Not just peanut butter: What's happening to our food supply?

Last year it was tomatoes contaminated with Salmonella. Except not really. After the tomato industry lost $200 million, it turned out it wasn’t tomatoes after all, but jalapeno and serrano peppers from Mexico. Tomatoes aren’t off the hook though. There have been 12 Salmonella-contaminated tomato outbreaks since 1990 serious enough to involve multiple states.
In 2007 it was the bagged spinach food scare, also a Salmonella problem. In 2006, spinach contaminated with pathogenic E. coli was recalled. That was traced by the FDA to a California town where spinach fields were bathed in the runoff from nearby cattle ranches.

The reason ground beef is rarely eaten rare is the high probability that it contains E. coli. The FDA recommends cooking your eggs before making eggnog, and even then you shouldn’t leave it sitting out at room temperature. Cutting boards and knives that come in contact with uncooked chicken should be disinfected in the dishwasher before they touch anything else.
At the moment we have Salmonella in peanut butter, and it’s not the first time. In 2007, ConAgra produced Salmonella-tainted peanut butter distributed under the Peter Pan brand.

Are foodborne illnesses on the rise?

It would be difficult to definitively prove an increase in foodborne illness over the last half century, in part because of our increased ability to detect specific bacteria and analyze data. Still, it’s not unreasonable to think there’s more going on than just enhanced data collection.
According to the CDC, foodborne illnesses are responsible for 350,000 hospitalizations and 5000 deaths every year. Dr. Dennis Maki, an Infectious disease expert and epidemiologist, estimates that this adds $7 billion a year to health care costs. All this in a country that presumably has intensive regulation of food production and distribution.
Dr. Maki calls foodborne illness a “disease of progress” and identifies three changes over the last half century that have decreased food safety:
• The vast industrial scale of food production
• The increased consumption of imported foods and the decrease in food grown locally
• The increase in meals purchased and consumed outside the home as opposed to meals prepared in the home.

Industrialized agriculture now produces livestock, such as cattle, chickens, and pigs, under conditions that encourage the growth of pathogenic bacteria and create illness in the animals. And so antibiotics are administered. We then consume these antibiotics in our food. Meanwhile bacteria have become increasingly resistant to antibiotics. There’s no way an industrialized food supply can fully eliminate these bacteria. Instead, the food industry applies yet more technology, such as food irradiation, on a massive scale.
Because mass production of food is less expensive and more efficient, food is no longer grown locally. The advantages of this are many. Unfortunately, the mass production and distribution of food means more people are affected when things go wrong.
Imported food is a problem because we cannot control the health and safety practices of foreign countries. Only 1.3% of imported fish, vegetables, fruit and other foods are inspected. In addition to harmful bacteria, imported food may contain the hepatitis A virus (green onions from Mexico), parasites (raspberries from Guatemala), or illegal veterinary drugs (frozen catfish from China).
The risk of foodborne disease is much higher for food prepared outside the home. If Grandma undercooks the Christmas turkey, only the immediate family is affected. If the chef at your local steakhouse or sushi bar is lax about washing his hands, far more people are at risk.
Are we really eating out more than we used to? Most definitely. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has extensive statistics on how much we spend on food prepared at home and food we eat away from home. In 1957 consumers spent three times as much on home-cooked food as they did on restaurant food (76% vs. 24%) By 2007, the two numbers were rapidly converging (53% vs. 47%).

Back to the garden?

What is to be done? Big question. No easy answers. Dr. Maki believes there is no turning back. We must combat the side-effects of technology with more technology.

To those who believe that the solution is a return to a pastoral, early-20th-century model with millions of small farms producing more “natural” food, I would point out that even if the millions of farm workers who would be required were available to produce food on a quasi-boutique scale, the costs would be enormous; it would be impossible to feed 300 million Americans, let alone the rest of the world. Efficient, industrialized production of huge quantities of food is an inescapable necessity to avoid food shortages and global famine. The challenge is to enhance the quality and safety of industrially produced food.

Given the current economic environment, you just might be able to find tons of people willing to work an honest day on the farm — though they’re probably not too likely to stay there once the economy recovers.
As for food shortages, consider how much food is produced every day for each person in the U.S. How to calculate this? First the USDA converts food into calories. They add up all the food calories produced domestically in a year, add imported food, and then subtract what’s exported or fed to animals. In 1999 the U.S. produced 3900 calories per person per day. How many calories do you need in a day? It depends on your size and how active you are, but 2500 for men and 2000 for women is generous. So 3900 is a lot more than you need.
And remember, those 3900 calories are what’s produced after we’ve accounted for exports. To say we’d have global famine if we tried to modify industrial agriculture sounds like a scare tactic to me. Famines are due to an unequal distribution of resources, not an inadequate supply.
The post-industrial world creates irreversible risks and consequences that threaten plants, animals, and human beings. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had their occupational and factory-related risks, but these were limited to specific locations or groups of people. Only coal miners got black lung disease. Our risks today are global, whether they stem from food, infectious disease, or the economy.
Our lives are now determined by scientific and technological advances, not nature. The very process of controlling risks creates new ones. Irradiation may be harmless. Genetically modified organisms may not lead to environmental change. But who really knows for sure? Many European countries – France in particular – are wary of genetically modified crops. I guess France can serve as the control group in this experiment while those of us in the U.S. can be the experimental group. To be honest though, I don’t remember signing up as a guinea pig.

Related posts:
Links of interest: Organic food
What’s wrong with our food?
Pig dignity: Animal welfare in Europe
Is it safe to eat yet?
Is agriculture bad for your health?