Green Leafy Vegetables And Other Dangerous Foods

It looks like November is food safety month here at the Meow. Last week, after regaling you with tales of the family poultry farm where my husband learned the fine art of chicken catching as a boy (I didn't tell you that he knows how to hypnotize chickens--honestly, he does), I sent you to an article about the Kentucky Colonel's favorite bird and the diseases that roost in poultry, slipping past government inspectors on the way to your kitchen. Disease, you see, cannot always be detected via visual inspection, and many of the birds that grace your dinner table could make you sick if you don't make sure they are thoroughly cooked. You just can't tell by looking at a chicken what microorganisms have found a home there. One of the ways the article's author, John Stossel, proposed we address the problem of poultry contamination is irradiation, designed to kill even the bacteria that escapes detection, before the bird gets packed off to the supermarket. Stossel explains that for a variety of reasons, irradiation isn't common. Important safety changes are slow in coming to this industry, so chicken really needs to be cooked to death, after it has been butchered, for safety's sake. Let's put chicken on the scary but tasty list for now.

Joining chicken these days in warranting "Caution: Severe Potential Body Damage" warnings is spinach. We're just starting to be able to find Popeye's secret weapon in the stores again after an E. coli outbreak, which started a couple of months ago, was traced to fresh bagged spinach, which infected about two hundred people, causing three deaths. Revealing my own ignorance here, I've always thought of E. coli as a meat-borne illness, undercooked burgers and all that. I really didn't know you could get it from the plant kingdom, but I sure do now. Spinach salad is a staple in Meowville, and we've been particularly aware of the unavailability of this extremely important member of the food chain. Until this week, our green leafy vegetable of choice was nowhere to be found. That made us sit up and take notice.

We are glad to have our favorite back, but I'm not ready to just return to my pre-spinach-drought state of ignorance. I have wanted to know how the infection got to the plants in the first place, how it spread, and why all the washing, that is the primary reason for buying bagged spinach, didn't do its job and cleanse away the germs. Some answers are coming out now; it's starting to look like the infection invaded spinach crops in California because wild hogs found their way onto farms in Salinas Valley. Okay, that answers how the plants got "defiled." (It's the best word I can think of to describe the ruination of perfectly good spinach.) So, how did the E. coli make it past the packaging plant?

Dr. Henry I. Miller, of TCS Daily, says that washing sometimes simply can't do the job of ridding produce of disease, because the germs aren't on the surface of the produce, they're inside it. Miller says, "Exposure to E. coli or other microorganisms at key stages of the growing process may allow them to be taken into the plant and actually incorporated into cells." Even the irradiation, which Stossel recommends for meat, and Miller agrees is an important tool, can't deal with all the complications from infection, because some bacteria secrete toxins which remain even after irradiation has eliminated the germs themselves. These toxins can make you sick no matter how dead their germy progenitors are. What's Miller's solution? Biotechnology.

I've often discussed Miller's TCS articles here, and frequently the focus of his writing has been the ever-expanding and much-debated field of biotechnology, or gene-splicing, as it is more descriptively labelled. Repeatedly he has come down on the side of the safety and efficacy of gene-splicing to introduce desirable traits into plants. He's explored the concept of biopharming, altering plants so that you can, in effect, grow drugs to meet pharmaceutical needs. It's basically programming plants. (If you want to find more post and links to Dr. Miller and biopharming, just do a search at the top of this page. Blogger will list for you the four or five other posts I've done on Dr. Miller's articles.) Miller describes the benefit to be found in addressing the problem of infected food with biotech, but, as usual, also acknowledges the objections that inevitably go hand in hand with such an approach:

There is technology available today that can inhibit microorganisms' ability to grow within plant cells and block the synthesis of the bacterial toxins. This same technology can be employed to produce antibodies that can be administered to infected patients to neutralize the toxins, and can even be used to produce therapeutic proteins that are safe and effective treatments for diarrhea, the primary symptom of food poisoning.

