Not everyone lives near a farm.
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āAs the US government stretches out into its second week, with federal food-safety and disease outbreak personnel sent home and prohibited from returning to work even if they wanted to without pay, a major foodborne-illness outbreak has begunā
Obviously a false flag operation!
I worked for a nameless big national nonprofit once upon a time that had ārequired volunteerā hours. Specifically, you were required to put in unpaid hours on fundraising events and activities for your specific location, in addition to whatever your regular paid position was.
Still one of the best jobs Iāve ever had, but the mandatory volunteering was a bit much to swallow.
Oh, they donāt feed the animals antibiotics, they feed them āgrowth promotants.ā
Approved by the FDA!
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Hey! When you put it that way it changes everything!
I have mandatory continuing education hours to get for my license, and even though Iām not strictly a microbiologist, last year I picked a book called Food Safety, by Phyllis Entis. The first half was about meat contamination, and as I read I vowed never to eat meat again. The second was about plant-food contamination and I realized eventually that couldnāt vow not to eat plants too - Iād just have to take my life in my hands. The book is just a textbook, not a polemic, but it all adds up to what journalists would call A Searing Indictment Of The Food Industry, and to some extent the FDA as well.
For example, someone remarked above that contaminated spinach is hard to clean. Yes. In the book is a description of E. coli O157:H7 contamination of lettuce. The bacteria can get from cow manure fertilizer or chicken manure in adjacent chicken farms to 100 um inside the tissue of a cut or bruised leaf, beyond the reach of cleaning agents. One event resulted in a 61 people sickened and a little girl spending 11 weeks in intensive care. Her kidneys were stunted and she developed diabetes.
So, unfortunately itās not just drinking raw chicken juice that causes the problems. (And I donāt eat the pre-cut up bagged salads any more for sure.)
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I understand, but you have to see the bigger picture. Organic food is expensive because weāve designed a system that makes it so; if we, as a society, want a better system, we have to work for it. And people are, just not enough. Unfortunately, a lot of people are stuck where you are, not able to move forward because of short-term costs.
But there are a lot of people who CAN make that switch- and if they did, all this āexpensiveā local food would actually get cheaper. Part of the answer is also pushing our government into putting the same amount of money they currently have with industrial food into organic / local. Industrial chicken isnāt cheap because of magic, itās cheap because they put decades of research into boosting production while keeping costs down. Unfortunately, the byproduct of that goal is a lot of shitty, unhealthy chicken, and a system so dependent on fossil fuels that itās going to go belly-up the minute gas prices take a big leap upwards. If we put that same R&D into local, organic methods, productivity would go up and prices would go downā¦ but not at the expense of our health and environment.
Believe me, Iām on your side. Iām not rich- I just have done a lot of research on the subject, interviewed a lot of experts and farmers, and realize what a sham our current system is. Those with more money than you need to start supporting this system so that everyone can eat well in the long run.
One final note- I donāt know about Canada, but here in the U.S. there are lots of CSAās with subsidized shares for folks who canāt afford it. The CSA Iām in will kick in half the cost if you are a family that wants to eat well but canāt afford it. Our farmersā markets will give you $2 worth of food for every food stamp dollar you spend on their foodā¦ so yes, there are solutions even now.
I donāt either. In fact, people who live in cities far away from farms have even more access to the kind of food Iām talking about because they represent a large customer base in a small areas. Farms will come to THEM for that reason.
Iām not sure what part youāre not getting. If someone gets sick from your shitty farming practices, their friends and neighbors will know. If itās part of a CSA or buying club, it just takes one email to let all those customers know whatās up. Seriously, this is not rocket science- itās simple community dynamics. I understand, in the world youāre describing, why we need all that extra bureaucratic BS to protect us from the big systems weāve created. Iām talking about a whole other paradigm, which is really an old-skool paradigm of simply knowing your community (and your farmers are part of that community.)
