[USCC] Fwd: The Vegetable Industrial Complex

[Jim McNelly]

>
>
>October 15, 2006
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>The Way We Live Now
>
>
>The Vegetable-Industrial Complex
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>
>
>By MICHAEL POLLAN
>
>Soon after the news broke last month that nearly 
>200 Americans in 26 states had been sickened by 
>eating packaged spinach contaminated with E. 
>coli, I received a rather coldblooded e-mail 
>message from a friend in the food business. “I 
>have instructed my broker to purchase a million 
>shares of RadSafe,” he wrote, explaining that 
>RadSafe is a leading manufacturer of 
>food-irradiation technology. It turned out my 
>friend was joking, but even so, his reasoning 
>was impeccable. If bagged salad greens are 
>vulnerable to bacterial contamination on such a 
>scale, industry and government would very soon 
>come looking for a technological fix; any day 
>now, calls to irradiate the entire food supply 
>will be on a great many official lips. That’s 
>exactly what happened a few years ago when we 
>learned that E. coli from cattle feces was 
>winding up in American hamburgers. Rather than 
>clean up the kill floor and the feedlot diet, 
>some meat processors simply started nuking the 
>meat — sterilizing the manure, in other words, 
>rather thaan removing it from our food. Why? 
>Because it’s easier to find a technological 
>fix than to address the root cause of such a 
>problem. This has always been the genius of 
>industrial capitalism — to take its failings and 
>turn them into exciiting new business opportunities.
>
>We can also expect to hear calls for more 
>regulation and inspection of the produce 
>industry. Already, watchdogs like the Center for 
>Science in the Public Interest have proposed 
>that the government impose the sort of 
>regulatory regime it imposes on the meat 
>industry — something along the lines of the 
>Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point 
>system (Haccp, pronounced HASS-ip) developed in 
>response to the E. coli contamination of beef. 
>At the moment, vegetable growers and packers are 
>virtually unregulated. “Farmers can do pretty 
>much as they please,” Carol Tucker Foreman, 
>director of the Food Policy Institute at the 
>Consumer Federation of America, said recently, 
>“as long as they don’t make anyone sick.”
>
>This sounds like an alarming lapse in 
>governmental oversight until you realize there 
>has never before been much reason to worry about 
>food safety on farms. But these days, the way we 
>farm and the way we process our food, both of 
>which have been industrialized and centralized 
>over the last few decades, are endangering our 
>health. The Centers for Disease Control and 
>Prevention estimate that our food supply now 
>sickens 76 million Americans every year, putting 
>more than 300,000 of them in the hospital, and 
>killing 5,000. The lethal strain of E. coli 
>known as 0157:H7, responsible for this latest 
>outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 
>1982; it is believed to have evolved in the gut 
>of feedlot cattle. These are animals that stand 
>around in their manure all day long, eating a 
>diet of grain that happens to turn a cow’s 
>rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7. 
>(The bug can’t survive long in cattle living 
>on grass.) Industrial animal agriculture 
>produces more than a billion tons of manure 
>every year, manure that, besides being full of 
>nasty microbes like E. coli 0157:H7 (not to 
>mention high concentrations of the 
>pharmaceuticals animals must receive so they can 
>tolerate the feedlot lifestyle), often ends up 
>in places it shouldn’t be, rather than in 
>pastures, where it would not only be harmless 
>but also actually do some good. To think of 
>animal manure as pollution rather than fertility 
>is a relatively new (and industrial) idea.
>
>Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took 
>animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we 
>had, in effect, taken an old solution — the one 
>where crops feed animals and animals ™ waste 
>feeds crops — and neatly divided it into two new 
>problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a 
>pollution problem on the feedlot. Rather than 
>return to that elegant solution, however, 
>industrial agriculture came up with a 
>technological fix for the first problem — 
>chemical fertilizers on the farm. As yet, there 
>is no good fix for the second problem, unless 
>you count irradiation and Haccp plans and 
>overcooking your burgers and, now, staying away 
>from spinach. All of these solutions treat E. 
>coli 0157:H7 as an unavoidable fact of life 
>rather than what it is: a fact of industrial agriculture.
>
>But if industrial farming gave us this bug, it 
>is industrial eating that has spread it far and 
>wide. We don’t yet know exactly what happened 
>in the case of the spinach washed and packed by 
>Natural Selection Foods, whether it was 
>contaminated in the field or in the processing 
>plant or if perhaps the sealed bags made a 
>trivial contamination worse. But we do know that 
>a great deal of spinach from a great many fields 
>gets mixed together in the water at that plant, 
>giving microbes from a single field an 
>opportunity to contaminate a vast amount of 
>food. The plant in question washes 26 million 
>servings of salad every week. In effect, we’re 
>washing the whole nation’s salad in one big sink.
>
>It’s conceivable the same problem could occur 
>in your own kitchen sink or on a single farm. 
>Food poisoning has always been with us, but not 
>until we started processing all our food in such 
>a small number of “kitchens” did the 
>potential for nationwide outbreaks exist.
>
>Surely this points to one of the great 
>advantages of a decentralized food system: when 
>things go wrong, as they sooner or later will, 
>fewer people are affected and, just as 
>important, the problem can be more easily traced 
>to its source and contained. A long and 
>complicated food chain, in which food from all 
>over the countryside is gathered together in one 
>place to be processed and then distributed all 
>over the country to be eaten, can be 
>impressively efficient, but by its very nature 
>it is a food chain devilishly hard to follow and to fix.
