Essay · August 2026
The gift and the trap of a standard
A standard is a gift before it is a trap.
It is a common reference point — a stick planted in open ground so that strangers who share no language, no legal system and no history of dealing with one another can nevertheless agree on point of reference and trade. For the most part, it is designed as easy to comply with and easy to enforce, and those two properties are not small. Without them there is no international food trade worth the name, and a great deal of what any of us eat would not exist.
Now watch it turn.
Every society that sits close to a standard has, in effect, written that standard. It reflects the capacities they already had, the testing infrastructure they had already built, the evidence they could afford to generate. And because our standards are now properly evidence-based and science-based — which is a genuine achievement and not something I would undo — those who control the production of evidence exert an influence on the outcome that is entirely disproportionate. The people who would benefit most from a seat at that table are, with grim reliability, not in the room when the line is drawn.
The result is exclusion conducted in the language of public health. I want to be careful here, because the wealthy are entitled to set demanding standards for their own food, and I would defend that right. The problem is not strictness. The problem is that we have built no road.
The tyranny of the binary
Food safety is treated as a binary event. Safe or unsafe. Pass or fail. The consignment is admitted or it is destroyed, and there is no meaningful difference between missing the line by a hair and missing it by an order of magnitude. Failure is failure, and failure means exclusion. Granted in reality there is often some room for negotiation, thus the previous statement is somewhat unjust, yet, the spirit of compliance testing still remains the same.
Consider what this does to a national market that sits a long way from the line. Any serious improvement will take longer than any political mandate. Any surveillance program will, in its first year, do nothing but document how bad things are — usually far worse than the population believed. The minister who starts measuring is the minister who is blamed. So the rational move is not to improve. The rational move is not to look.
A system that was designed to raise the floor has, for the countries furthest below it, removed every incentive to try. We then observe the resulting stagnation and read it as evidence that the standards were necessary all along.
The two-tier system we already have
The obvious objection to anything I am about to propose is that flexibility means dumping substandard food on poor people, and that a two-tier system is precisely what a universal standard exists to prevent.
I would ask the objector to look at what the current arrangement actually governs.
International standards govern food that is good enough to cross a border into a wealthy market. The overwhelming majority of what people in low-income countries eat never encounters those standards at all. It moves through local and informal channels that no international rule touches. So the binary is not protecting those eaters. It is protecting rich markets from their food, while leaving the eaters themselves under no system whatsoever — and we have learned to call that abandonment rigor.
The two-tier system is not a risk we might introduce. It is the arrangement we have. It is simply hidden, permanent, and dressed as a single universal line. The real choice has never been between one honest standard and a degrading two-tier one. It is between a dishonest permanence that abandons most of the world's eaters and an honest, converging climb that brings them onto the road.
What we have not built
The architecture already exists in other fields, and I see no reason to invent it again.
Climate governance abandoned uniform binding targets, which most of the world was effectively outside of, in favor of nationally determined contributions with a ratchet: you begin where you actually are, and each successive commitment must be more ambitious than the last. Human rights law solved the same problem with progressive realization — states must move toward full realization to the maximum of available resources — paired with a principle of non-retrogression, so that flexibility runs in one direction only. Occupational safety has long worked with proportionate rather than absolute standards. And harm reduction has already won the argument I am bracing for, by demonstrating that meeting people where they are protects them better than a binary that drives the problem out of sight.
Translated into food safety, the shape is something like this. Every food system in the world is on one road toward safer food. None has arrived; the frontier in wealthy countries keeps moving too. The questions that matter are direction and speed, not arrival. Honest measurement is reframed from confession of failure to the entry ticket — you cannot join the road, or unlock the support and market access that come with it, without first establishing where you stand. And interim flexibility is always available, but only ever as a loan against a credible, resourced, time-bound plan of improvement, withdrawn the moment a system stops climbing. You may be early on the road. You may not be stationary.
That last clause is what answers the dumping objection, and it has to be structural rather than rhetorical. A promise of future improvement is exactly the kind of commitment institutions are expert at absorbing and never honoring. The ratchet has to bite through something that is actually felt: market access tied to trajectory, so that backsliding costs; public visibility of where each system stands and which way it is moving; and a reciprocal obligation on wealthy countries, who are on the same road, to keep advancing their own frontier and to supply the means for others to climb. A ratchet that applies only to the poor is not a road out. It is the injustice restated.
The register is wrong, too
There is a deeper problem than architecture, and I have come to think it matters more.
Look at the words our field runs on. Contamination. Hazard. Rejection. Destruction. Non-compliance. That is the vocabulary of threat and policing. But the human meaning of feeding someone safely is the precise opposite. To hand another person food that will not harm them is the oldest act of care we have — the taboo against harming the one you feed is close to universal across cultures. We took the most loving act available to human beings and turned it into a border-rejection procedure.
Every parent everywhere wants the food they give their child to nourish and not to harm. That wish is identical in Lilongwe and in Lyon. The binary tells one of those parents that their food, and by implication their competence to feed their own children, does not qualify. The other story tells both of them they are on the same road, at different points, moving the same direction, and that the point of the exercise is to help each other along it.
A border excludes. A table includes. I have not yet worked out everything that follows from preferring the second image to the first, but I am increasingly certain that norms follow narratives rather than the other way around — and that we have been trying, for thirty years, to fix with rules what we first got wrong in the story.
Cite as: Lipp, M. (2026). The gift and the trap of a standard. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21795228
This version (v1, 4 August 2026): 10.5281/zenodo.21795229 · Licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0