Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[yarrow@sfo.com]

Her are more reasons to favor locally grown food over what Pollan 
calls "the vegetable-industrial complex."



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The Vegetable-Industrial Complex

By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: October 15, 2006, New York Times Magazine

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 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.

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 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 - 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 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 - to the farmer
selling me my spinach, to the rancher who sells me my grass-fed beef - 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
- the ones that local meat 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 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 - 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."