yearofplenty

New Report: 1 in 4 Packages of Meat at the Grocery Contain Multi-Drug Resistant Staph

A few weeks ago I wrote a post highlighting the book, Superbug by Maryn Mckenna. The book tracks the emergence of antibiotic-resistant MRSA and claims that the heavy use of antibiotics in industrial animal agriculture has contributed to the rise of these resistant strains of bacteria.

Mckenna has an article at Wired.com today that reports on a new scientific study on the presence of drug-resistant bacteria in meat for sale in stores. She reports:

A team of researchers from Arizona bought meat and poultry in five cities across the United States, tested them for bacteria, and found this: 47 percent of the samples contained the very common pathogen Staphylococcus aureus, and 96 percent of those isolates were resistant to at least one antibiotic. Of more concern: 52 percent of those staph isolates were resistant to at least three antibiotics that are commonly used in both veterinary and human medicine.

That is: Roughly one in four packages of meat and poultry from across the US contained multi-drug resistant staph.

Here's the breakdown of how different types of meat compared:

Among the types of meat tested, turkey carried the most resistance, with 77 percent of the meat samples showing at least some; that was followed by pork (42 percent), chicken (41 percent) and beef (37 percent). Interestingly, it wasn’t all the same staph. Though there was a great diversity of staph types, each animal species seemed to carry mostly one sequence type or strain of staph: ST1 in pigs, ST5 in chickens and ST398 in turkey.

Perhaps the most important finding in the study is that the source of the bacteria was not human contamination, rather the bacteria came from the animals themselves. Mckenna quotes study team member Lance Price:

“There’s an important second point: We found that each of the meat and poultry types had their own distinctive staph on them. That provides strong evidence that food animals were the primary source of the resistant staph. The source wasn’t human contamination of the meat at slaughter, or when it was packaged for retail sale.”

This is an important data point in the debate about the impact of antibiotic use in raising farm animals. The Ag. community has argued for years that no one has been able to prove a link between such use and the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria that is harmful to humans. The evidence is mounting that concentrated animal operations are not only bad for animals, but they are bad for humans as well.

Go here for a previous post on safety issues with America's meat supply.

Newsflash: Dairy Industry Wants You to Eat More Dairy - What's So Controversial About That?

The headlines have been blaring all over the internet since the New York Times reported, While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Cheese Sales. The story highlights the work of an organization called Dairy Management to promote extra cheese on Domino's Pizzas. Here's how the NY Times article describes their work:

Dairy Management, which has made cheese its cause, is not a private business consultant. It is a marketing creation of the United States Department of Agriculture — the same agency at the center of a federal anti-obesity drive that discourages over-consumption of some of the very foods Dairy Management is vigorously promoting.

So the story gets framed as the U.S. Government pushing cheese like a drug dealer while at the same time creating "Just Say No to Fatty Foods" initiatives. With the narrative framework in place it has been cast as yet another sensational example of big government hypocrisy and waste.

Huffington Post made it a top story and the message about this being a government plot evolved into headlines like, Uncle Sam Wants YOU to Eat More Cheese and Federal Government Helps Dominos Sell Pizzas, Uses Tax Dollars to Push Dairy Products.

While I have often been critical of large U.S. agricultural interests on this blog, in this case I think the story is misleading.

The biggest misunderstanding is that taxpayer dollars are behind this promotional campaign. The NYTimes article states clearly,

Dairy Management, whose annual budget approaches $140 million, is largely financed by a government-mandated fee on the dairy industry.

But the article then proceeds to muddy the waters with the very next sentence,

But it also receives several million dollars a year from the Agriculture Department, which appoints some of its board members, approves its marketing campaigns and major contracts and periodically reports to Congress on its work.

If you read the whole article it actually does a good job of reporting accurately that Dairy Management "received $5.3 million that year from the Agriculture Department to promote dairy sales overseas." But if you only read the first page it's easy to misunderstand, as some have, that U.S. tax dollars used to fund the USDA are being used to promote Domino's pizzas with extra cheese.

