Thank you, Domek. Thank you for that very nice introduction. I will share my screen

if that's okay.

Should be possible, but...

Yeah, it looks like it's working. Hold on a second. So, okay. So yes, as Domek mentioned,

the title of the talk is From Fake Eggs to Wet Markets, Qualification Devices and Counter

Qualification in China's Food Safety Crisis. So, as Domek said, the main research I was

doing during this period of time, this was between 2010 to 2013, was focused on avian

influenza and endemic influenza and the search for the origins of endemic influenza in China.

But while I was in China during this time period, food safety was really a major pressing

concern for many of the people that I talked to, both experts in the food industry, but

also laypeople, people that I met on the street or friends. You've probably heard about some

of these food safety scandals, such as contaminated milk powder and infant formula, reused gutter

oil, pesticide residues and rice, to name just a few of these. But an incident that

really caught my attention at the time was consumer complaints about fake eggs. In news

reports such as this one that you see here, consumers complained that purchasing what

they believed were chicken eggs when they bought at the store or at the market, but

turned out when they brought them home to be artificial imitations, that they then believed

were made by humans, not by hens. So it's impossible to determine the validity of these

complaints for myself. And indeed, in many of these news programs on this issue, the

status of this being a fake product was contested. And the purpose of this paper is not to try

to determine whether they did or did not exist. But what troubled and fascinated me about

the idea of fake eggs was the challenge of distinguishing the real from the fake. And

that turned out to be a common condition that consumers faced in this food safety crisis

in China. Programs like this one always culminated with a demonstration that you're seeing here

of the differences between apparently fake and a real egg. For instance, in this case,

they're noting that the yolk of the egg is too flaccid, like something is not correct

about the yolk of the egg. If you go online, you can still find on the Baidu, Baike Encyclopedia,

this is like the Google search engine of China on their encyclopedia, the entry for fake

eggs or Jiajidan. It lists eight different ways that you can distinguish a real from

a fake egg. These include things like the color of a fake egg's outer shell is brighter

than a real egg shell, although it's not very apparent. And number four, using your nose

to carefully smell a real egg will have a little bit of odor. A fake egg would not have

that odor. And there's so there's eight of these different characteristics on that encyclopedia

put up by somebody on how to distinguish a fake from a real egg. So again, these fake

eggs and fake food are just one example of a range of food safety problems in China that

have been described by anthropologist Nancy Chen as a vast landscape of bio insecurity.

But fake food raises certain distinct problems that makes them especially threatening, but

also perhaps especially interesting from a social science point of view, because of the

way they link bodily threats or threats to the body to problems of knowledge, perception

and judgment in new ways. So there's two things that I want to focus on in this that distinguishes

the sort of fake food incident from other other food safety incidents that we might

be more familiar with in other contexts. First of all, there's, as I mentioned, this issue

about how do you differentiate the real from the fake, and that becomes a concern for consumers.

That's a kind of issue of perception and judgment that's at stake in every purchase. Is this

a real or fake? And then the second is that there's an interesting reflexive aspect to

the fake food problem. Generally, when we think about food safety issues, we think that,

well, if we introduced new tests, new regulations, new mechanisms for identifying these contaminated

food items, then this will lead to an improvement in food safety. But the issue with food fraud

is that precisely those tests and those mechanisms for identifying problems in food can also

be the object of fraud. This is something, an issue that's discussed in sort of the sociology