Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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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.