Is Our Food Safe: A Consumer's Guide to Protecting Your Health and the Environment

Book by Warren Leon Caroline Smith Dewaal

CHAPTER ONE

IF OUR FOOD IS SO SAFE, WHY ARE WE WORRIED? Confusing messages about food are everywhere. For example, government leaders tell us we have the safest food supply in the world, but they also ask us to memorize complicated food-handling instructions. Are Americans who question the safety of their food being overcautious, or are there really serious problems with what we eat? In short, is food safety a major concern or not?

At first glance, the situation in America today certainly looks good compared to what it was in the past. After all, we could be living in New York City in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Back then, the public water supply smelled from pollutants and any- one who could afford it paid for water trucked in from the country- side. The milk was so contaminated that newspapers accused the dairies of murder. The cows' meager diet of "swill" residue from the city's distilleries, caused the milk to appear a sickly blue that had to be hidden by artificial coloring. It was then delivered unrefrigerated to local neighborhoods in the same wagons that trucked out cow manure.1

The bread wasn't much better. Health reformer Sylvester Graham accused commercial bakers of increasing their profits by adding "chalk, pipe clay and plaster of Paris" to their bread to cover up impurities and to make it heavier and whiter.

New York was by no means unique. At every location and every time in history, people have gotten sick from what they ate. Poor food preservation techniques, inadequate understanding of sanitation, and contaminants in the food supply caused serious illnesses such as cholera and typhoid fever. Even today, 2 million people die each year in developing countries from diarrheal disease, primarily transmitted through food and water.3

Most people throughout history have had diets lacking key nutrients. Before the American Revolution, many of the colonists ate an unvarying diet consisting almost exclusively of bread and meat. For most of the year, they ate few, if any, fruits or vegetables. Even today, many poor people around the world subsist primarily on a single food such as rice. From the lack of vitamins and other essentials, they frequently become sick or blind or even die.

So, viewed through the long lens of history, the modern American food system is a marvel of productivity, cleanliness, and safety. For a visitor from an earlier generation, or from many developing countries today, an American supermarket, with its endless aisles of food choices, including fresh fruits and vegetables stacked high year-round, would be a technological wonder as impressive as computers, video cameras, and cell phones.

This abundance has had real health benefits. People grow taller and live longer than ever before, at least in part because they have more plentiful and better food. We know so much more about nutrition than earlier generations, and our food even comes with informative ingredient lists and nutrition labels. We also use more sophisticated methods to prepare and preserve food safely. Farmers and food processors have raised their standards of sanitation. Government regulators take consumer safety more seriously.

Perhaps most impressive of all, it takes remarkably few people to provide us with all this food. In 1900, more than 2 out of 5 Americans lived on farms, since that was the only way in which society could produce sufficient food. Today, only 1 out of each 40 American workers works in agriculture; and because of their remarkable productivity, the rest of us are free to pursue other occupations and live away from the land.

THE DOWNSIDE TO ALL THAT FOOD

Unfortunately, at the same time that we have increased the variety, quantity, and overall safety of our food, we have created new and serious problems that threaten our well-being. Here are three reasons why we should be concerned.

1. Changes to the Food System Have Generated Troubling New Safety Problems

In a quest for greater productivity and lower costs, farms have changed dramatically since World War II. Farmers now produce much of our food on large commercial farming tracts that grow one or just a few crops. The widespread adoption of a single-crop system, the so-called monoculture, was only possible with the use of chemical agents to increase yields and annihilate pests. Farmers began applying large quantities of synthetic chemical pesticides and fertilizers. The amount of pesticides used annually has now grown to well over 1 billion pounds of active ingredients, 10 times more than in 1945.

Many farmers feel they have little choice but to rely on pesticides once they switch to monoculture. In a farming system in which different crops are grown in rotation, many pests, like potato beetles and corn borers, have difficulty gaining a toehold since they thrive on only one type of plant. But once farmers start growing the same crop in the same field year after year, pesticides become necessary to prevent these pests from flourishing.

