Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

The Perils Of Industrial Agriculture
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/green/detail?&entry_id=27828
Beef. Spinach. Pet food. Now tomatoes.

What is up with our food being contaminated? There was an E. coli recall 
issued yesterday. If you've read The Omnivore's Dilemma, you know that 
grass-fed cattle produce healthier meat and do not get E. coli. But grass 
doesn't fatten cattle as quickly, so industrial agriculture prefers to feed 
them corn, soy, even other cows, causing the cows to get fat—and sick, 
requiring huge quantities of antibiotics and producing more climate-changing 
methane than they would if they ate a more natural diet (seriously, cow burps 
are a significant source of GHGs).

Why does the government—particularly the FDA, which is in charge of 
produce—have such a hard time finding the problem when there is one? It's 
been almost a month since tomatoes were linked to salmonella poisoning (that 
must have originated in meat), and the FDA still hasn't found the source of 
the problem. That's because the FDA doesn't track produce. The administration 
wrote a report outlining the need to track tomatoes in particular, but never 
asked for funding to implement the plan.

The FDA does fewer inspections now than it did in the early 70s. The 
government doesn't want to know about or document food contamination, because 
doing so would pull the blindfold off consumers' eyes about where our food 
comes, and how it's produced. The truth is not pretty—tomatoes and 
slaughtered animals being tossed around together—and if Americans get queasy 
about the industrial food system, it will be hard to bring them back to the 
table.

Organic agriculture already has chain of custody systems that document where 
food comes from. Of course, it's much easier to do that when your market is 
smaller and you can charge more for what you grow.

How can we make healthy food accessible for everyone?