I spoke with a representative of Dairy Management Inc. this morning and she clarified that the U.S. Dairy Export Council, which is not involved in domestic marketing partnerships like the one with Domino's, received $5.3 million of its $20 million budget from Foreign Ag. Services, an arm of the USDA. Those are the funds referred to in the Times article.

But what about the staff from USDA that provide oversight of Dairy Management? The NYTimes article hints that tax dollars that pay for employees of the USDA are being used to support Dairy Management. According to the representative of Dairy Management, the USDA does provide oversight of their programs as mandated by law, but Dairy Management reimburses the government for the costs of this oversight. I was also told that USDA employees do not sit on the board of Dairy Management, but do attend board meetings in their oversight capacity.

The other major misunderstanding is that somehow the government is running this program or "pushing" for cheesier pizzas. Dairy Management and its board of 80 dairy farmers are the ones who run the program and they are the ones who pay for it.

At the behest of the dairy industry, a law was passed in 1983 known as the Dairy Production Stabilization Act of 1983.

It, therefore, is declared to be the policy of Congress that it is in the public interest to authorize the establishment, through the exercise of the powers provided herein, of an orderly procedure for financing (through assessments on all milk produced in the United States for commercial use and on imported dairy products) and carrying out a coordinated program of promotion designed to strengthen the dairy industry's position in the marketplace and to maintain and expand domestic and foreign markets and uses for fluid milk and dairy products.

This established what is known as the Dairy Checkoff. Every commercial producer of dairy in the U.S. is required by law to pay a fee per 100 pounds of product. For example, Idaho dairy farmers pay a total of 16 cents per 100 lbs of milk. Of that, 10 cents stays in Idaho to fund a state version of Dairy Management called United Dairymen of Idaho, 1 cent funds the Idaho Dairymen's Association that lobbies for dairy interests, and 5 cents goes to Dairy Management for national programs.

With the Domino's Legends Pizza promotion, Dairy Management set up the marketing campaign nationally, and in Idaho's case, the United Dairymen of Idaho Communications Rep. did radio interviews and ran statewide radio advertisements. All of this paid for by dairy farmers, not tax-payers. Their activities are regulated by the government according to the 1983 law to ensure they are using the funds legally, but it's disingenuous to suggest then that the government is therefore promoting fatty fast foods and dishonest to imply that taxpayer dollars are being used for such programs.

I'm not a big fan of promoting fast foods to consumers, but I'm not sure why it's controversial that dairy farmers are paying for programs to promote the sale of their products. It's like saying it's scandalous that Starbucks wants consumers to drink more coffee.

Behind the faux controversy of tax-payer funded promotions for cheese pizza is a very real controversy about the juxtaposition of Dairy Management's promotional work and the USDA initiatives promoting a healthy diet. Marion Nestle and her Food Politics blog is a good place to start in getting up to speed on this ongoing debate. But let's not give dairy farmers a hard time for wanting us to eat more cheese.  They already have enough challenges.

Worldometer Gives Real-Time Statistics on Food and Environment Crisis

The Worldometers site takes mind-numbing statistics and gives them a real sense of urgency by updating them in real-time. For example, you can watch the world population grow right before your eyes and you can witness the remaining supply of oil in the world disappear one barrell at a time. Below are some static screen grabs of statistics related to the content of this blog:

The Bats and the Bees - Hidden Heroes of Agriculture in Danger

I've reported on the precarious health of bee populations in Washington State, and bee colony-collapse disorder has received worldwide attention because of the irreplaceable role that honey bees play in the pollination of agricultural crops. Just last week scientists announced they were beginning to understand the combination of fungal and viral infections in bee colonies that are leading to widespread collapse.

Apparently bat populations, natures most important pesticide, are also under siege;

For several years now, scientists have been sounding alarms about a devastating fungus, White-Nose Syndrome (WNS), that has literally decimated bat populations in the Northeastern U.S. The fungus leaves a white substance on the bat's nose, wings and body, and disrupts the bat's hibernation patterns, forcing it to burn through its fat reserves, which quickly leads to starvation. Earlier this year, a survey of the bat population in New Jersey estimated that 90% of that state's bats had been killed off.

