The Killing Floor ~ THE 5TH ESTATE ASIA

Tuesday, December 03, 2013

The Killing Floor

Tuesday, December 03, 2013

America's food supply terminally, irreparably poisoned

COUNTERPUNCH
By Jeffery St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn
11/29/2013

The other day we were forced to listen to an NPR interview, by Terry  Gross, presumably, with some fellow talking about his garden, about which he had  evidently written a silly-sounding book. After firing off some well-honed clichés  about the importance of the garden in making us consider the role of culture  in man’s relationship to nature, the interviewee said ponderously that  these days most people don’t know where food comes from. He and Gross, or a Gross soundalike, chewed that one over industriously for several minutes.

Why would you  want to know where food comes from? Ignorance is probably preferable, if not  morally desirable. Better to think that New York strip or T-bone was put together  in a lab, which is the way we’re headed anyway. Why be curious about where  your broccoli comes from? In the old days a lot of it came from the Pajaro Valley  just south of Santa Cruz on California’s central coast. The fellows picking  it were undocumented workers, mostly from Michoacan, earning $6 an hour.

Then  the growers figured it was more profitable to relocate the broccoli down in  Mexico, pay the pickers $6 a day, ship the veg up to the border, relabel  it as natural-born American and ship it east. One trouble with this is that  the broccoli or spinach is often laced with raw sewage. Uncomposted shit isn’t  good for you.

Potatoes? We read an account not so long ago of the chemical conditions in which Idaho russets  are raised, where the application of pesticides is so intense that when something  screws up in the irrigation systems, they dare not send out maintenance  workers right away because the air is too toxic.

Who would have  thought that eating broccoli or spinach was a high-risk event, an X-treme sport  right there in your own kitchen or dining room? The big food chains such as  Safeway are trying to figure out an inspection system that will spot toxic veg  before it gets onto the shelf. Trouble is, the political economy of capitalist  agriculture is structurally tilted toward the likelihood that your spinach will  be shit-enhanced. It’s become part of the price for cheap food.

E. Coli

The alternative  is a different system of land ownership and farm production that would give  you a better class of spinach at a higher price for the farmer.

No chance of  that in the foreseeable in this country. Food will just get more dangerous, because the conditions  in which veg is grown or cows are raised and killed become more noxious.

The  latest scare is a ferocious strain of E. coli (mostly benign), labelled E. coli  O157:H7, which first became notorious in the Jack in the Box food deaths back in 1993. It’s a strain that has apparently flourished because of the intensive  fattening methods of the modern feedlot.

People are  probably a little too fussy about what they eat, though not always quite to the degree of Mrs. Deborah Wilkes, aged 44, of Pinellas County, FL, who forced her husband of six years, Eric,  aged 31, to disrobe when he came home from his work (surveying), but not for  the purpose of amorous diversion. He had to proceed directly to the shower,  then re-attire in clean garments. She also forbade Eric use of the domestic  phone or computer on the grounds that he might contaminate them. When visiting  his parents for Christmas she would insist they sat with hands safely folded,  then leave before the germ-laden perils of Christmas dinner.

Something snapped  in Eric recently, and he choked and stabbed Deborah until she was good and dead.  He tried to make it look like a burglary, but messed up. The cops didn’t  take long to figure it out, and he’s now sitting in the Pinellas County  jail, charged with first-degree murder. In the beginning, Deborah’s concern  about cleanliness wasn’t so severe, Eric’s mother Barbara Wilkes told  the Tampa Tribune. “He thought that was neat about her because she was tidy, he wanted the perfect wife, and this was the perfect wife for him.”  Some expert testimony about obsessive-compulsive disorder will get the charges reduced.

Maybe every child should be taken on a tour of a slaughterhouse,  as a reality check. In Holland they have pig “facilities,” let’s  call them condos, where an elevator takes the doomed creatures from the sixth floor down to the basement, where they’re killed and processed. 

There could be a viewing window, just like the one through which the Oklahoma families and some journalists watched Timothy put to death.

Back in the  19th century, a trip to the killing floor at the Cincinnati or Chicago stockyards  was a standard item on the itinerary of cultured folk exploring America’s  hinterland. In the 1850s and 1860s (the Chicago stockyards were completed in 1865) these two cities perfected the production-line slaughter of living creatures  for the first time in the history of the world.

At one end of the trail lay  the prairies, the open range, the boisterous pastoral of the cattle drive, where  the cowboys sometimes spared a longhorn. There’s a marvelous book by J. Frank Dobie called The Longhorns that tells of Reed Anthony, a cowboy  working for Andy Adams, telling “how he and other Confederate soldiers  guarding a herd of Texas steers saved the life of one because he would always  walk out and stand attentive to the notes of ‘Rock of Ages’ sung by  his herders.” Thus spared were two or ten or a hundred or a thousand from  among the millions and millions of creatures that plodded to rail heads like  Abilene, and thence eastward, or to slaughterhouses nearer at hand, and then  bought up by government agents to be sent to the reservations to feed Indians  who no longer had buffalo to hunt.

William Cronon  has a good chapter on the stockyards in his book on Chicago, Nature’s  Metropolis. “In a world of farms and small towns, the ties between  field, pasture, butcher shop and dinner table were everywhere apparent, constant reminders of the relationships that sustained one’s own life. In a world  of ranches, packing plants and refrigerator cars, most such connections vanished  from easy view. In the packers’ world, it was easy not to remember that eating is a moral act inextricably bound to killing. Such was the second nature  that a corporate order had imposed on the American landscape. Forgetfulness  was among the least noticed and most important of its by-products.”

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature, Grand Theft Pentagon and Born Under a Bad Sky. His latest book is Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.

Alexander Cockburn’s Guillotined! and A Colossal Wreck are available from CounterPunch.

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