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I knew I shouldn’t have eaten those honey-garlic-onion-cracked pepper-mustard-sea salt fizbos. But damn they were good.
Everything done to industrialize a product — to mass-produce it in large numbers, minimize the unit cost of production, maximize cash profits –at the same time concentrates risk of harm. The profit, however, is immediate, while the risks are almost always delayed, and this fact skews the judgment of the people involved. They come to believe that a healthy profit in hand today is worth any number of sick people down the road tomorrow or the day after. Industrial food is certainly no exception.
Scaling up food production requires the handling of plants and animals in enormous numbers, subjecting them to numerous chemical and mechanical processes performed by regiments of people using battalions of machines. Every chemical, process, person and machine presents multiple opportunities for contamination, a delayed risk for the eventual consumer of the product. Indications are that the risks are getting worse, fast.
Any doubts that this is so should have been laid to rest by the events that made news just this summer. Consider a partial list:
- In July, 650 people in Ohio suffered cramps and diarrhea after eating at a Chipotle restaurant.
- In June, 395 people in 15 states were sickened by the parasite cyclospora after eating tainted salads from McDonalds restaurants. The contamination came from Fresh Express, which recalled product from 3,000 McDonalds restaurants as well as Walgreen’s, Trader Joe’s and Kroger stores.
- Salmonella contamination in dry whey powder led to the precautionary recall of Ritz Crackers, Goldfish, Swiss rolls and various other products that use the ingredient.
- At least 100 people in 33 states became ill after eating Kellogg’s Honey Smacks cereal that had been contaminated with salmonella bacteria.
- Internationally, 212 people died and hundreds more were severely ill after eating processed meat products from a South African plant. It was the largest outbreak of Listeria poisoning ever recorded by the World Health Organization.
- “Fresh-cut” melon contaminated with salmonella and sold by such chains as Costco, WalMart and Whole Foods sickened 60 people, and put 30 in hospital, in eight states.
- At least 197 people became ill in 35 US states after eating romaine lettuce contaminated with E. coli bacteria. Five people died.
- In April the FDA recalled 206 million eggs from such chains as Food Lion and WalMart after 35 people were sickened — 11 of them hospitalized — by salmonella poisoning.
- A Consumer Reports analysis of processed baby foods found problematic levels of heavy metals such as arsenic and lead in two-thirds of the products.
- An analysis of 29 popular, oat-based breakfast cereals found dangerous levels of the probable carcinogen glyphosate — an ingredient in the infamous weed killer Roundup.
We cannot blame our collective ignorance of the threats posed by processed foods on the corporate news media — they actually do a pretty good job of reporting incidents of contamination, recalls, and the like. As to our collective persistence in demanding, buying and consuming ever more processed foods, who can be blamed for that? I mean, for crying out loud, are we actually going to try to avoid a few minutes of effort by buying chunks of watermelon that have been cut up into bites for us by unknown underpaid people in an unknown under-maintained facility in an unknown under-regulated country? And we’re going to be surprised when we get sick?
Repeat after me and memorize, please: with food as with anything else, if it is industrial, it might be cheap and easy, but eventually it’s going to make you very sick.
The question, “Are we actually going to …” extends nearly everywhere across human activity. Whether it’s the convenience of buying chopped or whole veggies, cultural attitudes (racism, sexism, militarism), destruction of the biosphere in exchange for energy and consumer goodies, or patterns of habitation, migration, and immigration, the answer to the question is uniformly “yes”: we’re going to actually keep on keeping on until we can’t anymore. Long-delayed outcomes of known risks doesn’t motivate nearly so much as short-term seductions. I chalk all this up to cultural drift, but there is probably a lengthy analysis of designed, motivated exploitation and manipulation out there.
When the US became a nation, 93% of people lived on farms as a matter of necessity. Unless you had some lucrative skill, paying someone else to grow your food was prohibitively expensive! It’s been that way for most of human history, which was a good thing imho.
My family and I reached the point where we grew and raised about 75% of our own food (for many of the reasons you note above). It seems as if nearly every day is devoted to it in one way or another, whether weeding, watering, freezing, canning, harvesting, dealing with breeding, births, worming, or some other aspect of animal husbandry.
My revelations over this time? It takes a lot of time to produce food! It simply doesn’t work when both parents are employed outside the home, which is the majority nowadays. We might very well forego $100 in “off the farm” income in order to take the time to produce food that could be purchased for $10. Yet, considering how food is produced industrially, I still think it’s worth it.
Most people simply don’t have the time, and I blame banks and corporate rule. Look at your major expenditures (mortgage, higher education, healthcare, etc). The costs for each have gone up dramatically, either as a result of increased credit availability (i.e. you pay more to the bank now because the credit they offer has raised the price for education and homes). The overpriced healthcare in this country is a result of corporate lobbying and corrupt government, hands down. Paying for all this *forces* people to work themselves to death, and increases their need for overpriced healthcare.
Until people figure this out and turn off their televisions in disgust, I expect more of the same.
All of the above is true, but it all boils down to one basic fact; there are too many of us. Given that man is individually and collectively self-centered(irretrievably so), coupled with the observation that each of us will take the easiest path for the greatest result, there is no hope that a great meltdown will be avoided. The article is spot on regarding processed foods, and it will get worse before it ever gets better, but there is coming a much bigger train wreck of human kind. When it manifests itself, wholesale starvation will put an end to the concern over less than desirable foods.
Hi Tom,
Good stuff. The basic goal of macroeconomic policy is to keep prices down. Look what happened the last time hyperinflation kicked in, how does WWII work for you? And so, corners get cut. Mind you, I suspect that what you are writing about is an attempt to keep prices for basics low, however stopping inflation is like trying to keep water in a leaky bucket!
Like David Veale (in the comment above), I too invest a lot of my personal time, resources, and energy into producing my own food for consumption (several days per week). It is a big job and has required me to straddle the monetary world and the future world for much the same reasons that David mentioned. Declining food quality was one of the stories (among others) that got me started down this path.
Walking between the two worlds is a bit like walking along a tightrope and it requires a good sense of balance – which you don’t always get right. Oh well.
On the other hand, home grown and processed food is significantly better than the industrial products. I can see that in the reactions of visitors to the basic foods that I feed them.
Chris
For a lot of people processed, prepared, industrial grade food is all they know. The BBC some years back had a series on families in Britain who no longer could buy, prepare or cook food at all. They had no idea what a raw vegetable looked like, how to use any other implement in the kitchen other than a few dishes or the microwave. The went to their Tesco (Walmart) and it was prepared or frozen ready to go and that was it. Needless to say their dietary balance was appalling and they were all overweight and unhealthy, alive but unhealthy. So multiply that across the world and what have you got industrial human feedlots um supermarkets and fast food restaurants they call them.
My most priceless take from that series, one of the central characters from one family standing there with a raw potato in complete puzzlement, they had absolutely no idea how to wash it, peel it or chop it or even cook it. That is what industrial food does great for profits never ending sales amen!
I’ve been telling people to stop eating supermarket food for years. It’s toxic. The only thing you can eat anymore in non-processed, organic food. And it’s difficult to get in some locations, so you should also try to grow some of your own. We stopped selling food that we felt was unsafe for humans to eat, but most people refuse to cook, so this had a big impact upon sales volume. People would rather have convenience then worry about eating right.