Great article today in the NY Times by Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma. I've heard amazing things about this book, and this article lights a fire under my behind to read it right away.
In todays article, Pollan explains the imminent danger of contamination of our food supply, seen on a small scale in the latest not-so-little e.coli outbreak, but ultimately at risk from the nature of our industrial food production itself as well as the outside threat of terrorist attack.
The rational conclusion is to decentralize food production and support local farmers and producers, including changing the regulation structure so that small-scale producers do not bear the disproportionate burden of rules made to protect us from the dangers of highly industrialized producers. (Excerpts below reordered for clarity in brief)
[T]he 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 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.) ...
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.
TodayIn effect, we're washing the whole nation's salad in one big sink.
- 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.
[I]t’s easier to find a technological fix than to address the root cause of such a [contamination] problem. This has always been the genius of industrial capitalism — to take its failings and turn them into exciting new business opportunities.
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.
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