I didn't really have bats on my radar as virtuous creatures of the night, but their role in the food chain is amazing;

Bats are the primary predator of night-flying insects. That not only includes pests like mosquitoes but also insects like corn earworm moths and cotton bollworms. In their caterpillar forms, those insects can destroy crops. A 2006 study of several counties in South-Central Texas concluded that the local bat population had an annual value of over $740,000 a year as a pest control -- or up to 29% of the value of the local cotton crop.

A bat eats 60% to 100% of its body-weight in insects every day. Adams says one colony of Mexican free-tailed bats in Colorado's San Luis Valley, an important agricultural region, "pulls about 100 metric tons of insects out of the air in a year." And having bats in agricultural areas, he says, tends to move insects out of those areas, creating less need for dangerous and expensive pesticides.

This is a good reminder to me of the interconnected web of nature. We tend to find a problem in one area and try to fix the problem as if it were isolated. Our philosophical heritage is to imagine the world as a machine, and with a machine when one cog breaks down you can isolate it and fix the one cog to get the machine running again. It would be easy to look at these issues as isolated problems with bees and bats, but they are more likely reflections of systemic problems. While the scientists work on "isolating" the fungus and virus to study it I hope there are some ecologists working on the big picture question of why vital parts of the system are collapsing. Could it be that the over-generous application of anti-fungicides in agriculture is leading to the rise in especially harmful varieties of fungus? Or could it be that regularly covering a good portion of the earth's surface with herbicides like Round-Up is killing some important bacteria that controls fungus populations? It may be completely unrelated but those are some questions that come to my mind.

Food Fight: Washington Post Foodie Ezra Klein Defends Industrial Agriculture

Earlier in the week influential blogger Ezra Klein of the Washington Post wrote a short post dismissing the influence of the local food movement and heralding that "Industrial farms are the future." He wrote;

Despite the dreams of many foodies, I can't think of a major industry that went from small, decentralized production methods to large, scaled industrial production -- and then back again. Are there any examples I'm missing? Maybe so. But for now, I think of the preference for farmers markets and small producers as being mainly important in sending certain signals about production methods and branding preferences to Big Ag than in actually creating some sort of viable alternative.

In the article he references an article from the Guardian in the UK where Jay Rayner argues;

Words such as local, seasonal and organic have become a holy trinity. But these are merely lifestyle choices for the affluent middle-classes, a matter of aesthetics, and nothing to do with the real issues.

If we are to survive the coming food security storm, we will have to embrace unashamedly industrial methods of farming. We need to abandon the mythologies around agriculture...and recognise that farming really is an industry, much like car manufacturing or steel forging, one which always works better on a mass scale, but which can still be managed sustainably.

Ezra Klein is a farmers'-market-shopping, meatless-monday-eating, full-on-foodie so his little post created quite a stir. Tom Philpot at Grist offered up the highest profile retort. He mainly takes down Rayner's editorial and tisk-tisks Klein for passing it off as meaningful commentary. He writes;

Rayner's argument goes like this: a) because the U.K. relies increasingly on food imports, and b) U.K. supermarkets demand flawless, uniform fruits and vegetables, forcing farmers to "grade out" much high-quality produce, and c) U.K. consumers have come to expect dirt-cheap food, then the nation "will have to embrace unashamedly industrial methods of farming" to avoid looming famine.

Really? The same line of reasoning could more logically have led Rayner in the opposite direction: that Britain's food problems stem from a globalized industrial food system consolidated into the hands of a few powerful companies.

Yesterday, Klein offered a little bit of an apology for citing the Guardian editorial, which he admits is weak, but he sticks to his guns when it comes to the future of food being industrial;

...I'm increasingly less convinced that small and big are, in the overall scheme of things, terribly useful dividing lines for the future of agriculture. Whether one could hypothetically imagine feeding the world using decentralized production methods, I don't see much reason to believe it will happen. At the same time, small farms can be run wastefully and large farms can be run sustainably.

