[Texgreen] The Vegetable-Industrial Complex

[Roger Baker]

... The lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for =20
this latest outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 1982; it =20
is believed to have evolved in the gut of feedlot cattle. These are =20
animals that stand around in their manure all day long, eating a diet =20=

of grain that happens to turn a cow's rumen into an ideal habitat for =20=

E. coli 0157:H7. (The bug can't survive long in cattle living on =20
grass.)...A long and complicated food chain, in which food from all =20
over the countryside is gathered together in one place to be =20
processed and then distributed all over the country to be eaten, can =20
be impressively efficient, but by its very nature it is a food chain =20
devilishly hard to follow and to fix.... A result is that regulating =20
food safety tends to accelerate the sort of industrialization that =20
made food safety a problem in the first place...


                   *****************************************

 =46rom the NY Times, October 15, 2006

The Way We Live Now

The Vegetable-Industrial Complex

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 =97
sterilizing the manure, in other words, rather than 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 =97 to take its failings and turn
them into exciting 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 =97 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 =97 the
one where crops feed animals and animals' waste feeds crops =97 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 =97 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 =97 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 =97 how country 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 =97 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 =97 and
deliberate =97 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 =97 and at the moment
they are thriving =97 is a matter not of sentiment but of critical
importance 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 =97 to the
farmer selling me my spinach, to the rancher who sells me my grass-
fed beef =97 is, of all things, the government's own well-intentioned
efforts to clean up the industrial food supply. Already, hundreds of
regional meat-processing plants =97 the ones that local meat producers
depend on =97 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.
 =46rom 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 =97 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 =97 in technologies rather
than relationships.

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 =97 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."