The recent nationwide recall of 550 million eggs after 1,500 people were sickened from salmonella contamination is underlining once again critical problems in the nation’s food production industry.
Notice I didn’t saying farming or farm system. That’s because modern food production is a far cry from the traditional (if admittedly imperfect) stewardship of land to raise the plants and animals that we eat. As The New York Times recently pointed out (PDF), most egg-laying hens nowadays are stuffed inside “battery cages” whose floor spaces are smaller than a sheet of office paper, never to venture outdoors.
The egg recall is but the latest in a steady drumbeat of recalls stemming from food borne illnesses. Think salmonella in peanut butter, E. coli-tainted meat, spinach and other vegetables and countless other unintended foodstuffs causing headaches for Big Food, and it’s enough to drive you to the nearest farmer’s market.
As former farm boy Nicholas Kristoff writes in the Times:
Repeated studies have found that cramming hens into small cages results in more eggs with salmonella than in cage-free operations. As a trade journal, World Poultry, acknowledged in May: “salmonella thrives in cage housing.”
Industrial operations — essentially factories of meat and eggs — excel at manufacturing cheap food for the supermarket. But there is evidence that this model is economically viable only because it passes on health costs to the public — in the form of occasional salmonella, antibiotic-resistant diseases, polluted waters, food poisoning and possibly certain cancers. That’s why the president’s cancer panel this year recommended that consumers turn to organic food if possible — a stunning condemnation of our food system.
Indeed, federal regulators are coming under fire for somehow not noticing the filthy conditions and problems with vermin in and around egg-laying “barns,” as they are generously called.
“Salmonella didn’t exist 30, 40 years ago,” Robert Kenner, the producer and director of the documentary “Food Inc.”, told CNN. “Then we started putting thousands of hens into hen houses and fewer and fewer companies were controlling these hens. Now if we have one sick hen, this disease spreads.”
You can view the rest of Kenner’s interview with CNN in the video below. And check out some other reasons why it’s a good idea to eat more organic food.
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