>
>Fortunately, this is not the only food chain we 
>have. The week of the E. coli outbreak, washed 
>spinach was on sale at my local farmers’ 
>market, and at the Blue Heron Farms stand, where 
>I usually buy my greens, the spinach appeared to 
>be moving briskly. I tasted a leaf and wondered 
>why I didn’t think twice about it. I guess 
>it’s because I’ve just always trusted these 
>guys; I buy from them every week. The spinach 
>was probably cut and washed that morning or the 
>night before — it hasn’t been sitting around 
>in a bag on a truck for a week. And if there 
>ever is any sort of problem, I know exactly who 
>is responsible. Whatever the risk, and I’m 
>sure there is some, it seems manageable.
>
>These days, when people make the case for buying 
>local food, they often talk about things like 
>keeping farmers in our communities and eating 
>fresh food in season, at the peak of its flavor. 
>We like what’s going on at the farmers’ 
>market — how countryy meets city, how children 
>learn that a carrot is not a glossy orange 
>bullet that comes in a bag but is actually a 
>root; how we get to taste unfamiliar flavors and 
>even, in some sense, reconnect through these 
>foods and their growers to the natural world. 
>Stack all this up against the convenience and 
>price of supermarket food, though, and it can sound a little. . .sentimental.
>
>But there’s nothing sentimental about local 
>food — indeed, the reasons to support local food 
>economies could not be any more hardheaded or 
>pragmatic. Our highly centralized food economy 
>is a dangerously precarious system, vulnerable 
>to accidental — and deliberate  ” 
>contamination. This is something the government 
>understands better than most of us eaters. When 
>Tommy Thompson retired from the Department of 
>Health and Human Services in 2004, he said 
>something chilling at his farewell news 
>conference: “For the life of me, I cannot 
>understand why the terrorists have not attacked 
>our food supply, because it is so easy to do.” 
>The reason it is so easy to do was laid out in a 
>2003 G.A.O. report to Congress on bioterrorism. 
>“The high concentration of our livestock 
>industry and the centralized nature of our 
>food-processing industry” make them 
>“vulnerable to terrorist attack.” Today 80 
>percent of America’s beef is slaughtered by 
>four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads 
>are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk 
>by just one company. Keeping local food 
>economies healthy — and at the moment they are 
>thriving — is a matter not of sentiment but of 
>critical importannce to the national security 
>and the public health, as well as to reducing 
>our dependence on foreign sources of energy.
>
>Yet perhaps the gravest threat now to local food 
>economies — to the farmer selling me my spinach, 
>to the rrancher who sells me my grass-fed beef — 
>is, of all things, the governmentâ’s own 
>well-intentioned efforts to clean up the 
>industrial food supply. Already, hundreds of 
>regional meat-processing plants — the ones that 
>local meeat producers depend on — are closing 
>because they can’t afford to comply with the 
>regulatory requirements the U.S.D.A. rightly 
>imposes on giant slaughterhouses that process 
>400 head of cattle an hour. The industry insists 
>that all regulations be “scale neutral,” so 
>if the U.S.D.A. demands that huge plants have, 
>say, a bathroom, a shower and an office for the 
>exclusive use of its inspectors, then a small 
>processing plant that slaughters local 
>farmers’ livestock will have to install these 
>facilities, too. This is one of the principal 
>reasons that meat at the farmers’ market is 
>more expensive than meat at the supermarket: 
>farmers are seldom allowed to process their own 
>meat, and small processing plants have become 
>very expensive to operate, when the U.S.D.A. is 
>willing to let them operate at all. From the 
>U.S.D.A.’s perspective, it is much more 
>efficient to put their inspectors in a plant 
>where they can inspect 400 cows an hour rather 
>than in a local plant where they can inspect maybe one.
>
>So what happens to the spinach grower at my 
>farmers’ market when the F.D.A. starts 
>demanding a Haccp plan — daily testing of the 
>irrigation water, say, or some newfangled 
>veggie-irradiation technology? When we start 
>requiring that all farms be federally inspected? 
>Heavy burdens of regulation always fall heaviest 
>on the smallest operations and invariably wind 
>up benefiting the biggest players in an 
>industry, the ones who can spread the costs over 
>a larger output of goods. A result is that 
>regulating food safety tends to accelerate the 
>sort of industrialization that made food safety 
>a problem in the first place. We end up putting 
>our faith in RadSafe rather than in Blue Heron 
>Farms — in technologies rather than relatiionships.
>
>It’s easy to imagine the F.D.A. announcing a 
>new rule banning animals from farms that produce 
>plant crops. In light of the threat from E. 
>coli, such a rule would make a certain kind of 
>sense. But it is an industrial, not an 
>ecological, sense. For the practice of keeping 
>animals on farms used to be, as Wendell Berry 
>pointed out, a solution; only when cows moved 
>onto feedlots did it become a problem. Local 
>farmers and local food economies represent much 
>the same sort of pre-problem solution — elegant, 
>low-tech and redundant. But the logic of 
>industry, apparently ineluctable, has other 
>ideas, ideas that not only leave our centralized 
>food system undisturbed but also imperil its 
>most promising, and safer, alternatives.
>
>Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the 
>magazine, is the author most recently of “The 
>Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.