Why Do I Keep Harping On This?
(Factory Food • )
OK, this will be the last one for awhile, but by now I suppose the reader might wonder why a blog ostensibly mostly about growing your own fruit and vegetables in south Texas seems to have morphed into the Peanut Butter Salmonella Report.
I’m glad I asked that question.
Here’s why: Because this, the latest and worst of the modern American mass salmonella poisoning cases, illustrates perfectly on multiple levels the failure of the Factory Food System in which we find ourselves mired. Thus it strikes at the crux of the biscuit – the core reason we here on the One Acre Ranch are growing as much of our own food as we can on a tiny town plot of land, and working on buying the rest from people we know and trust.
Let’s count some of the lessons learned from this latest escapade:
1. Grocery store and restaurant food isn’t safe – If you’ve spent very many years buying food you have your own stories about getting food poisoning at your favorite deli, or about that box of pasta that was full of weavils, or the rotten produce or moldy cheese or rancid fish that you opened straight from the store. But it’s getting much worse, as mass recalls of spinach, tomatoes, hot peppers and peanut butter (twice in two years) have most recently demonstrated.
The truth is, if you’re shopping at a chain grocery store, high-end or low-end, you need to realize that as a customer, you have an adversarial relationship with store management. They’ll try their best to sell you expired milk, meat or mushrooms when the fresh stuff is in the back, and they do not vouch for any of the pre-processed canned, boxed and frozen goods that make up the bulk of their wares – even their own store brands. Read the labels, look for signs of spoilage, choose wisely. You’re on your own, bucko.
2. A single producer can contaminate a nation – By the Food & Drug Administration’s own reckoning, a single peanut products factory has now sent out possibly contaminated substances that have found their way into (as of 8:30 a.m.) 1,680 processed food products sold in stores.
The FDA’s recall list is so vast and still growing so fast that it has overwhelmed the agency’s recall notification system. Not only can’t you keep track of all the products now recalled because of possibly poisoned peanuts, you can’t find any other type of product that has been recalled.
The only sensible thing to do is quit eating anything at all with peanuts in it, except maybe Jif, because the FDA has put its collective ass on the line by specifically saying major brands of peanut butter are safe to eat. Still, my memory is long enough that I remember the ConAgra peanut butter fiasco of 2007 and haven’t purchased a jar of Peter Pan since.
3. Food inspectors play defense, not offense About all they’re good for at this point is issuing the recalls and cleaning up the vomit afterwards.
And they’re not even that good at defense. For instance, the FDA had reason itself to know since 2001 there was trouble brewing at the Peanut Corporation of America’s Georgia peanut butter plant, the one identified as the source of (as of today) 575 very sick (some of whom died) people in 43 states plus at least one Canadian. But the FDA turned over safety inspections to the state of Georgia’s agriculture department, and you see the result.
And here in Texas, we learned the other day that PCA has been operating a peanut processing plant in Plainview for almost four years, without a state license or a single state or federal safety inspection. So don’t let the presence of so-called food inspection agencies lull you into thinking you’re operating above some kind of safety net. You’re not.
4. The FDA isn’t going to the source of salmonella contamination – Salmonella and E. coli are intestinal bacteria, as this guy notes down below. They originate in animals, not tomatoes, peppers, spinach or peanuts. So how come there’s salmonella in your peanut pie? Probably because several big factory farms full of chickens and chicken shit are upstream from several big fields full of peanuts. The chicken shit spread the salmonella to the peanuts.
In the case in the fall of 2006, in which E. coli-contaminated spinach killed three and sickened more than 200, it came to pass that the spinach fields had been contaminated by cow shit. And not the factory feedlot variety of cow shit, but the kind that comes from grass-fed cows. Because all cows are likely carriers of E. coli. (It’s just that cows on the feedlot have a lot more opportunity to roll around in it since they live in their own shit).
The point is this: Shit rolls downhill. If the peanuts in your peanut butter, or the hot peppers in your salsa, or the melons in your back yard garden, are being watered with water that drains out of cow pasture or feedlot or chicken farm, they’re probably going to become contaminated with bacteria that will make you or someone else sick.
But it seems as though the FDA et al close the books when, as in the PCA case, they find the plant that has processed poison food. That’s not good enough. Where are the peanut farms that supplied that plant? Because those farms, or whatever is upstream of them, are probably the source of the salmonella (not that PCA did anything but make matters worse, as attested by this amended FDA inspection report made public Friday).
While all the grazing and pecking animals may carry salmonella and E.coli in their guts, it is the intensive factory farms causing the most environmental and, occasionally, human damage. Duh, because they cram so many animals together and thus produce such incredible loads of poop.
I remember camping in Arkansas woods and parks in the mid 1970s when (and this was verified at the time by the EPA) it was the last state in the lower 48 in which you could safely drink water out of the streams. Not long thereafter, Tyson Foods impressed on the local farmer the benefits of cramming thousands of caged chickens into buildings and feeding them just the right mixture of industrial corn and chemicals so that they would grow really fast and not die. Later on, Tyson did the same for pigs – and other companies followed suit elsewhere.
The result in Arkansas was that the water was soon at least as polluted and dangerous to drink as untreated water anywhere else in America.
If I want to buy a little trailer and put in a septic tank down the road in Needville, the county will come out and put my efforts under a microscope if they let me install the septic system in the first place. And that’s OK with me.
But if I run a factory chicken farm in Arkansas or a corn farm in Iowa, I can let the runoff roll through my neighbor’s tomato garden and on into the Mississippi River, the better to run into the Gulf of Mexico and create another new world-record dead zone in the ocean. And probably, I won’t even get a warning or even a mean look from anyone in county government, or the FDA either.
5. Things are likely to get worse before they get better – People have developed a taste for cheap meat, just as Earl Butz predicted way before he became Nixon’s agriculture secretary and started driving us toward our current agricultural predicament. And by God, Cargill and the rest of the Corn Lobby are going to give more of it to us. And that means more factory feedlots, more cow poop and more food poisoning. Just pray salmonella never finds its way into one of the giant corn-processing plants, because corn syrup, fructose and other derivatives are everywhere in the universe, and the resulting disaster would dwarf this current peanut butter dust-up.
So now what?
Shop really carefully, with the realization that the wrong choice will make you or your kids puke. Be prepared to spend more time and money on obtaining food that’s safe and healthy. Grow (or hunt and fish for) as much of your own food as you can, learn to process your food safely, and work on buying the rest from farmers or growers you know and trust.
Or not. Your choice. I’m just sayin’…
And I swear, that’s it for the peanut butter report from this quarter.
→ B.Dunn, Feb 07, 2009, 09 26 am
