Sustainability; New York Times article: Our Decrepit Food Factories

[apower2me408]

Published on Monday, December 17, 2007 by The New York Times

Our Decrepit Food Factories

by Michael Pollan

The word ³sustainability² has gotten such a workout lately that the
whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness.
Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever ³it² means. On a recent
visit to a land-grant university¹s spanking-new sustainability institute,
I asked my host how many of the school¹s faculty members were
involved. She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing
research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in
the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what
soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any
other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against
sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in
the term, you have to wonder if we haven¹t succeeded in defining
sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it
will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like ³natural² or
³green² or ³nice.²

Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the
world, we had best start with the ³rectification of the names.² The
corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper
names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment
of words to real things and precise concepts. So what about this
much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?

To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an
objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of
environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can¹t go
on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which
it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are
internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.

For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial
agriculture as ³unsustainable² in precisely these terms, though what form the
³breakdown² might take or when it might happen has never been
certain. Would the aquifers run dry? The pesticides stop working? The soil
lose its fertility? All these breakdowns have been predicted and they may
yet come to pass. But if a system is unsustainable - if its workings
offend the rules of nature - the cracks and signs of breakdown may show
up in the most unexpected times and places. Two stories in the news
this year, stories that on their faces would seem to have nothing to do
with each other let alone with agriculture, may point to an imminent
breakdown in the way we¹re growing food today.

The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant
strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each
year than AIDS - 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005,
according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical
Association. For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in
hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant
strains of bacteria. It¹s Evolution 101: the drugs kill off all but the
tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance mutation, possess
genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught; these hardy survivors then
get to work building a drug-resistant superrace. The
methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed
a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent
strain - called ³community-acquired MRSA² - is now killing young and
otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is
yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently
different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking
elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of
antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the
concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least 70 percent of
the antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on factory
farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and
filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine
feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious
diseases. That the antibiotics speed up the animals¹ growth also commends
their use to industrial agriculture, but the crucial fact is that without
these pharmaceuticals, meat production practiced on the scale and with
the intensity we practice it could not be sustained for months, let
alone decades.

Public-health experts have been warning us for years that this
situation is a public-health disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later, the
profligate use of these antibiotics - in many cases the very same ones
we depend on when we¹re sick - would lead to the evolution of bacteria
that could shake them off like a spring shower. It appears that
³sooner or later² may be now. Recent studies in Europe and Canada found that
confinement pig operations have become reservoirs of MRSA. A European
study found that 60 percent of pig farms that routinely used
antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs (compared with 5 percent of farms that did not
feed pigs antibiotics). This month, the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention published a study showing that a strain of ³MRSA from an
animal reservoir has recently entered the human population and is now
responsible for [more than] 20 percent of all MRSA in the Netherlands.²
Is this strictly a European problem? Evidently not. According to a
study in Veterinary Microbiology, MRSA was found on 45 percent of the 20
pig farms sampled in Ontario, and in 20 percent of the pig farmers.
(People can harbor the bacteria without being infected by it.) Thanks to
Nafta, pigs move freely between Canada and the United States. So MRSA may
be present on American pig farms; we just haven¹t looked yet.

Scientists have not established that any of the strains of MRSA
presently killing Americans originated on factory farms. But given the rising
public alarm about MRSA and the widespread use on these farms of
precisely the class of antibiotics to which these microbes have acquired
resistance, you would think our public-health authorities would be all over
it. Apparently not. When, in August, the Keep Antibiotics Working
coalition asked the Food and Drug Administration what the agency was doing
about the problem of MRSA in livestock, the agency had little to say.
Earlier this month, though, the F.D.A. indicated that it may begin a
pilot screening program with the C.D.C.

As for independent public-health researchers, they say they can¹t
study the problem without the cooperation of the livestock industry, which,
not surprisingly, has not been forthcoming. For what if these
researchers should find proof that one of the hidden costs of cheap meat is an
epidemic of drug-resistant infection among young people? There would be
calls to revolutionize the way we produce meat in this country. This
is not something that the meat and the pharmaceutical industries or
their respective regulatory ³watchdogs² - the Department of Agriculture
and F.D.A. - are in any rush to see happen.

