The Vegetable-Industrial Complex
Photo by David Royal/New York Times Magazine
Michael Pollan writes in today’s New York Times Magazine about “bad spinach the government will only make worse.”
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 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—to take its failings and turn them into exciting new business opportunities.
He goes on to say that industrial farming and processing methods, both of which have been “industrialized and centralized over the last few decades” are putting our health at peril. The lethal 0157:H7 strain of E. coli, responsible for the latest outbreak of food poisoning, was believed to have evolved in the guts of cattle fed 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.
Pollan makes a case for eating local, not just because we want to support farmers in our communities and eat seasonal fresh food at their most flavorful—or even because we want our children to recognize real food in its natural, unpackaged glory—but also for “hardheaded or pragmatic” reasons. Want to fight off a possible terrorist attack? Shop at your local farmers’ market or community-assisted-agriculture (CSA) program.
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 importance to the national security and the public health, as well as to reducing our dependence on foreign sources of energy.
(Emphasis is mine)
The Food Network’s Alton Brown also fingers our not eating local for the whole spinach fiasco. [via Slowly She Turned] “21 states affected by spinach grown not only in one state but in one region of one state. Had the spinach stayed near home odds are good this would have been caught sooner,” he blasts in his blog. He continues:
Had the big chain grocers and restaurant suppliers purchased locally grown produce, this wouldn’t have happened. But don’t blame them. Nope. Blame us. By demanding fresh spinach year round (or anything else for that matter) we create the monster. It’s like Dan Akroyd thinking of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghost Busters. Our own unnatural desires and our refusal to consume locally grown foods have brought us to this sorry state.
(Emphasis is mine.)
Brown ends his post with a ominous warning. “Until we diversify and decentralize our food growing system and learn to eat locally and seasonally,” he says, “we only open up ourselves for more of the same. And let that be a lesson to us all.”
DUM DUM DUUUUUMMM …
green LA girl » Clicklist: Nuked spinach said,
October 15, 2006 at 10:41 pm
[...] Michael Pollan on spinach and the Vegetable-Industrial Complex. “any day now, calls to irradiate the entire food supply will be on a great many official lips.” (via Worsted Witch) [...]
azgoddess said,
October 16, 2006 at 10:39 am
thanks for this post…i frequent the local farmers markets…and buy my produce there
as we do this - they will grow and prosper…
i’ve noticed in the past 5 years how much bigger my local markets have become…which is wonderful!!
aleta said,
October 21, 2006 at 2:36 am
Another interesting thing about this incident is that it has everyone afraid of spinach when the risk of contamination is not just limited to spinach. The farms in the area where the majority of the nation’s spinach is grown also grow lots of other leafy greens. But I noticed that when my local Trader Joe’s (one of the distributors of greens from Natural Selection Foods) re-introduced bags of mixed greens to their shelves, they had stickers on them that said “no spinach” as if the other leaves are completely safe.
For those who are interested in making changes to the food system, two legislative opportunities are the Safe Food Act of 2005 (Durbin), and the 2007 Farm Bill.
The Worsted Witch » You Are What You Grow said,
April 22, 2007 at 7:53 am
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