The Slow Food USA Blog

In the name of food safety: bulldoze, rip, shoot and poison!

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by Biodiversity intern Regina Fitzsimmons

Last month, HR 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, passed in the House.  While this legislation marginally amps up government food oversight by granting the FDA power to force food recalls and increase inspections of food processing plants (a power—you got it—the FDA can now only recommend), spokespeople for small farmers have big concerns if this bill passes in the Senate.  You can read a breakdown of the bill by the Washington Post and keep up on the current Congressional actions at the Library of Congress online. 

In sum-up, though, concerns arise from a couple of things: for one, identical regulations will be imposed on both small and large food enterprises.  In tangible terms, this bill would require all food handlers.  Under this legislation a big company like Kraft would pay the same FDA registration as an artisan cheesemaker with a couple of goats. A second concern is that the legislation also grants the FDA the power to set standards determining how crops are grown, requiring the adoption of tracking technologies—a process significantly more taxing for small operators.  Food writers like Gourmet’s Barry Estabrook are hoping that Senate won’t follow in the Houses’ fast-tracking footsteps and will instead allow a sustained debate with the inclusion of possible amendments like Kaptur-Farr legislation that was glazed over in the House.  Estabrook hopes the Senate will address these concerns because as he put it, “being a conscientious farmer is a tough business [and] Congress just made it tougher.”

It isn’t surprising that the House steam-rolled through the review and vote of HR 2749.  This bill comes a month after yet another food recall: this time, Nestle’s Toll House refrigerated cookie dough.  In the past three years, we’ve avoided bagged spinach, ground beef, tomatoes (even though Serrano chile peppers were the real culprit) and peanut butter, among other foods.  People are getting sick and we all want to know the answer to the most basic of questions: what’s okay to eat?

In light of food recalls, corporate agricultural giants are desperate to convince consumers that their products are safe.  In a recent San Francisco Chronicle article, Jo Ann Baumgartner, head of the Wild Farm Alliance in Watsonville, explained that now, “produce buyers compete to demand the most draconian standards so they can sell their produce as safest.” 

What we’re seeing now is something Michael Pollan has christened “agricultural sanitation:” large produce buyers have compiled lists of requirements that farmers must abide by if they want their produce sold in conventional markets.  While a bulleted list of “must haves” may sound like a good theoretical idea, in practice, it is anything but.

“It’s all based on panic and fear, and the science is not there,” said Amy Gordons, an environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Game.  Buyers are demanding what Estabrook calls a “scorched earth policy.”  Borders thirty feet wide have been scraped free of any viable plant life around field edges; farms are scattered with poison-bait stations to kill of any interloping rodents; fences towering eight-feet high keep out deer, even though “the science isn’t there to prove that deer are a factor,” in the battle against E.coli, according to Dr. Andy Gordys, staff scientist of California Fish and Game.  Ponds are drained or poisoned and in turn, non-renewable ground water is pumped. “I was driving by a field where a squirrel fed off the end of the field, and so 30 feet in we had to destroy the crop,” said Dick Peixoto, a farmer in the Pajaro Valley.  Some farmers are “taking gun-safety classes to learn how to shoot animals that could carry bacteria,” and in essence, making “their land inhospitable to wildlife.”  And yet, these strict demands are making our food system less safe. 

Habitat is what animals need.  “If you remove it, they will go into the field,” said Will Daniels, Vice President of Quality, Food Safety and Organic Integrity and Earthbound Farms.  What’s more, “Vegetation and wetlands are a landscape’s lungs and kidneys, filtering out not just fertilizers, sediments and pesticides, but also pathogens.”  U.C. Davis scientists have found that vegetation buffers can remove as much as 98% of E. coli from surface water. 

While produce buyers demand “safer food,” biologically diverse farming methods are being degraded.  And while evidence suggests that big, industrial agriculture corporations may, in fact, be the bigger culprit, farmers are forced to submit to buyer demands.  The bulldozers are coming.

So, what can we do?  How do we save our diverse farmlands and the expanding list of endangered foods, as corn and soybean fields squeeze out the small growers?  Write to your Senators; tell them we need a different bill to make America’s food safe and a bill that supports small farmers and biologically diverse farming methods.  Once you’ve put down your pen, pick up your fork! Seek out endangered foods and fill your belly with local produce that supports your community, your farmers and preserves biological and economic diversity.

[second photo courtesy of .j.e.n.n.y. on flickr creative commons]