When I say that the food movement is sending important signals to America's agribusiness giants, I mean it -- forcing them to innovate in organics and compete with Stonyfield and think about the success of farmers markets are types of pressure that could lead to really important transformations in how they do their business. And those are transformations that might then be copied by large producers in other countries. That's why I think the most important role of the food movement is potentially changing the behavior of players like Nestle and ConAgra, and creating some large companies that demonstrate how a different ethos of food production can be brought to industrial scale.

Andrew Sullivan just pinged this dialogue so I suspect it will get a lot of play on blogs and editorial pages in the coming weeks.

This little food fight touches on so many different aspects of what I blog about here that it's a little hard for me to decide where to enter in, but let me pick one aspect of the debate and see where it leads.

Klein mentions the hypothetical question as to whether it's possible to feed the world through decentralized production methods. It's typical in these debates for defenders of industrial ag to assert that it's not possible to feed the world using organic or local methods and others reply that, actually, you can. Klein dismisses this line of argument as irrelevant. He says it's not going to happen. He asserts that we have never seen "a major industry that went from small, decentralized production methods to large, scaled industrial production -- and then back again," which is what would need to happen in the case of food. The industrial cat is out of the bag and there is no turning back. All we can hope for is mega-corporations that are responsible and responsive to consumer demands for more sustainable and local food.

He takes the the pose of the realist and on one hand I agree with him. I often say (I just said it yesterday in fact), that real substantial change in food distribution will have to come through changes to big retailers like Walmart. For an example of how this is happening with potatoes go here.

But I disagree with Klein's and Rayner's foundational assumption - that the production of food is best viewed as an "industry, much like car manufacturing or steel forging, one which always works better on a mass scale..." For one, there is mounting evidence that food production does not work better on a mass scale. It's only over the last 75 years that food has been imagined as an industry and practiced as such. We fed the world for millennia with small, local and organic agriculture. Modern industrial food practices are a very recent innovation and the long term consequences are still unknown.

There is no doubt that modern technologies have been a boon to the task of feeding people around the world, but there is something different about food than making cars or forging steel. Manufacturing cars is a product of the industrial revolution. Eating food arises out of the very nature of the created order. For all of history food amounted to more than the shallow categories of industry. Food was culture, family, provision, and for the three major religions of the world, a sign of God's grace.

In the Genesis account of creation the first words out of God’s mouth to Adam and Eve are, “You are free to eat….” Not far behind is the warning, “You must not eat…” After their disobedience, God proclaims judgment, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:17-19). Even in judgment there is a grace of provision.

It's funny to me how casually we throw around the phrase "saving the world" in debates about sustainability. Isn't it so obvious that "going green" is a veiled, modern-secular way of entering into the territory of apocalypse and salvation, the ancient categories of the human quest for life and meaning and God. Food goes deep into mysterious and hallowed places of human existence. Food cannot be reduced to the limited categories of industry and it does great damage to imagine it exclusively as such.

There is one thing I agree with in the Guardian column. Rayner says that the local, seasonal and organic food movements are a matter of aesthetics, and have nothing to do with the real issues of industrial practices and pragmatics of feeding the world. He's right in pointing out that what drives the local food/sustainable food movement is, something beyond the pragmatism of calories and food miles, something more intangible. Aesthetics is a rather dismissive way of putting it. I would say that it arises out the human search for meaning and hope.

One last comment. Rayner claims that it's only the well-off middle-class who have the luxury to dismiss the reality of food as industry. In my experience it's actually the impoverished 2/3 world that understand the reality that food is more than industry. To the majority world food is culture, family and life. Most of the world gets that those are "real issues" that are relevant to conversations about food. Wealthy westerners are actually the innovators of the exclusive view of food as industry and profit margin. It is our particular single-minded lens that is foreign in the world. 

The insurgent foodies in the western world are attempting to lift up other issues that are very real, issues that touch on aspects of human life that industry can never reduce and control, and issues that impact and change industrial practices.

