The Federation Layer

If the country pages were the index's atlas and the product pages its shelves, international.htm was its roof beam. The archive preserves a page of some eighty links, and it opens not with companies but with the bodies that federate the federations.

The two parents and their world

The page's first cards belong to the family: EFFoST, the European Federation of Food Science and Technology, one of the directory's own sponsors, and IUFoST, the International Union of Food Science and Technology, its worldwide counterpart. A directory that files its own parents first is not being vain; it is stating its line of descent. The index understood itself as a child of food science's organised world.

The alphabet soup, read properly

Below the parents the page runs through the European sector federations, and the list is dense with acronyms that each sign for a trade. CAOBISCO for chocolate, biscuits and confectionery. The European Brewery Convention for the brewers. The European Dairy Association for milk. Euroglaces for ice cream, the AIJN for juices and nectars, FEDIMA for the bakery intermediates, COFALEC for the yeast producers, the European Cocoa Association, the European Coffee Science Information Centre, the spirits producers' confederation, the bottled-water federation, the cider and fruit-wine industry, the egg processors.

To a modern reader the page can look like an attic of abbreviations. To the index's actual readers it was the working directory of the Brussels layer: the bodies that answer consultations, write standards positions and sit across the table from the European institutions.

The consumer counterweight

The federations did not have the page to themselves. Consumers International and the BEUC, the European consumers' organisation, were filed on the same shelf, and the European Masters Degree in Food Studies stood for the universities. The page's arrangement was therefore a small map of the European food conversation: the science federations, the trade federations, the consumer federations, the schools. That is the whole polity of the sector on one page, which is why this monograph treats it as the index's highest shelf.

What a federation page was for

The practical use of the page is easy to underrate now. A food-science student in 2009 who needed to know which body spoke for the European juice trade did not ask a search engine's first result; she opened the index and took the AIJN from the shelf. A journalist checking who represented the ice-cream industries found Euroglaces without sorting through a page of advertisements. The page was a shortcut past the commercial noise of the early web to the bodies that actually sign sector positions.

The eighty links also carried a theory of legitimacy. Everything on the page was an organisation with members, a statutes document and a public address: bodies that can be written to and that write back. That filter, unfashionable then and rarer now, is what gave the index its texture, and what this monograph preserves by reading the shelf rather than copying it.

The shelf the monograph borrows

This site keeps the federation layer in the same position the index gave it: above the countries and the trades, the first shelf a serious reader opens. The arrangement still teaches. A reader who learns the acronyms on this page, EFFoST and IUFoST, BEUC and CAOBISCO, the EBC and the AIJN, holds the key to most European food debates, because the arguments change but the signatures do not. The bodies that answered for the trades in 2009 are, in most cases, the bodies that answer now, and the index's roof beam has proved more durable than the roof.