Why is the government so anti-small-farm and, in the process, so anti-nutrition? Those are the questions underlying the discussion over the last few days about pasteurization—the questions raised by Elizabeth, and the answers posted by Mac and Steve Bemis. The article Mac posted from Joel Salatin, captures the crazy-quilt roadblocks placed between farmers and consumers.
It really is crazy, when you think about how difficult it is for farmers to interact with the people who eat their products. Certainly pasteurization is an imposed technology, as Steve argues.
But I don’t think technological standardization is the government’s goal. It imposed pasteurization almost as a desperation measure, to solve a public health problem, as a major part of the compact I described in my post as part of the same discussion. Rather, I see the government as interested in two things when it comes to food:
- Insurance. It wants to reduce as much as possible the chances of people getting sick…now. The fact that pasteurization isn’t as necessary today as it might have been fifty or sixty years ago doesn’t matter. It’s the old saw: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. In fact, Hannah Wallace’s Salon.com article points out that even more drastic technological solutions are taking hold: ultra pasteurization and ultra high temperature. They kill even more bacteria, providing a higher degree of insurance than regular pasteurization. On the horizon is irradiation of all food, which kills all bacteria. Cloning is another one that will likely take hold. You see, hundreds of people getting sick over a period of a week or two from E.coli is a “right now” problem for government officials. A “just-make- it-go-away problem.” Higher incidents of asthma, allergies, autism, diabetes, and other diseases from nutrition-depleted food is a much less urgent problem because it happens over many years. More of a problem for the next guys in charge, if people even notice at all or, if they do notice, have any idea what the cause is.
- Help big business. The government wants the biggest and fastest growing businesses to do well, because that makes the GDP go up, which makes the stock market go up, and the politicians look good. Businesses in most industries do best when they can achieve economies of scale—make larger quantities of stuff at lower per-item cost. It’s what drove the industrial revolution, what drives the technology revolution (faster chips at lower cost), and what is driving the agriculture “revolution” (such as the push toward the National Animal Identification System, NAIS). So what if agriculture and nutrition are different beasts from widgets and computer chips. Doesn’t matter to the central bankers and economists in charge.
Here’s a prediction: We’re going to see ever more conflict about pasteurization, cloning, irradiation, NAIS, etc. Big business is moving toward something called “functional food,” which involves dressing up ordinary food with extra vitamins and bacteria. It’s attractive to corporations to see the government mandate processes that remove nutrition from food so that the corporations can re-inject the nutrients, and charge premium prices for the new product. Today’s New York Times has an article about how food companies have latched onto probiotics—via injecting ordinary foods like yogurt with extra beneficial bacteria–as the “next big thing.”
The best way to inform consumers that they can obtain better probiotics through natural foods like raw milk is education, as Elizabeth suggests. The success of Whole Foods indicates that growing numbers of people—still a minority of the population—sense problems with the food chain. But as more people take up the cause, via such things as the articles in Salon, Washington Post, L.A. Times, and BusinessWeek.com, then word will gradually get around. As Salatin points out in his piece, sometimes it’s when things look most bleak that a corner is silently turned.
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