Food Recalls Highlight the Dangers of Farm Consolidation

Food contamination seems to have become as American as apple pie. Wait, let's make that salmonella-laced apple pie.

In February, David Orr wrote about the avalanche of food recall notices that overwhelmed his inbox once he signed up for the FoodSafety.gov Recalls & Alerts list. Over the months, we've reported here on some of those contamination episodes, from beef to packaged salad mix to peanuts. This week, we've written not only about a massive egg recall due to salmonella poisoning, but also about Listeria monocytogenes appearing in deli meats. As Sarah Parsons aptly asked, "Is anything safe to eat?"

Serendipitously, this very same week, Stephen Budiansky wrote an op ed piece in the New York Times in which, by bashing the "locavore" mindset, he unwittingly waded right into the middle of the brouhaha over our poisoned food supply. With his straw-man argument that assumes the obsession over food miles is strictly about carbon emissions, he opened up space for a great debate about the nature of the problems with our food system, a conversation that has only recently started to reach any level of sophistication in the mainstream media.

A collection of excellent rebuttals published on Grist make clear that the motivation for eating locally has more to do with salmonella-tainted eggs than bean-counting the environmental impact of every truck load of cross-country tomatoes.

The respondents on Grist identify a vast number of reasons to eat closer to home (at least regionally) when it's possible, and one of the most frequently cited is the fact that when you do, you can actually have a clue about who is making your food and how.

As the agricultural and food industries in the U.S. have consolidated under a profit-over-all, "get big or get out" mindset, fewer and fewer players have come to dominate our food supply, especially in the area of eggs and meat. As such, a single outbreak of a contaminating agent in the system of any of these huge producers can rain down salmonella on all four corners of our country and beyond. Eating food from smaller, less remote establishments is a worthy goal, Grist's good-food advocates say, because we are all safer if one outbreak can't sicken millions.

And if we know something about the organizations that are producing the food we eat, the more their reputations suffer from poisoning us all. If we know who they are — even if it's simply that we can identify the name on our box of eggs as a mid-sized company located in a town an hour up the road — we can punish them by taking our business elsewhere. This will make companies more motivated to keep their operations clean and tidy.

But in today's marketplace, shoppers generally don't know which company is making the eggs they buy, not to mention where it is, how big it is, and what its practices are like. According to Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food and Water Watch, a food safety organization, many of the brand names customers see on the egg shelves of supermarkets are all produced by the same few companies. "I don't think people have any idea when they see all these brand names in the stores that so many are coming from the same place," Lovera told the Washington Post. "It raises the stakes — if one company is doing something wrong, it affects a lot of food."

In a supposedly capitalist system, companies that can best provide a supply that meets a demand (in this case, clean food) should be rewarded by customers' business and loyalty. But in a system that contains monopolies, where customers' choices are constrained to the point that taking one's business elsewhere is a privilege only the lucky or wealthy can afford, those who are doing the right thing are not being rewarded as they should. And likewise, those who poison us will not sufficiently feel the heat of our anger.

Photo: jaylopez via stock.xchng