Even if you donāt personally visit your farms, other people you know will have. The internet has made this kind of thing doable again, as it was decades past. Iām not talking out of my theoretical ass here, Iām living exactly what Iām telling you, and not in some kind of marxist commune or libertarian state- Iām in New York City, and our CSA is one of many, supported by a wide variety of people, ethnicities and income levels. This is not an affluent neighborhood at all- most of the people here are working or middle class.
The solutions are already here, as long as youāre willing to let go of your preconceptions.
Sorry, I thought you said you went to the farm, or something like that, picking fruit.
No public health standards and no government-mandated health inspections means you donāt have to let anyone on your farm or food processing facility without a warrant. If thereās an outbreak of food poisoning that makes it a helluva lot harder to track down quickly.
Granted, some extreme locavores may believe that anyone who doesnāt personally research the entire supply chain for every morsel of food they consume deserves to get Salmonella poisoning. Me, Iād rather keep the FDA around for now.
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My point was more that I am not poor (not really), but still cannot afford to buy all organic. I wish I could. We grow what we can and buy organic when we can, but the choice is fairly stark. I would not and should not qualify for any subsidies - as I said above we are around the median household income, so any subsidy system would go broke quickly.
I have known some families who go all organic (and/or vegan etc). Not a scientific sample, but of the three, two ended in divorce/split due to massive money problems. The other family is fine, but they live in crappy rental housing, their kids do not participate in any activities, and they are broke all the time. Not worth it. What is the long-term health impact on kids who eat all organic but spend all their emotional energy dealing with family crises and living in crappy conditions?
It is easy to justify spending, and even going into debt, because āorganicā. But for all of us who are not rich, all choices of that nature come with other things we choose against. My kids could eat all organic, but my older kid would not play hockey (which he loves), I would not get exercise, my younger kid would not have music lessons. Etc. Etc.
I wish the solutions were that simple. Definitely bring down the cost of it - use subsidies to do that, great. But donāt offer solutions that amount to āraise the price of basic needsā because it will teach us recalcitrant people to behave properly.
If I die from antibiotic-resistant salmonella, Iām sure Iāll find that very comforting. If I miss two weeks of work and get fired, or two weeks of self-employment and go into the red, Iām sure it wonāt take any time at all for me to be made whole again.
And does it not occur to you that any deaths attributable to this shutdown (even if we canāt get a precise body count), it will be because BOTH sides of the aisle played chicken and used ALL of us as pawns. Lately, itās become a thing again for various legislators to stay up all night and read random junk from the podium in order to force/prevent various actions. But not this time. And, not a single legislator I know of has stepped up and said, āEnough! Iām sitting in until or unless the rest of you show up and get this thing done, one way or the other.ā Not one of them. Not a hero in the entire carload - even though they could take gym breaks and have a staff and a food supply at the ready. (None of the people who sat in during the protests over the past couple of years had anywhere near those advantages. But they did it, because it mattered to them.)
Although - the playing chicken thing hasnāt got anything to do with the salmonella outbreak. Thatās what we have State health departments for - 50 of them, to be exact. Which means, 50 state-level agencies with the same level of access to the media as the FDA or the CDC. So, other than the District of Columbia, Congress threw the burden back on the States. And they will do their jobs, because all of their scientists and public health officials went to the same schools, got the same degrees with the same quality of education. And when you think about that, consider how much fear-mongering press your state is doing? Lots of press releases? Just a couple? Or are the federal agencies busy over-dramatizing threats to the people in your state? Take a look, and form your own opinion.
Whatās different now is that, unlike the federal agencies, the states with the largest populations canāt throw their weight around as they do in dealing with those federal agencies. The entire nation doesnāt have to follow their lead in terms of projects or statistical studies as they usually do, or anything else, as long as the shutdown lasts. You get to decide what that means to you and your state. You donāt have to wait for somebody to tell you.
Think about which goods and services are ONLY provided at the federal level, and THEN youāll have a decent measure of whatās actually at any potential risk. I think youāll find most things of direct consumer impact are going to be handled by your state and local agencies. That doesnāt mean youāre going to be happy about the shutdown - but it might help you gain some perspective on the thing.