But don't expect your favorite organic producer to embrace this triple-threat technology, even if it would keep his customers from getting sick. Why? The technology in question is biotechnology, or gene-splicing -- an advance the organic lobby has vilified and rejected at every turn.

Read Dr. Miller's article for more about this current spinach situation and its implications, and more of the posts here if you want to follow up further on what he has to say about gene-splicing. He comes down very firmly on the side of pro-biotech, but does address in some detail the issues and problems that others raise with ongoing development in this burgeoning industry. He's gradually been winning me over to the idea that manipulating genes to introduce desirable outcomes can be safe and effective, if proper care is given to how the technology is used, and a firm set of precautions is in place. I wasn't always this sanguine about it, thinking, basically, that God knew what He was doing when He made things, and who are we to mess with them, but I've really come, over time, to see these genes they are manipulating as God-made building blocks, that get shifted around all the time in nature. Shifting them is not inherently dangerous or wrong, but it does require a great deal of wisdom to know what's appropriate and what's not. It's interesting to me watching where the science is heading. I still say they need to keep their hands off people, but making spinach safer so I don't ever have to face another spinach fast? I think there I'm cautiously in favor of ongoing research.

Looks Could Kill

My husband grew up on a chicken farm. His family raised 120,000 chickens every two months, in six big barns. That's a lot of chickens. Of course, there are lots of people who eat chickens, so the more the family raised, the better for everyone. At the end of every grow, trucks would come in the night, and the 10 or so professional chicken catchers per barn (yes, there are professional chicken catchers) would work through the night, picking up every one of the birds by hand to be sent off to the processing plant. A good catcher would carry 7 birds at a time. Ked, in his day, was a good catcher.

The family, though, never had anything to do with what happened to the birds after they left the farm. They raised them, sent them off, and then cleaned up the barns for the next batch of chicks. End of story. Of course, it's not really the end of the story. The birds would go on to processing plants, where they were killed, plucked, and all the rest of the things that most of us carnivores don't tend to dwell on for the sake of enjoying our dinner. (In our early-married and extremely poor days we had to butcher a few chickens for ourselves, but that's another story altogether.) Most of us are quite satisfied to leave the "processing" to others and pay for the privilege at the grocery store. We get pre-cleaned dinner meat. The company who processed them for us gets money. Free enterprise, in this case, makes us all happy (with the noted exception of PETA.)

Where chickens are involved, there are, of course, always concerns about the safety of the meat. Disease germs, for some inexplicable reason, are particularly fond of chickens. Here are some of the nice names from an article I read: yersinia, salmonella, listeria, campylobacter--don't they all sound wholesome and nutritious? Actually, these little trespassers could kill you. We've all read the warnings that chicken absolutely, positively has to be fully cooked. No exceptions. No chicken tartar. Never. Not even a little tiny bit of pink in the flesh. Just say no to raw chicken. We are also warned to wash every surface we even thought about bringing near said chicken. Every surface. No exceptions. Just to be on the safe side, you should wash the wrapper in which the raw chicken entered your home in the dishwasher, before you throw it in the trash, so the garbage won't be contaminated. Then, wash the dishwasher...and maybe the car you drove when you went shopping. You just can't be too careful.

The interesting thing about all the warnings is that they come despite the tax dollars we all pay to have government employees inspect these chickens for safety. Why is that? Well, the man whose article gave me the lovely compilation of bacterial interlopers I listed earlier, John Stossel, formerly of "20/20", writing at Townhall. com, says it's because the government generally evaluates the chickens by how they look, rather than whether they pass a microbial exam. Huh? We've known about germs for a long time guys, so what's with the visual inspection? According to Stossel, this system was put in place before the government knew any better, but why is it still the way things work, now that we have a bit of science to back up the notion that a pretty bird can be just as dangerous as an ugly one? Stossel says it's a combination of chicken industry interests, government inertia, and unions. Wow, all three of these players working in tandem? How does that work? Read Stossel's article and see for yourself.

