La production de la sécurité sanitaire au quotidien : l’inspection des services vétérinaires en abattoir

Slaughterhouses are a decisive link in a healthy food chain. Officials from veterinary services, stationed there full-time, work next to personnel on the line so that the food produced is safe for human consumption. Each inspector has to lay the grounds for his/her individual position of authority to exercise controls. This control also depends on ongoing exchanges among inspection team members and on their knowing the distance to keep from workers on the line. Recent food and health scares, along with reforms for modernizing interventions by public authorities, have made controls more formalistic. References to standards and procedures for carrying out interventions and filing reports have been thoroughly modified. This study in France of the switch from an educational approach to food inspection to a procedural one, wherein written texts have an unprecedented scope, focuses on the concrete implications for inspectors, especially in terms of human relations. Light is shed on how the possibility of legal action has shaped these changes.