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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Warning: This product may cause sickness, paralysis, and death
  • Date: Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:05:40 -0600


Warning: This product may cause sickness, paralysis, and death
http://www.grist.org/article/warning-this-product-may-cause-sickness-paralysis-and-death/
Posted 11:59 AM on 7 Oct 2009

Celebrated food and ag author Michael Pollan debunked some myths about
organic agriculture Tuesday night at a Grist event in San Francisco, in a
conversation with Grist food writer Tom Philpott and the audience.

In response to a question about whether we can really feed the world without
industrialized ag (ah yes, a perennial), Pollan pointed out that we’re not
feeding the world with it now. He said we wouldn’t be doing developing
nations a favor by exporting a fossil fuel–dependent ag system to them when
it’s clear that fossil fuels are only going to become more scarce and
expensive. And overproducing government-subsidized food in the U.S. is
certainly not the way to solve world hunger—it just exacerbates it by putting
small-scale farmers in developing countries out of business. Give people in
the developing world the tools to do sophisticated organic ag and it will
help solve many problems, including undocumented immigration, Pollan argues.

And yes, sophisticated organic ag does exist. Pollan disputed the idea that
organic techniques are anti-technology. Philpott agreed, pointing out that
renowned farmers Joel Salatin and Will Allen use advanced technology to
produce organic food—it’s just not the type of technology that Big Ag
promotes and profits from.

Asked what the Obama administration is thinking on ag—sometimes veering in
the direction of progressive change, other times whipping back toward the
agrichemical status quo, as Philpott puts it—Pollan said the admin appears to
be playing both sides of the street. Pollan related an anecdote in which the
president implied that there needs to be a popular political movement for
sustainable food before he can make big change—and suggested to his wife that
this might be her issue.

Where, asked Pollan, are the members of Congress who will take up this issue
as their own? For now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is letting
Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and other Big Ag–oriented reps run the show on food
and ag policy. The recent farm-bill fight was a loss, but during the debate
the sustainable food movement started to get its message heard in D.C. and
rattle some of the vested interests. The next fight on Capitol Hill will be
over the school lunch program reauthorization, Pollan said.

Though the sustainable food movement seems to be thriving in oases like the
Bay Area, Philpott pointed out that still only 3 to 4 percent of food
consumed in the U.S. is organic or local. How do we grow that number and
include more people? Pollan said the movement, like many social movements,
was started by elites, but is spreading to other parts of society. He sees
encouraging signs in the heartland and among young people. But if in 20
years people are still talking about this as an elitist movement, we’ll know
we really screwed up.

Grist offers a big thanks to Pollan, host Tony Conrad and the rest of our
host committee, our caterer Dominique Salomon (the food was scrumptious!),
and everyone who attended and helped to make the evening a success. Let’s
keep the conversation rolling.

It’s hard to draw any other conclusion from Michael Moss’s New York Times
blockbuster investigative piece on E. coli in industrial beef, which is
centered on the plight of Stephanie Smith, a young dance instructor left
comatose, near death and now paralyzed from eating a single Cargill
hamburger. Of course, a “single hamburger” can include meat from hundreds,
some would say thousands, of animals. As Moss puts it:

Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder.
Instead, records and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is
often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and
even from different slaughterhouses. These cuts of meat are particularly
vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say. Despite
this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients
for the pathogen.

This is why a food safety expert who helped develop tracking systems for E.
coli in meat can declare that, “Ground beef is not a completely safe
product.” No kidding. The problem, however, is not with E. coli in general.
The problem is that the particular strain of E. coli which infected
Smith—known as E. coli O157:H7—is virulent, deadly, persistent and endemic in
industrial beef. How virulent, deadly and persistent? This much:

Food scientists have registered increasing concern about the virulence of
this pathogen since only a few stray cells can make someone sick, and they
warn that federal guidance to cook meat thoroughly and to wash up afterward
is not sufficient. A test by The Times found that the safe handling
instructions are not enough to prevent the bacteria from spreading in the
kitchen.

In other words, if a piece of infected meat ends up in your kitchen, you are
almost guaranteed exposure to it no matter how carefully you handle it. And
how endemic? This year alone almost half a million pounds of E. coli infected
ground beef have been recalled nationwide (and that doesn’t include the
800,000 pounds of Cargill beef recalled for contamination with
antibiotic-resistant salmonella). Indeed, if Moss’s work proves anything,
it’s that the safety systems in industrial beef processing are both barely
functioning and almost fully opaque. And while the government is able to peek
behind the curtain at these massive slaughterhouses and processing
facilities, it seems far more concerned with protecting companies’
intellectual property than with the public health:

The meat industry treats much of its practices and the ingredients in
ground beef as trade secrets. While the Department of Agriculture has
inspectors posted in plants and has access to production records, it also
guards those secrets. Federal records released by the department through the
Freedom of Information Act blacked out details of Cargill’s grinding
operation that could be learned only through copies of the documents obtained
from other sources. Those documents illustrate the restrained approach to
enforcement by a department whose missions include ensuring meat safety and
promoting agriculture markets.

In one of the most chilling, and I thought devastating, quotes in the entire
piece, a top official at the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service
observed that his options were somewhat limited since he had to “look at the
entire industry, not just what is best for public health.” Note the fact that
his phrasing sets the meat industry’s needs at odds with ours—the two can’t
be reconciled in his eyes. What does that say about the government’s ability
to ensure a safe food supply? No matter how you structure it, the industry
now appears too big and too powerful to be regulated. What other explanation
is there for the fact that the top food safety job at the USDA remains
unfilled if not regulatory paralysis—the meat industry seems to have veto
power over its regulators and hasn’t found a federal overseer to its liking.

One area that Moss does not cover is how E. coli O157 got into industrial
beef in the first place. In fact it’s there because of the meat industry’s
insistence on feeding cows corn—something they cannot easily digest—instead
of grass. Among other things, corn feeding requires cows to be fed a steady
dose of antibiotics, which has led to the rise of antibiotic resistance among
various pathogens. But more importantly, it has caused very real changes in
the cow’s gut which has allowed this toxic strain of E. coli to take hold, a
strain that research suggests cannot survive in the gut of cows that eat only
grass.

In short, E. coli didn’t just “happen” to the meat industry—it’s a
consequence of industrial practices. But nowhere in the article (or in the
halls of the USDA or the largescale beef producers for that matter) is the
possibility of moving away from this corn-based system raised as a solution
for the industrial system. Surprisingly, the article includes virtually no
proposed solutions for this crisis—just vague assurances that the USDA isn’t
“standing still” on the issue. In reality, the industry focuses exclusively
on “managing” the ongoing presence of E. coli O157 though the development of
an E. coli vaccine for cows, and irradiation or chemical washes for the meat.
All of which are attempts to mask the risks of a failed system and represent
an institutionalizing of the underlying failures. And none of which make me
ever want to touch industrial meat again.

Indeed, if there ever was a powerful argument for eating only grass-fed beef
from small producers, this article is it. The only conclusion worth drawing
from this expose is that industrial ground beef simply isn’t worth the risk.
And without wholesale industry and regulatory reform—neither of which appears
likely or even possible, it may never be.





  • [Livingontheland] Warning: This product may cause sickness, paralysis, and death, Tradingpost, 10/08/2009

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