~continued in another post~

[apower2me408]

The second story is about honeybees, which have endured their own
mysterious epidemic this past year. Colony Collapse Disorder was first
identified in 2006, when a Pennsylvanian beekeeper noticed that his bees were disappearing - going out on foraging expeditions in the morning never
to return. Within months, beekeepers in 24 states were reporting losses
of between 20 percent and 80 percent of their bees, in some cases
virtually overnight. Entomologists have yet to identify the culprit, but
suspects include a virus, agricultural pesticides and a parasitic mite.
(Media reports that genetically modified crops or cellphone towers might
be responsible have been discounted.) But whatever turns out to be the
immediate cause of colony collapse, many entomologists believe some
such disaster was waiting to happen: the lifestyle of the modern honeybee
leaves the insects so stressed out and their immune systems so
compromised that, much like livestock on factory farms, they¹ve become
vulnerable to whatever new infectious agent happens to come along.

You need look no farther than a California almond orchard to understand
how these bees, which have become indispensable workers in the vast
fields of industrial agriculture, could have gotten into such trouble.
Like a great many other food crops, like an estimated one out of every
three bites you eat, the almond depends on bees for pollination. No bees,
no almonds. The problem is that almonds today are grown in such vast
monocultures - 80 percent of the world¹s crop comes from a 600,000-acre
swath of orchard in California¹s Central Valley - that, when the
trees come into bloom for three weeks every February, there are simply not
enough bees in the valley to pollinate all those flowers. For what bee
would hang around an orchard where there¹s absolutely nothing to eat
for the 49 weeks of the year that the almond trees aren¹t in bloom? So
every February the almond growers must import an army of migrant
honeybees to the Central Valley - more than a million hives housing as many
as 40 billion bees in all.

They come on the backs of tractor-trailers from as far away as New
England. These days, more than half of all the beehives in America are on
the move to California every February, for what has been called the
world¹s greatest ³pollination event.² (Be there!) Bees that have been
dormant in the depths of a Minnesota winter are woken up to go to work in
the California spring; to get them in shape to travel cross-country
and wade into the vast orgy of almond bloom, their keepers ply them with
³pollen patties² - which often include ingredients like high-fructose
corn syrup and flower pollen imported from China. Because the
pollination is so critical and the bee population so depleted, almond growers
will pay up to $150 to rent a box of bees for three weeks, creating a
multimillion-dollar industry of migrant beekeeping that barely existed a
few decades ago. Thirty-five years ago you could rent a box of bees for
$10. (Pimping bees is the whole of the almond business for these
beekeepers since almond honey is so bitter as to be worthless.)

In 2005 the demand for honeybees in California had so far outstripped
supply that the U.S.D.A. approved the importation of bees from
Australia. These bees get off a 747 at SFO and travel by truck to the Central
Valley, where they get to work pollinating almond flowers - and mingling
with bees arriving from every corner of America. As one beekeeper put
it to Singeli Agnew in The San Francisco Chronicle, California¹s almond
orchards have become ³one big brothel² - a place where each February
bees swap microbes and parasites from all over the country and the
world before returning home bearing whatever pathogens they may have
picked up. Add to this their routine exposure to agricultural pesticides and
you have a bee population ripe for an epidemic national in scope. In
October, the journal Science published a study that implicated a virus
(Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus) in Colony Collapse Disorder - a virus
that was found in some of the bees from Australia. (The following month,
the U.S.D.A. questioned the study, pointing out that the virus was
present in North America as early as 2002.)

³We¹re placing so many demands on bees we¹re forgetting that
they¹re a living organism and that they have a seasonal life cycle,² Marla
Spivak, a honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota, told The
Chronicle. ³We¹re wanting them to function as a machine. . . .
We¹re expecting them to get off the truck and be fine.²

We¹re asking a lot of our bees. We¹re asking a lot of our pigs too.
That seems to be a hallmark of industrial agriculture: to maximize
production and keep food as cheap as possible, it pushes natural systems and
organisms to their limit, asking them to function as efficiently as
machines. When the inevitable problems crop up - when bees or pigs remind
us they are not machines - the system can be ingenious in finding
³solutions,² whether in the form of antibiotics to keep pigs healthy or
foreign bees to help pollinate the almonds. But this year¹s solutions
have a way of becoming next year¹s problems. That is to say, they
aren¹t ³sustainable.²

From this perspective, the story of Colony Collapse Disorder and the
story of drug-resistant staph are the same story. Both are parables about
the precariousness of monocultures. Whenever we try to rearrange
natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory, whether by
raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may
gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience.
The question is not whether systems this brittle will break down, but
when and how, and whether when they do, we¹ll be prepared to treat the
whole idea of sustainability as something more than a nice word.


Michael Pollan is a contributing writer. His new book, ³In Defense of
Food: An Eater¹s Manifesto,² will be published next month.

[rawstrength]

:eek: That's terrifying about the MRSA! I just don't understand how people can operate factory farms, or how so many can turn a blind eye to this practice! I just hope that people take action about this before it's too late . . . :(