the sickness in our food supply

Michael Pollan is the author of several books about food and agriculture, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food. The president and America’s meat eaters, not to mention its meat-plant workers, would never have found themselves in this predicament if not for the concentration of the meat industry, which has given us a supply chain so brittle that the closure of a single plant can cause havoc at every step, from farm to supermarket. As meatpacking plants become coronavirus hotspots and large producers dump milk and destroy crops, the nation's industrial food chain is buckling. The Senator Giovanni Agnelli International Prize, Israel and the Occupied Territories: An Urgent Appeal by the ICRC. See Claire Kelloway, “Why Are Farmers Destroying Food While Grocery Stores Are Empty?,” Washington Monthly, April 28, 2020. A series of shocks has exposed weak links in our food chain that threaten to leave grocery shelves as patchy and unpredictable as those in the former Soviet bloc. See Magaly Licolli, “As Tyson Claims the Food Supply Is Breaking, Its Workers Continue to Suffer,” Civil Eats, April 30, 2020. See Leah Douglas, “Mapping Covid-19 in Meat and Food Processing Plants,” Food and Environmental Reporting Network (FERN), April 22, 2020. A series of shocks has exposed weak links in our food chain that threaten to leave grocery shelves as patchy and unpredictable as those in the former Soviet bloc. The Sickness in Our Food Supply The juxtaposition of images in the news of farmers destroying crops and dumping milk with empty supermarket shelves or hungry Americans lining up for hours at food banks tells a story of economic efficiency gone mad. How did we end up here? These innovations have made meat, which for most of human history has been a luxury, a cheap commodity available to just about all Americans; we now eat, on average, more than nine ounces of meat per person per day, many of us at every meal.7 Covid-19 has brutally exposed the risks that accompany such a system. A momentous question awaits us on the far side of the current crisis: Are we willing to address the many vulnerabilities that the novel coronavirus has so dramatically exposed? The pandemic is, willy-nilly, making the case for deindustrializing and decentralizing the American food system, breaking up the meat oligopoly, ensuring that food workers have sick pay and access to health care, and pursuing policies that would sacrifice some degree of efficiency in favor of much greater resilience. There is no evidence thus far that the disease can be transmitted via food or packaging (though the virus apparently remains viable on plastic for 2 to 4 days). Americans get sick from contaminated foods or beverages each year, and 3,000 die. We can start by recognizing the fundamental shift in the way Americans eat, said professor Tim Griffin, division chair of Agriculture, Food, and Environment at the Friedman School, whose classes cover agricultural science and policy and the food system. The Sickness in Our Food Supply. We'll talk to him about why he thinks it's time to de-industrialize our food system and re-imagine the American diet. It was this threat to the industry’s profitability that led to Tyson’s declaration, which President Trump would have been right to see as a shakedown: the president’s political difficulties could only be compounded by a shortage of meat. Unfortunately, a diet dominated by such foods (as well as lots of meat and little in the way of vegetables or fruit—the so-called Western diet) predisposes us to obesity and chronic diseases such as hypertension and type-2 diabetes. May 14, 2020. When an outbreak of Covid-19 forced the state’s governor to shut that plant down in April, the farmers who raise pigs committed to it were stranded. Farmworkers, too, live and work in close proximity, many of them undocumented immigrants crammed into temporary quarters on farms. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. This second chain experienced a collapse due to the coronavirus economic shutdown which kept people away from school, work and restaurants. ↩, 8 The global food system is making us all ill. That’s the warning cry from some of the world’s leading food researchers who have made a bid to UN experts today in Rome for more political action on what they describe as the negative impact of our food system on human health.. Please consider supporting TMN and the Tournament of Books by joining us as a Sustaining Member today. (The Western diet is by itself inflammatory.) join our … Scattered job actions and wildcat strikes are beginning to pop up around the country—at Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, and some meat plants—as these workers begin to flex their muscle.8 This is probably just the beginning. The Sickness in Our Food Supply Posted on May 28, 2020 by Kelsy Black Full Story originally published for the June 2020 issue of the New York Review of Books. In order to reopen their production lines, Tyson and his fellow packers wanted the federal government to step in and preempt local public health authorities; they also needed liability protection, in case workers or their unions sued them for failing to observe health and safety regulations. ↩, See Magaly Licolli, “As Tyson Claims the Food Supply Is Breaking, Its Workers Continue to Suffer,” Civil Eats, April 30, 2020. Brought up a lot of good questions about our food supply in the US, assuming you can get past the writing style (I wanted more hard information, less personal pats on the back). We’ll be reading Michael Pollan’s essay “The Sickness in Our Food Supply” from the New York Review of Books. © 2021 Michael Pollan. All rights reserved. An earlier version of this article included an incomplete credit for “‘The Workers Are Being Sacrificed’: As Cases Mounted, Meatpacker JBS Kept People on Crowded Factory Floors,” which was a collaboration between FERN and Mother Jones. How did we end up here? The Sickness In Our Food Supply? If we don't get the right information, our metabolic processes suffer and our health declines.If we get too much food, or food that gives our bodies the wrong instructions, we can become overweight, undernourished, and at risk for the development of diseases and conditions, such … 15 (April 17, 2020). It’s long been understood that an industrial food system built upon a foundation of commodity crops like corn and soybeans leads to a diet dominated by meat and highly processed food. It would treat public health as a matter of national security, giving it the kind of resources that threats to national security warrant. