plate IVThe Countries
The German Shelf
Germany's page in the World-of-Food index filed its food governance in German: three consumer watchdogs, a run of federal research institutes, two ministries, and a long shelf of sector associations.
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Open germany.htm in the archive and the atlas's standing question, who in this nation speaks officially or scientifically about food, gets answered at German length and in German words: three consumer watchdogs, a run of federal research institutes, two ministries with two safety offices behind them, and more than two dozen sector associations, nearly all of them named only in the country's own language.
A page kept in a national language
The French page, read earlier in this monograph, filed its consumer unions and its schools in French names that an English reader could still parse: UFC-Que Choisir, INRA, ENSIA. The German page does not make that concession. Foodwatch.de keeps its own name, but the institutes and associations run in German throughout: Bundesanstalt, Bundesverband, Fachverband, Zentralverband. The directory did not translate its drawers for the reader; it filed each country the way that country filed itself, and Germany's filing cabinet runs in German.
The three watchdogs
At the top of the page sit the bodies that watch the food on behalf of the eater rather than the trade: Foodwatch.de, the campaigning consumer group; Verbraucherzentrale Hamburg, one of the regional consumer centres that Germany keeps state by state; and Stiftung Warentest, the product-testing foundation whose verdicts on food, like its verdicts on everything else it tests, carry weight with German shoppers. A page that opens with a testing foundation before it opens with a single company is making the same claim the French page made: the watchdog is filed first.
The federal institutes
Below the watchdogs the page runs through a shelf of federal research institutes, each built around one commodity: the Bundesanstalt für Fleischforschung (BAFF) for meat, the Bundesanstalt für Milchforschung in Kiel (BAfM) for dairy, the Bundesanstalt für Getreide-, Kartoffel- und Fettforschung (BAGKF) for cereals, potatoes and fats, and a dedicated brewing school in Berlin, the Versuchs- und Lehranstalt für Brauerei. The Deutsches Institut für Lebensmitteltechnik and the Technische Universität Berlin sit beside them. Where the French page handed the reader to the great schools (ENITIAA, ENSBANA, ENVT), the German page hands the reader to a federal institute built for a single commodity. The structure differs; the instinct, that food science belongs to named public institutions rather than to any one company, is the same instinct the atlas records on every national page.
Two ministries, and the one that no longer exists
The page lists two ministries by their initials: the Bundesministerium für Gesundheit (BMG), the health ministry, and the Bundesministerium für Verbraucherschutz, Ernährung und Landwirtschaft (BMVEL), the ministry then responsible for consumer protection, food and agriculture. The second name is itself a small dating mark. The BMVEL was renamed in 2005, folded into what later became the Bundesministerium für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft (BMEL); the directory's page still carries the older name, frozen at the moment it was filed, in the same way the atlas's misspelled country files carry the typing of the year they were kept. Beside the two ministries the page also names the Bundesamt für Verbraucherschutz und Lebensmittelsicherheit (BVL) and the Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung (BfR), the two federal offices created in the early 2000s to run food safety and risk assessment at arm's length from the ministries, a split that German food administration still keeps today.
The shelf of associations
The longest run on the page is the trade shelf itself, association after association, each standing for one commodity the way the European federations stand for one commodity at the Brussels level: Deutscher Brauer-Bund for the brewers, Deutscher Kaffee-Verband for coffee, Deutscher Teeverband for tea, Deutscher Weinbauverband for the wine growers, Milchindustrie-Verband for the dairy industry, Verein der Zuckerindustrie for sugar, Fachverband der Gewürzindustrie for spices, Zentralverband des Deutschen Bäckerhandwerks for the baking trade, Zentralverband der Deutschen Geflügelwirtschaft for poultry. Nothing on this run is a brand; every entry is a Verband, a Verein or a Bund, an association speaking for its members rather than a company speaking for itself. It is the national mirror of the page this monograph has already called the index's roof beam, the international federations of international.htm, except that here every signature is German.
What the German shelf still teaches
Taken together, the German page argues the same point the atlas of nations argues everywhere, that food governance is a national instrument first and a European one second, but it argues it in a country dense enough with institutions that the page needed four separate rows: watchdogs, institutes, ministries, associations. A reader who had already learned the French shelf's shorter list could open germany.htm and recognise the same four kinds of drawer, filled in a stricter language and a longer run. That recognition, the atlas's whole design working again on a second country, is what this monograph keeps of the German page: not the Bundesanstalt or the Verband by name, most of which have since reorganised or renamed themselves, but the shape of the shelf that filed them.
