Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

permaculture - [permaculture] The Vegetable-Industrial Complex By MICHAEL POLLAN

permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: permaculture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: George Monacelli <bungo_bean@yahoo.com>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] The Vegetable-Industrial Complex By MICHAEL POLLAN
  • Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 19:15:26 -0700 (PDT)

The Way We Live Now
The Vegetable-Industrial Complex By MICHAEL POLLAN

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.”



---------------------------------
How low will we go? Check out Yahoo! Messenger’s low PC-to-Phone call rates.



  • [permaculture] The Vegetable-Industrial Complex By MICHAEL POLLAN, George Monacelli, 10/15/2006

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page