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.
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.”
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.