As I see it, the task is not to de-industrialize food, the task is to re-enchant, re-annimate, and re-new our imaginations around food, which by necessity means to re-connect with the land that supplies us with food (and perhaps the Creator of the land), and along with that to re-connect with the farmers who farm the land.

Are Raw Food Fanatics Wrong?

I found this 10 minute "How Cooking Made Us Human" talk from Harvard's Richard Wrangham very eye opening. He challenges the notion that raw foods are healthier for human consumption and describes the role of cooking in human evolution. h/t Andrew Sullivan.

Scientific Study: Gardening May Make You Smarter, Lower Anxiety

 
Picture: some variation on glacier lily wildflower.

It has always intuitively made sense to me that spending time out in the garden is good for my health and general well being, especially for reducing stress. Well, it turns out that there may be a scientific basis for such a claim. A recent study on the effects of exposure to a common soil bacteria (mycobacterium vaccae) shows a strong correlation between the bacteria and improved learning and lowered anxiety.

Scientific American reports:

Studies have shown time spent in nature does us all good. Specifically a recent study done with 1,200 people, published in the journal Environmental Health and Technology found that even just five minutes in a leafy park can significantly boost our mood. Well it might be because we inhaled some bacteria among the leaves and grass...

Injecting this bacteria into mice has already been shown to increase serotonin levels and decrease anxiety. But the researchers wondered if it might have a subsequent effect on learning. They fed the bacteria to mice and then tested them in a maze.

And lo and behold these mice navigated the maze twice as fast as mice who received no bacteria.

The Montreal Gazette adds;

Matthews doesn't know how well the bacterium aerosolizes, "but certainly if you're vigorously working in the soil, there are probably some particles that are becoming airborne, so we may very well be inhaling it, as well as eating it by inhaling it and having it get into our GI (gastrointestinal) tract." We're also exposed via contact with food, especially foods grown directly in the soil, such as carrots and lettuce "and other things that are close to the soil..."

This may be an important data point for those advocating for gardening as part of school curriculum.

An interesting follow up to this would be to study the effects of Round Up and other ubiquitous weed killers on the presence of the bacteria. Organic gardeners have long been saying that soil is a complex community of life and we can't kill weeds and bugs with chemicals and not recognize that we are likely killing all kinds of other important forms of life. In the end, this effects the foods that we eat. It's not just the presence of pesticides and herbicides in our carrots that should concern us, but also the lack of important bacteria that are keys to human health.

To all my organic gardening friends, you officially have permission to say "I told you so."

MIT Scientists Say Local Food Is the Answer to Obesity Epidemic

Must read article on the efficacy of local food movement at MIT News. Yes that MIT. Not Moonbeams In the Twilight food co-op or Michael pollan Is Totally awesome fan club newsletter. It's the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From a scientific perspective they take a stab at advocating for local food systems as a way to combat obesity in our communities. Some choice quotes:

Obesity is widespread due to our national-scale system of food production and distribution, which surrounds children — especially lower-income children — with high-calorie products. “The problem lies not just in a child, but the whole environment around a child,” says Albright. “To end obesity, we need to produce healthier, more accessible, more affordable food.” As Albright notes, 90 percent of American food is processed — according to the United States Department of Agriculture — meaning it has been mixed with ingredients, often acting as preservatives, that can make food fattening.

America should increase its regional food consumption. Each metropolitan area, the researchers say, should obtain most of its nutrition from its own “foodshed,” a term akin to “watershed” meaning the area that naturally supplies its kitchens. Moreover, in a novel suggestion, the MIT and Columbia team says these local efforts should form a larger “Integrated Regional Foodshed” system, intended to lower the price and caloric content of food by lowering distances food must travel, from the farm to the dinner table.

Of course this doesn't explain why my gerth is growing since I've become a locavore. It might have something to do with turning 40. Or spending too much time sitting in front of computer blogging.

Fresh healthy food from the Second Harvest Food Bank will be available today in the parking lot of Millwood Presbyterian Church from 1pm to 3pm for low income families. Spread the word to folks who can benefit.