Organic Wal-Mart

Would the organic food industry lose its raison d’etre if buying organic became just about eating healthy, rather than social consciousness? James H. Joyner, Jr. raises that question at TCS Daily. Right now there's the perception if we buy organic food that not only are we doing something good for our bodies, by avoiding pesticides and preservatives, but we are helping protect the environment, supporting sustainable/environmentally responsible local farmers, and in some cases encouraging the humane treatment of animals. They all go together in a sort of do-gooder package--IF we can afford it. All this social consciousness comes at a rather steep price, and not many people make the decision that organic is worth the expense. Not many can.

What if the cost for organic wasn't so high, but the grand benefit total wasn't either? What if there were an alternative that made the food healthy, but still kept the cows that provide our beef in less-than-idyllic conditions? What if instead of supporting small, local farms, buying organic meant supporting giant companies that shipped the food over vast distances quickly, using lots of petroleum in the process? What if this organic bastardization came from the anti-Christ of the socially responsible--Wal-Mart? According to Joyner, "The retail giant has announced plans to stock a wide variety of organics in its stores later this year with prices only ten percent higher than for similar non-organic items it now carries." It will do so by focusing on the pesticide and preservative-free portion of the organic equation, without adding the expense of all the other layers of "the organic movement". This is raising an outcry from some who think that the health benefits of organic food cannot be separated from the socially responsible side of things, regardless of the cost. Joyner quotes University of California at Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollan who says, "To index the price of organic to the price of conventional is to give up, right from the start, on the idea, once enshrined in the organic movement, that food should be priced not high or low but responsibly."

However, Joyner points out that most people simply can't afford to be motivated by the social consciousness more than the cost:

Remember, now, at the moment most people simply cannot afford "organic" food. They're consuming food that's been sprayed with pesticides and prepared with preservatives to give it a long shelf life. And whatever cost to the environment that comes from these practices is already being borne. So, we're comparing an ideal -- growing foods that yield some health gains to the consumer in addition to various environmental benefits -- that does not presently exist at anything but a niche level because of cost against a proposed reality where the health gains are made possible for the masses but without the ancillary environmental gain.

That sums it up in a nutshell to me. It seems unreasonable that there not be middle ground for those who do not have the luxury of surplus income, or the desire to promote a particular social agenda in their grocery shopping, at the cost of other things they consider more valuable. I for one will be glad to see Wal-Mart offer healthier food alternatives at a reasonable price. I have often lamented the cost of organic foods, and how I can't reasonably make the choice to invest my money so heavily into my grocery basket. It would be nice to see sustainable farming, and happy cows too, but people can't always prioritize according to what would be nice. Joyner takes the pragmatic approach:

The perfect should not be allowed to become the enemy of the good. In an ideal world, local farmers would produce delicious foods grown without any harm to the environment at prices we could all afford while simultaneously making an excellent living. The livestock would all live happy lives, singing their little animal songs, dying a natural death and yet remaining tender and tasty. We would then get together and cook them over our campfires which produce no smoke, sing our little campsongs, and eat our meals in perfect harmony.

That world, unfortunately, does not exist.

We could take the tack that says that the organic approach must be holistic, all or nothing. That would entail a world view that might ultimately come round to this way of thinking: "Its probably a good thing that people without the proper perspective aren't eating organic. We simply can’t have people eating healthy who aren’t going to be socially conscious. Those are the people who should die young and leave the world to people who have the right attitude--and to the happy cows." I doubt any but the most hardened "people are the scourge of the earth" crowd would go there, though. Most would probably see the good in people eating healthier food, even if the solution isn't perfect, and even if it does come from Wal-Mart.

Of course, there are some who will raise a fuss, and thus we have Joyner's article. I hope that they can see the benefit eventually, though. The less expensive organic food becomes, the more people will buy it. The more people buy it, the more profitable it is to produce; so production goes up, which brings the price down. The more popular organic food becomes, the more people will see it as worth a little extra cost, and some who buy it for health might see their way to add just a little more money to see that it is grown responsibly. It could work out fostering both aims in the end.