Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

The Way We Live Now - The Vegetable-Industrial Complex
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/magazine/15wwln_lede.html
By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: October 15, 2006

"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."

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.”