A vigilant vegetarian suddenly ponders food safety

Being mindful of one's food is probably a learned trait. For myself, I find that I take much of my food for granted, like most Americans probably. I have a pretty simple, routine vegetarian diet that I don't give a whole lot of thought to. So it was odd to be stopped dead in my tracks at lunch yesterday, gazing down in consternation at my leafy green salad covered in tomatoes. Could I trust the restaurant owners to know if the tomatoes were safe?

Tomatoes are one of my favorite things in the universe. Fresh off the vine, stewed in a thick sauce, or stuffed and baked...they're kind of a vegetarian staple. Tomatoes and spinach together are simply sublime. So imagine the blow to my 20-year vegetarian induced sense of complacency in the wake of the salmonella outbreak this past month.

When bagged spinach disappeared from the grocery stores last year, I railed and ranted about factory farms. With the recent tomato crisis I'm more shell-shocked than anything.

In my simple mind, as a vegetarian I'm supposed to be safe from salmonella and e-coli bacterial foodborne illnesses so long as I follow proper food handling procedures.

Over the years, I've had a mild superiority complex regarding meat eaters and foodborne illnesses. But in the end, a little investigation shows this may have all been a matter of perception.

As it turns out, such illnesses happen in large amounts every year, the vast majority of them small, localized instances of improper food storage and handling. These are the ones I've had a superiority complex about because so often among my friends and family they're related to meat products like chicken.

But the big outbreaks have been happening in the United States since at least the early 1970s, and a number of those have originated straight from vegetarian fare: apple cider in 1974, garlic in soybean oil in 1985, strawberries in 1997, and sprouts in 2000. Obviously, vegetarians have been just as vulnerable as everyone else, when it comes to mass food production anyway.

A second look, though, at this basic timeline in wikipedia shows there's more to the story. The pace of the outbreaks picks up significantly in the 1990s and is simply rocketing along in the 2000s.

The real issue, as it turns out, is indeed the factory farm. Food production has gone industrial, consolidated in large mega-farms in a vertically integrated industry. This means the owners raise the crops/animals, harvest them, prepare them for distribution, and in some cases even own the grocery store. This is in sharp contrast to the way it used to be.

For instance, my grandfather on my dad's side used to raise chickens. My uncle on my mom's side had an after-school job as a buyer for Pilgrim's Pride, which is now the largest chicken producer in the United States. He'd travel around the countryside weighing and purchasing small farmer's chickens. My uncle loves to tell the story of how whenever he showed up at my grandpa's place to buy chickens, for some reason the chickens to be weighed were always soaking wet. But that's an aside. The point is that chicken production was diversified, not to mention an integral part of a local economy. Eventually, Pilgrim's Pride announced they would no longer buy the chickens of surrounding farmers. In fact, my grandfather was the last one who got to sell directly to the company because he had known Bo Pilgrim from the time he was first starting out. Pilgrim built its own chicken houses, and raises them in mass quantities today. And local farmers lost an important buyer for a perennial farm commodity.

When contaminated food slips out of one of these mega-farms we have today undetected, the sheer volume of it can cause large outbreaks all over the country. And in fact one originated with Pilgrim's Pride in 2002. One wonders if it's happening outside our borders as well. Using that company as an example, they're also the largest producer of chicken in Puerto Rico, and the second largest in Mexico.

Beyond the issue of food safety, there are reams of other issues associated with factory farms, enough to make you duck for cover: environmental degradation through run-off from chemical laden farms; lack of food diversity and the danger posed to food security when all our eggs (literally) are placed in one basket; the damage to rural economies when small farms disappear; and at times, abusive conditions for animals on a very large scale. Our food system is out of whack.

What's the solution?

You'll hear a lot of talk about increased funding for food safety programs at the Food and Drug Administration. Given the rise of foodborne illnesses coming from our industrial farms, it could be that the funding has just not kept pace with the need for oversight.

But I can't help but think that further regulation of a food system so disconnected from society doesn't really solve our problem. The best solution I've heard yet is a concerted effort to return to greater diversity and localization of agriculture. Maybe it'll never be on the scale of my grandparent's generation, in which significant percentages of the population were small farmers, or even look much like it. But there may be a middle ground with its own 21st century flavor, and there's a movement underway to find it. The question for me, and maybe you, is how to support it.

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