Safe Food in Dangerous Times

E. coli and salmonella are in the news again, and it seems that eating food from the grocery store is about as safe as drinking water from a public toilet.  Congress is criticizing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for their ineptitude and they are considering a compensation package for farmers hurt in the latest tomato…. er, uh, I mean pepper.. no wait.. maybe tomato and pepper salmonella outbreak.  While Congress seeks to lay the blame at the door of someone or something, they really need look no further than the closest mirror.

 

For years, Congress has encouraged the expansion of large scale, industrial agriculture and slowly-but-surely killed small diversified and localized agriculture.   Farm bill after farm bill continues to subsidize just a few commodity crops leading to bigger and bigger monoculture farms. Now if you were in the business of making a wide range of products — some selling better than others — and the government comes along and guarantees to buy all you could produce of just one of your products, what would you do?   You’d do what most American farmers have done, you would produce as much as you could as efficiently as you could. 

 

The economics are very simple.  Farmers cannot differentiate their commodity products.  One kernel of dent corn is indistinguishable from another.  So, a farmer can only increase their profitability by growing as much as possible, as efficiently as possible.  This was the theory behind 70’s era Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz’s mantra to, “get big or get out” and “plant fencerow to fencerow. “  The result of this policy is high fructose corn syrup, feedlot cattle and concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) pork and poultry.  And who benefits?  According to our politicians, you do, in the form of cheap and abundant food. But the real beneficiaries are the Archer Daniels Midlands of the world.  And while you might think the current run up in commodity prices might hurt ADM, you would be wrong.  In our appetite for cheap fuel for our cars, what was formerly food is now being diverted into the production of fuel.  And the industrialists are taking full advantage of their control of the commodity supply driving food prices up.   

 

We are finding this formerly “cheap and abundant food” comes at a very high price.  This industrial food is not only making us fat and sick, but is poisoning us.   It also contributes to  the degradation of our soil, and the destruction of rural  communities.

 

But more importantly, our modern industrial food system has placed us, both physically and philosophically far from the sources of our food.  We don’t know who grows our food, or where it comes from.  If our food supply becomes tainted, as the FDA is discovering, it is impossible to find the source of the contamination.  This has led to big government consumer groups to call for fruit and vegetable tracing and the USDA to propose the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) to trace your food supply from the producer to your table. 

 

But here’s an idea.  Wouldn’t our food supply be safer if you knew the farmer that produces your food?   Think of it, instant traceability with no huge taxpayer funded boondoggle program.  Or even better, grow your own food, talk about tracing efficiency!  No bar codes, and no middle man, just you and your garden.