Over on the civileats blog, takes a physician’s view of the industrial agriculture and food production system, in Locavorism vs. Salmonella A Physician’s Perspective. The doctor says “Given this obvious connection between food production and health, it is surprising how few in the health field are interested in food, much less the system that produces that food.”
I’ve been wanting to post here about the outbreak, but have not had a chance to collect my thoughts. It is just another example of how the industrial food system, through centralized and consolidated farming, along with mass production and distribution, can quickly sicken thousands of people all over the country. The pressures driving the cost of food down result in the disappearance of regional and local suppliers to food processors. It is a sad example of what happens when the lowest bid ingredients are used in food products to lower costs or increase profits.
There are health consequences to not paying enough for our food, to not paying attention to where our food comes from, and to who eats it. The truly sad part of this is this peanut butter company supplies the most vulnerable in our society, supplying schools and nursing homes. Our children deserve better. The same parents who will call their child back into the house to put on coat, hat and mittens, the same parents who will rush to school to pick up their children for some incident, send them blithely off to eat school cafeteria food, which has always been the butt of jokes, but is now dangerous.
I remember when our school system changed over from a cafeteria that actually produced and cooked its own food to reheating packaged food supplied by a corporation. Cooking puts you in touch with your food. And being in touch with your food means you are more likely to notice when something is wrong. To be careful in choosing ingredients. I believe the food was better when the gray haired ladies used to run the cafeteria. They used to have dignity, instead of handing out aluminum packages of warmed over food. It must have been terrible to be forced to stop cooking.
I have a personal stake in this. This year, my mother’s blood sugar was up a bit, so she cut back on snacks. One of her favorites was peanut butter crackers from a very famous brand. It was one of the affected brands. She is elderly and who knows if she would have survived getting infected? It is difficult to believe brands, which survive on the trust consumers put in the brand, would risk everything to include shoddy ingredients, trading short term gains for a long term catastrophe.
It is telling that the “good stuff,” the peanut butter in jars, which we pay a premium for, comes from a different food stream than the “industrial” peanut butter incorporated into processed food. I think that tells you something. It is common for “seconds” to go into processed food and for the first rate stuff to go into the brand name products sold individually. Like sausage, processed foods can hide a multitude of sins. There really is no mechanism to tell the consumer where their food came from or how it was processed. A food label is not going to say “peanut butter, from a poorly maintained operator purchased at the lowest bid.” In this case, it may be criminal, since there are reports the operator knew the food was contaminated but shipped it anyway.
It is a shame, in a way, since when factory food was introduced in the early 20th century during the “progressive” food reforms, the establishment of the FDA and regulation of the food supply, “factory food” was considered safer and more nutritious than fresh. It was less likely to be adulterated contaminated and the brand ensured you knew where your food came from. The factory food was more likely to have been monitored experts concerned with ensuring a pure, safe product than the average farm. Many farmers were uneducated and engaged in practices we would not approve of now, not even farmers. Middle men would adulterate the food they sold in the marketplace. People were not as concerned about food safety. We benefit from nearly a century of reform and modernization of the farm through the food reforms and sanitary movements, all part of modernism, the same modernity that now threatens us. Everything is out of balance. When there were regional suppliers to factory food, regional modernized farms, the supply was diversified and sanitary, but consolidation and the drive to compete with Chinese imports creates the kind of factory we see supplying contaminated peanut butter for our crackers.
The situation in the United States before the FDA reforms was like the situation in China today, with few regulations and widespread adulteration. Yet, our food companies blithely accept assurances from Chinese suppliers the food is safe. They risk their brands for a few pennies of profit. The industrial food system has gone through this change as it stopped being a growth industry and became a commodity industry, which means in order to increase profits, the cost of ingredients must be reduced.
This is where our low cost food supply ends up coming from. A lowest bid operation with poor management, slovenly maintenance and and the otherwise “quality” brands looking the other way as long as the supplier is the cheapest. We should demand that the brands we trust get their food from suppliers who can be trusted, that if we pay higher prices for food, that should represent a higher quality and safety of ingredients. They should return to buying from local and regional suppliers to end the consolidation driven by ever falling prices. This is harder in hard economic times, when people look to the cheapest foods, but food is not cheap if it makes you sick.
