还影响了公司的组织结构、市场竞争的性质、技术创新的轨迹，甚至肉类的生物学型鸡。该项目还揭示了新兴的国际贸易体系如何影响 1945 年后美国法律和政策的发展，以及美国商界领袖如何在 21 世纪之交与监管机构合作重塑全球标准。这篇论文始于 1950 年代中期，当时一个由消费者权益倡导者、有组织的劳工和新兴的家禽业组成的不太可能的联盟动员了他们的国会代表，对州际贸易中的家禽产品进行强制性政府检查。