What Is In Your Food System?

With the news report that Vladimir Putin had banned further exports from Russia of cereal grains like wheat and barley it comes to my mind again today how fragile the food system is in the United States and how the industrialization of growing, processing, and delivering food creates a weak system not to mention one lacking in basic nutrition. Having reconnected with many people in the Los Angeles area recently I began to imagine what would happen to the tens of millions of people in that area, many of them trapped in valleys surrounded by mountains, with little water, and almost no usable land in which to grow food if any one of the known and expected natural or manmade catastrophes were to occur. Being completely dependent on a remote food supply isn’t a situation I would willingly put my family in.

Aside from the creeper disasters like drought that slowly erode an area’s ability to produce food, we have the super volcano in Yosemite ready to go off at any time, an eight foot bulge at a plate convergence running 100 miles up the coastline of Oregon, and wildly variable weather like that which caused late blight to reappear this week again in New York. We will have to wait to see if it creates the kind of destruction to whole fields of crops like it did last year. Too much rain might fall drowning fields or making it impossible to collect a usable crop. Many combinations of all of these and our dependence on the Interstate Highway System that won’t work if people are attempting to flee an area create a multitude of potential crises, some of which might make the atomic bombs I was drilled repeatedly to protect myself from in grade school by hiding under a piece of wood look like a welcome scenario.

Maybe it was this aspect of growing up in the United States that has lulled us into a state of euphoric bliss and denial that anything could ever go wrong. After all, we survived the atomic bomb, the Nazis and Soviet Union, the Korean and Cold War and at the same time were fed the same kind of propaganda that every dictator uses “we are the best country”-meaning that everyone else is second class, “people envy us for our freedom”-the rest of the world exists in oppressed slavery, and “God bless America”-yes we really are that much better than everybody else. With that kind of one-two punch why would anybody ever take off their party shoes?

I remember how unhappy my daughter was once when a family decision was made not to bring certain types of entertainment into the house. My wife and I could not understand what the fuss was about but our thinking is much more like the generation that lived through the dust bowl and Great Depression whereas my daughter is like most people today, needing to be entertained and not understanding the limits we put on spending for consumer goods. Her generation has forgotten the happiness of a long drink of cool clean water after a hard day’s work or what it is like to eat after not having had food for a while. For the most part we take cool clean air and protection from the weather for granted and most of us would be terribly unprepared if we had to live outside without these things.

I am sure that it seems implausible to many people that we should prepare for a disaster on the magnitude of the ones discussed here and reported widely elsewhere. It would make sense to think about our food systems, though, for other reasons. Many people believe that we shouldn’t be eating as much cereal grain as we do. No animal on the planet evolved to live on as much cereal or corn as we eat or feed cows and hogs to fatten them up. We feed them to animals to fatten them up the last few weeks of their life and we eat them because they are cheap to grow and lend themselves to mechanized industrialized processes, not because they have the nutrition we need and despite the fact that they are hard to digest and cause a multitude of health problems.

Cereals and corn make us feel good because they release energy quickly and we have associated that sugar rush and addiction with good health. Sometimes feeling good isn’t so good for you, like the skin rush you get when snorting brown heroin, one of the hazards I was exposed to during my time in the U. S. Army. I survived that and lived to tell the tale so I imagine anyone could decide to make any change they want, if they are strong enough, have the right kind of friends, and realize that in order to be a friend first you have to be strong and true to your real needs and self.

Are there antibiotics in our organic food?

A number of listservs and bloggers have posted articles searing organic producers when it was discovered that antibiotics used on animals in agriculture do not break down in soils or hot composting and can be taken up in plants. Under current USDA regulation it is possible for these chemicals to make it into food labeled as organic without being detected. The fear is that we are creating new types of super bugs that will be resistant to available antibiotics. Strange that they fail to point out that you are far more likely to come into contact with these chemicals in operations that make no attempt to follow organic methods than someone that does, or that the need for such chemicals is greatest in very large operations typical of those owned by large publicly traded companies.

