[Marxism] Sterilizing the manure

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times Magazine, October 15, 2006
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.?


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