This article is from the June 20, 2009 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/opinion/21kristof.html?_r=1. After reading it, I am happier than ever that I almost never go to the grocery store (even Whole Foods) and I eat almost completely locally. (I am not trying to break our banana, avocado, pineapple habits, though.) By eating locally I am supporting small farmers and fighting the fight against agribusiness, which is poisoning America.
To find local food, go to www.localharvest.org.
Lettuce From the Garden, With Worms
Published: June 20, 2009
Growing up on a farm near Yamhill, Ore., I quickly learned to appreciate the difference between fresh, home-grown foods and the commercial versions in the supermarket.
Store-bought
lettuce was always lush, green and pristine, and thus vastly preferable to
lettuce from my Mom’s vegetable garden (organic before we called it that). Her
lettuce kept me on my toes, because a caterpillar might come crawling out of my
salad.
We endured endless elk and
venison — my Dad is still hunting at age 90 — or ate beef from steers raised on
our own pasture, but “grass-fed” had no allure for me. I longed for delicious,
wholesome food that my friends in town ate. Like hot dogs.
Over the years, though, I’ve
become nostalgic for an occasional bug in my salad, for an apple that feels as
if it were designed by God rather than by a committee. More broadly, it has
become clear that the same factors that impelled me toward factory-produced
meat and vegetables — cheap, predictable food — also resulted in a profoundly
unhealthy American diet.
I’ve often criticized
America’s health care system, and I fervently hope that we’re going to see a
public insurance option this year. But one reason for our health problems is
our industrialized agriculture system, and that should be under scrutiny as
well.
A terrific new documentary, “Food, Inc.,” playing
in cinemas nationwide, offers a powerful and largely persuasive diagnosis of
American agriculture. Go see it, but be warned that you may not want to eat for
a week afterward.
(It was particularly
unnerving to see leftover animal bits washed over with ammonia and ground into
“hamburger filler.” If you happen to be eating a hamburger as you read this, I
apologize.)
“The way we eat has changed
more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000,” Michael Pollan, the
food writer, declares in the film.
What’s even more eerie is the
way animals are being re-engineered. For example, most Americans prefer light
meat to dark, so chickens have been redesigned to produce more white meat by
growing massive breasts that make them lopsided. Who knew that breast
augmentation was so widespread in chicken barns?
“When they grow from a chick
and in seven weeks you’ve got a five-and-a-half pound chicken, their bones and
their internal organs can’t keep up with the rapid growth,” explained Carole
Morison, a Maryland chicken farmer who allowed the film crew into her barns. “A
lot of these chickens here, they can take a few steps and then they plop down.
It’s because they can’t keep up with all the weight that they’re carrying.”
Huge confinement operations
for livestock and poultry produce very cheap meat and eggs. But at what cost?
The documentary introduces us
to Barbara Kowalcyk, whose two-and-a-half-year-old child, Kevin, went from
healthy to dead in 12 days, after he ate a hamburger tainted with E. coli
bacteria. Even after his death, it took weeks for the tainted meat to be
recalled.
“Sometimes it seems that
industry was more protected than my son,” Ms. Kowalcyk complains.
She has a point. Agribusiness
companies exercise huge political influence, and industry leaders often fill
regulatory posts. The Food and Drug Administration consequently dozed, and the
number of food safety inspections plunged.
There is some evidence that
pathogens, including E. coli, become much more common in factory farming
operations. Move feedlot cattle out to a pasture for five days, and they will
lose 80 percent of the E. coli in their gut, the film says. And the massive
routine feeding of antibiotics to farm animals is a disgrace that reduces the
effectiveness of antibiotics in treating sick humans.
Pathogens are now seeping
into the unlikeliest foods. On Friday, the
F.D.A. advised consumers not to eat Nestlé cookie dough — cookie dough! —
because of concerns about E. coli contamination, after reports of illness in 28
states.
American agribusiness truly
is wondrous. When I moved back to the United States after years of living in
China, I remember visiting a supermarket and feeling a near-religious awe. Yet
one consequence of this wondrous system is that unhealthy calories are cheaper
than nutritious ones: think of the relative prices of Twinkies and broccoli. We
even inflict unhealthy food on children in the school lunch program, and one in
three Americans born after 2000 is expected to develop diabetes.
The solutions aren’t simple,
and may involve paying more for what we eat, although we may save some of that
in reduced health costs for diabetes and heart disease. In any case, “Food,
Inc.” notes that we as consumers do have power. “You can vote to change the
system,” it declares, “three times a day.”
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