Hormones and other manmade chemicals are also altering biology in our water ways. Male fish carrying egg sacks and three legged frogs are now being linked to human artificial hormones being excreted in urine that is not monitored or broken down in waste water treatment plants. With all the scares about GMOs and other technological "advances", few people seem alarmed by the fact that mutated bacteria are being developed in farmer's fields every time they spray the manure from their holding ponds on next year's corn crop. “Around 90 percent of these drugs that are administered to animals end up being excreted either as urine or manure,” said Holly Dolliver, a member of the Minnesota research team and now a professor of crop and soil sciences at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. “A vast majority of that manure is then used as an important input for 9.2 million hectares of (U.S.) agricultural land.”

One thing that most people might not be aware of is that chickens in large egg operations aren't given water to drink. They get a chemical cocktail, as do cattle in feed lot operations, that is designed to keep them alive in such unnatural environments. Chicken manure is often composted and fed to cattle, possibly increasing the future need for antibiotics and new antibiotics since eventually resistance will develop. I have to wonder whether anyone is tracing the chain of antibiotic use as it gets passed from animal to animal and eventually to humans. People that choose to get their food from a large corporation instead of a local farmer may be subjected not only to resistant strains of bacteria but also to the chemicals that make the bacteria resistant.

The USDA had originally called a halt to one antibiotic, cefquinome, last year but lobbying by interest groups forced the only agency that has the authority to protect our food supply to continue allowing it's use. Cefquinome is a fourth-generation veterinary-use cephalosporin that is not affected by pH and can be used to treat infections caused by Salmonella, E. coli, Staphylococcus, & Streptococcus. It passes unchanged through the animal so giving this to an animal is like giving it directly to your corn or forage crops if that is what you do with your manure.

With the explosive rise in MRSA and other necrotizing fasciitis as well as epidemic levels of meningitis in states like Oregon, one has to wonder why there hasn't been more pressure to provide controls for these chemicals including certification that they were destroyed before animal byproducts were allowed to enter the environment or food chain. Veterinarians should be required to certify that proper handling and isolation procedures are in place at the time of use as a part of chain of custody agreements in order to write a prescription and could be as simple as checking a box on the prescription. We should be doing the same things with veterinarians that we do with doctors and train lower level practitioners to help deal with more routine matters so the overall cost of an affordable and safe food supply is ensured.

If we can’t ask or trust our licensed health practitioners and officials to protect the community’s health then who are we going to ask to do that? The signs are out there that a huge problem that we might not have any solutions for might be coming and it would seem that erring on the side of caution would get more consideration than supporting industries that only exist because they are so heavily subsidized in the first place. Our "cheap food" industry only exists because of taxpayer support for commodities like corn and milk, industries that are given billions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies every year. Hopefully some day we will have a government that invests in wellness and quality instead of supporting large company short term financial interests over the needs of the people that are being robbed to keep corporate and large government interests in power.

The current system of food production in this country is not only not sustainable, it is fragile and dangerous. Your next trip to a hospital could be because of an antibiotic resistant strain of bacteria currently being bred by the USDA in a large farmer's field. Supporting either wing of the Big Money Party, Democrats and Republicans, could end up being a death warrant for your grandchildren. We, government, can do better, we just choose not to upset the people that pay for and own our politicians. We also keep sending the same monsters back to Washington with results that should be predictable by now. Meanwhile one of the best protections you could give to your family is support local agriculture by getting to know who your farmer is and how they produce their food. Supporting local agriculture helps build strong communities that will be much more resilient and self reliant and have fewer exposures to vagaries in the economy and disease.

http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/antibiotics-in-crops
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cefquinome
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/03/AR2007030301311_pf.html
http://ars.usda.gov/research/publications/publications.htm?SEQ_NO_115=223799
http://www.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/Publications.htm?seq_no_115=217938
http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2007/03/fda_approves_cefquinome.php