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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Perils Of Industrial Agriculture
  • Date: Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:15:32 -0600


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?






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