Fit Fare

When I was a senior in high school, our dragon lady history teacher forced all us unsuspecting girls to read “The Jungle,” by Upton Sinclair, the watershed 1906 expose of the meat-packing industry. It’s a pretty foul read - think maggots and rats. A few girls in my class complained that the book made them too nauseated to eat for days afterward, and several girls proclaimed they would be vegetarians forever after. Sinclair’s book sparked a public uproar about food safety, and some of the first American food safety laws were passed as a result.

Fast forward 100 years, to the present day. The year of lethal spinach, killer green onions, disease-ridden tomatoes. It’s happening again, and two contemporary American authors are trying to carry Sinclair’s torch, encouraging a news-blasted and terror-fatigued public to get interested in its own safety. Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) each recently spoke up about the politics of food in America, and why people are getting sick.

Both agree that our food supply-chain has become disastrously centralized and industrialized. To give a few scary examples: 13 slaughterhouses process most of the beef for 300 million Americans. Beef “factories” process 400 cattle an hour, a speed which makes it “impossible to keep manure off carcasses.” Meat and veggies interact at “distribution centers,” like the Taco Bell one under investigation now - the one that supplies more than a thousand restaurants with food.

And the proverbial wolf is guarding the henhouse, and spreading salmonella in the process. According to Schlosser, the government agencies that are supposed to regulate food safety are headed by powerful members of the industry they are supposed to be regulating. The current head of the Agriculture Department used to be a lobbyist for the beef industry, and the most recent head of the FDA was a top exec at the National Food Processors Association. Since the year 2000, the biggest food-safety offenders, the fast-food and meat-packing industries, have given 80% of political donations to Republicans, who in turn basically gave them control of their own regulatory agencies. Budget cuts have brought down the number of FDA inspections from 35,000 a year in the 1970’s to just 3,400 a year today.

Consumer reports released a study last week saying 83% of grocery-store chickens were contaminated with bacteria - salmonella, campylobacter, or both at once. Pollan, in a recent interview with Salon, warned that strains of the bacteria contaminating our food are antibiotic resistant, making them deadly. “Salmonella was not as serious a problem a few years ago; it was very common…most of us could fight it with antibiotics, but once you get an antibiotic-resistant strain, it’s a big problem…”

Centralization means these deadlier bacteria can spread much more easily, and it also makes our nation’s food system vulnerable to deliberate threats, like bioterrorism. “Most of the nation’s chickens are coming out of a handful of plants where they’ve all been in the same water bath,” says Pollan. “This is a petri dish.” Because of the many conflicts of interest between the regulatory agencies and the food industry, the USDA doesn’t even have the power to order a recall of tainted meat - any recall would have to be voluntary.

Scared yet? So am I. Now here’s what you can do. Whenever possible, buy locally grown and processed food. Believe it or not, there are still actual butcher shops and vegetable markets in many American cities and towns. If that’s not possible, or if the cost is prohibitive, buy food that comes from a smaller (non-industrial) supplier - grocery chains like Whole Foods and Wild Oats are trustworthy on this count and source their food very carefully. Vote with your wallet; don’t buy food from giant corporations that have made the supply chain less safe. Wash all your fruits and vegetables thoroughly. Rinse your meat before you cook it, and make sure it comes to a safe internal temperature - this will kill off many dangerous bacteria. And pester, pester, pester your elected officials about this issue. No matter what your political beliefs are, you and your family - and mine - need safe food to eat.