While pesticides have allowed farmers to at least partially control pests, they have introduced a new hazard into our lives. Farmworkers and others in farm communities have suffered from pesticide poisoning because of direct contact with the chemicals. The rest of the public has ingested pesticide residues on the food they eat. Lakes, rivers, and groundwater have been polluted. As we will see in chapter 4, pesticides have many harmful effects.

Other changes to the food system have introduced other new hazards. In animal agriculture, large food companies and farmers have constructed massive facilities, some with tens of thousands of pigs or hundreds of thousands of chickens. On such factory-style farms, animals spend their entire lives confined indoors. Many routinely receive antibiotics in their feed, not only to improve growth, but to ward off disease in the crowded, dirty conditions. This practice threatens the continued effectiveness of important antiobiotic medicines for humans. And in the crowded, stressful conditions of the large animal farms, disease can spread more quickly, in some cases to humans. Once a problem like salmonella in chickens becomes established on a factory farm, it is extremely difficult to root out.

Modern food-processing practices compound the problem of foodborne illness. For example, not that long ago, local butchers and grocery stores still ground beef on site and packaged it for their customers. If an animal had an infection, the problem was serious but contained. But now, the meat of dozens of cows gets mixed together in a central processing facility. If just one of those animals is diseased, it can infect an entire batch of meat going to thousands of consumers in multiple locations.

Food now also increasingly travels to us from around the world. Trade in food commodities is nothing new—nineteenth-century New Englanders ate wheat from Ohio and molasses from the West Indies and drank tea from India—but these days a much smaller share of the average person's food is produced locally. Increased reliance on imported fruits and vegetables injects new safety risks into the mix, since consumers can't be certain of the conditions under which their food was produced.

If you are like most Americans, you eat a significant share of your meals outside your home. While some restaurants utilize state-of-the-art food safety protocols, others can't even keep their rest rooms clean. The workforce in America's fast-growing food-service industry includes many of the nation's lowest-paid, youngest, and least-educated workers. Due to a lack of proper equipment or training, necessary safety precautions are not always followed. When a cook at home fails to wash food surfaces properly, perhaps three, four, or five household members are affected. But when an individual in a restaurant or another commercial food service facility does the same thing, hundreds of people can end up ill.

All of these changes over the past 60 years represent serious causes for concern. Moreover, because of global trade in food and the increasing globalization of disease, there is always the threat that a new foodborne illness will spread from one part of the world to the rest, much as AIDS did in the realm of sexually transmitted disease.

Food-safety problems can crop up in unpredictable, seemingly random ways, heightening public concern. Neither smelling, looking at, or even tasting your food will tell you if it is tainted. You can't see the pesticide residues on your fruit or the pathogens in your meat. Because most people have little contact with farms, the entire food production process seems mysterious and baffling, much more so than for previous generations.

Paul Slovic and other social scientists who study Americans' attitudes toward risk have concluded that people are much more willing to accept risks that they understand and feel they have some control over. Most Americans realize that high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar diets cause many more deaths and more sickness than pesticides or bacterial contamination of food, but these diet choices are subject to greater individual control. With modern nutrition labels, consumers can frequently identity foods with too much fat or sugar, but they can't tell when they are ingesting invisible microorganisms or chemicals that will harm them.4

2. Changes to the Food System over the Past 60 Years Have Caused Widespread, Permanent Environmental Damage

The same trends that have introduced new food-safety concerns have damaged the environment, sometimes in irreversible ways. Pesticides harm beneficial insects and other animals. They also pollute water supplies. Large-scale animal farms are another leading cause of water pollution. Moreover, modern industrial-style monoculture agriculture uses extravagant amounts of freshwater, depleting a valuable resource. Topsoil, another valuable natural resource, washes or blows off fields, in part because the farming methods emphasized in the past 60 years haven't made the preser...