Paper short abstract:

Documentation is a central to producing food safety within late capitalist food systems. The documentation of animals destined to be food, and their relations to humans and each other, also has other effects, including making certain beings visible within institutions, and others unaccounted for.

Paper long abstract:

Documentary processes—the creation of documents, as well as their organization and circulation—are central mechanisms of institutionalization within late capitalism. Documents provide evidence of work accomplished, materials processed, and interactions that have occurred, as particular beings and objects are evidenced and tracked across borders, between sites of production and processing, within and among bureaucracies. Documentation of people—in the form of passports, visas, work permits—is an important way in which state and non-state institutions not only track who is where, but also attempt to control movements of various types, sorting people, for instance, into categories of belonging and foreignness. What does it mean, then, if some non-human animals in the EU and elsewhere, such as cows and pigs, also require passports (alongside other documentation), as they cross borders from birthplaces, to raising facilities, to slaughterhouses, and are eventually incorporated into food production? What types of beings are constituted through this sort of documentary institutionalization, which is central to modern modes of ensuring food safety? Based on ethnographic and linguistic anthropological fieldwork among northern Italian heritage food producers, this paper treats the documentary institutionalization of animals destined to be food to ask: what types of evidence are documents like passports? What kinds of beings are constituted through institutionalizing processes such as documentation? It will show how documents—or their absence—may produce states of safety or purity, as well as risk and danger, making certain beings and objects visible and recognizable within institutions, and others invisible and unaccounted for.