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What Iām trying to explain, though, is that this is not raising the prices. The prices for the āregularā food you eat are artificially low, and the real cost is hidden. If you were to include all the hidden costs of the ācheapā food youāre touting, it would actually be a lot more expensive. The subsidies youāre saying you donāt want to be a part of, well, you are a part of them since the food you buy is heavily subsidized by the government (I guess I canāt speak for Canada, but for the U.S. it is, and Iām guessing Canada is in a similar boat.) So you already are benefiting from subsidized food, itās just that in my example, itās a conscious effort by individuals rather than a hidden effort done by the government. And then, when you add all the health costs of salmonella outbreaks, diabetes, obesity, illnesses due to antibiotics and chemical spraysā¦ well, that food isnāt so cheap then. Letās add, on top of that, the fact that in the long run, your food is going to cost a lot more because it is incredibly dependent on oil- thatās the part no one is talking about. The system only works with the assumption that you can get cheap gas and cheap fossil fuels (for fertilizer.) The minute those costs go up, and they will go up as we run out of oil (which is not speculation) that system wonāt even be able to provide you with low cash costs.
We havenāt even gotten to the fact that the cost of that expensive food is actually a lot closer to what people paid for food decades ago- poor, working class people I mean. They managed it, because they lived in a society devoid of all the consumerist products weāve designed to keep everyone spending. Iām not talking about you specifically because I donāt know you, but people in general. So now a much smaller piece of our budget goes towards food, and a lot larger goes towards disposable entertainment. The system Iām recommending is actually just bringing things back to the balance they had before our society went economically nutso.
Given all that, it behooves us as a society to figure out a solution now- and people have. Itās just that it requires thinking āoutside the boxā and thatās not something a lot of people can do. Iām not saying make your marriage or children suffer for the sake of organic food. Iām not even saying buy organic food, since a lot of it is just corporate food that qualifies for a stupid label. Iām saying get to know where your food comes from, and base your choices on things that make sense in the short AND long term.
Your mind is stuck in a mode of āpeople are going to fuck you over if they can so youād better not ever trust anyone.ā Thatās not the only way to go about life, and itās certainly not the way I want to go about life.
Iām not advocating banning the FDA. Iām pointing out that theyāre pretty useless, and while youāre waiting around for them to magically improve, people have come up with an alternate system that works a hell of a lot better. If you donāt want to try it, and want to stick to trusting a corrupted, bloated ruling body that doesnāt even do what its supposed to do, go ahead. Good luck with that.
Historical precedent supports the notion that someone will eventually fuck you over if there is a good profit motive and few barriers against doing so.
Iām donāt need the FDA to inspect my neighborās zucchini patch before I accept some free vegetables, but I donāt think itās feasible for most Americans to have a deep, personal, trusting relationship with every person in their food supply chain.
So who vets the safety and efficacy of the medicines your family takes? A local health co-op?
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Iām not sure what that has to do with anything. Iām not advocating living in the wild west. People have figured out a great alternative to our food system. No one has figured out a great alternative to our drug and medical system, fucked up as it is. Not everyone can just make penicillin in their kitchen, so Iām not sure how you can compare that with growing vegetables. This is not an ideological argument about capitalism and socialism (at least, not for me.)
At the moment, as things stand now, it is possible for you to have a personal relationship with the people that provide you a good percentage of what you eat. Weāll cross the āentire nationā bridge when we come to it. And if itās not possible right now at this moment because of where you live and the options you currently have, itās an attainable goal if you can get your neighbors to advocate for it. You probably either live near a farm, or you live near / in a city. Unless youāre a hermit, thereās probably enough of you around to make this work. Whether you want to or not is a different question- but given the topic (what we EAT) I think itās right up there on the list of āimportant shit I should pay attention toā.
Your words were ā[the FDA is] pretty useless.ā I just wanted to make sure you knew what the āDā was for.
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