I just read an article on the NYT website (free subscription needed. ugh.) about the recent e coli issue with bagged spinach. It made some really good points about the problems in our food chain and what causes them. Most of the problems are directly attributed to Economics and the tendency to come up with technological solutions to them rather than putting things back the natural way they were. The article was written by Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.”

Case in point– During the Nixon administration it was found that farmers “cheated” and held back crops to market to manipulate farm subsidies and pricing. So the farm subsidy method was changed. The unintended consequence of that change was the resulting Big Agribusiness where corn is grown to make money from those subsidies, and uses need to be found for it. Feedlot cattle was one of those uses. The unintended consequences of feedlot cattle are that cows have become polluters and their meat has become unhealthy for humans. Manure, which was once a natural fertilizer for pasture, has become, because of its change in Ph due to feedlotting, a pollutant and a breeding ground for E coli bacteria. The article states, “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.”

There’s another unintended consequence here. Though smaller local producers of food may have stayed with the older and safer and more healthy food production methods, the regulations put into place to protect consumers do not take scale or method into account, putting an incredible burden on small scale producers which is absorbed much easier by those large scale producers who are the source of the problem in the first place, thereby encouraging the very food production method that should be discouraged. “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”

The article also points out other dangers and costs of our present food production and distribution system. With things so centralized, it would be an easy thing for an anti-US element to strike at the heart of our food supply. Also, the cost to transport megafarm crops from all over the country to a centralized location for processing, and then ship them back to all parts of the country to consumers is a double hit as well as a double dependency on our dwindling fossil fuel resources.

The problem of scale is also a problem from another perspective. The agribusiness that has developed has done so in such scale that it has now enough power and money to keep Lobbyists at both the state and federal level to protect those interests and keep those subsidies in place.

What’s the answer? A movement toward “outlaw” farms and homegrown is one possible outcome, though the FDA has never been shy about shutting people down. I’d love to hear your ideas.

Technorati Tags: Agribusiness, e coli, food supply, industrial farming, sustainability

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 11:41 am and is filed under Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.