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. QuickLink: Michael Pollan: The Sickness in Our Food Supply - “Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our … On April 26, John Tyson, the chairman of Tyson Foods, the second-largest meatpacker in America, took out ads in The New York Times and other newspapers to declare that the food chain was “breaking,” raising the specter of imminent meat shortages as outbreaks of Covid-19 hit the industry.3 Slaughterhouses have become hot zones for contagion, with thousands of workers now out sick and dozens of them dying.4 This should come as no surprise: social distancing is virtually impossible in a modern meat plant, making it an ideal environment for a virus to spread. —Originally published in The New York Review of Books May 12, 2020, 1 Until recently slaughterhouse workers had little or no access to personal protective equipment; many of them were also encouraged to keep working even after exposure to the virus. This is why the meat-plant closures forced American farmers to euthanize millions of animals, at a time when food banks were overwhelmed by demand.6. On May 8, Tyson reopened a meatpacking plant in Waterloo, Iowa, where more than a thousand workers had tested positive. Many growers depend on guest workers from Mexico to pick their crops; what happens if the pandemic—or the Trump administration, which is using the pandemic to justify even more restrictions on immigration—prevents them from coming north this year? Guests: Michael Pollan , Knight professor of journalism, UC Berkeley, and professor of the practice of non-fiction at Harvard; his article "The Sickness in Our Food Supply" appears in the June issue of The New York Review of Books. See “In America, the Virus Threatens a Meat Industry That Is Too Concentrated,” The Economist, April 30, 2020. Our utter dependence on them has never been more clear. (The renaissance of home cooking, and baking, is one of the happier consequences of the lockdown, good news both for our health and for farmers who grow actual food, as opposed to commodities like corn and soy.) Perhaps their new leverage will allow them to win the kinds of wages, protections, and benefits that would more accurately reflect their importance to society. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest. Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest. Some experts believe that the USDA and the FDA could do a better job of protecting our food supply … New and emerging bacteria, toxins, and antibiotic resistance. ↩, 3 Each year, approximately one sixth of the U. S. population … The food system we have is not the result of the free market. For even when our food system is functioning “normally,” reliably supplying the supermarket shelves and drive-thrus with cheap and abundant calories, it is killing us—slowly in normal times, swiftly in times like these. this is also a great way to hold politicians and other influential individuals accountable for the environment and how their actions are harming our planet. The Sickness in Our Food Supply “Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. A momentous question awaits us on the far side of the current crisis: Are we willing to address the many vulnerabilities that the novel coronavirus has so dramatically exposed? Food delivery is nothing new. Some chicken plant workers, given no regular bathroom breaks, now wear diapers.5 A worker can ask for a break, but the plants are so loud he or she can’t be heard without speaking directly into the ear of a supervisor. So far, the produce sections of our supermarkets remain comparatively well stocked, but what happens this summer and next fall, if the outbreaks that have crippled the meat industry hit the farm fields? The pandemic is, willy-nilly, making the case for deindustrializing and decentralizing the American food system, breaking up the meat oligopoly, ensuring that food workers have sick pay and access to health care, and pursuing policies that would sacrifice some degree of efficiency in favor of much greater resilience. Our utter dependence on them has never been more clear. Under normal circumstances, the modern hog or chicken is a marvel of brutal efficiency, bred to produce protein at warp speed when given the right food and pharmaceuticals. 15 (April 17, 2020). Unfortunately, a diet dominated by such foods (as well as lots of meat and little in the way of vegetables or fruit—the so-called Western diet) predisposes us to obesity and chronic diseases such as hypertension and type-2 diabetes. Four companies now process more than 80 percent of beef cattle in America; another four companies process 57 percent of the hogs. Add to this the fact that many meat-plant workers are immigrants who live in crowded conditions with little or no access to health care, and you have a population at dangerously high risk of infection. Civil Eats, FERN, and Mother Jones have done an excellent job of covering the outbreaks in the meat industry. ↩, 4 135–138. This should give food and agricultural workers a rare degree of political leverage at the very moment they are being disproportionately infected. (There hasn’t been a free market in food since at least the Great Depression.) ↩, 2 Meanwhile, you’ve got baby pigs entering the process, steadily getting fatter. In “The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It,” author Robyn O’Brien — known as the “Erin Brockovich of the food … The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided. “Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. It would address the mistreatment of essential workers and gaping holes in the social safety net, including access to health care and sick leave—which we now understand, if we didn’t before, would be a benefit to all of us. They also show up on our plates, since the diet on offer at the end of the industrial food chain is linked to precisely the types of chronic disease that render us more vulnerable to Covid-19. An outbreak at any one of them would barely disturb the system; it certainly wouldn’t be front-page news. But to be comprehensive, this post-pandemic politics would also need to confront the glaring deficiencies of a food system that has grown so concentrated that it is exquisitely vulnerable to the risks and disruptions now facing us. It is the men and women who debone chicken carcasses flying down a line at 175 birds a minute, or pick salad greens under the desert sun, or drive refrigerated produce trucks across the country who are keeping us fed and keeping the wheels of our society from flying off. The Sickness in Our Food Supply. Michael Pollan, a journalist of food issues and a professor of non-fiction writing at Harvard university, dives deep into the insecurities in the American food supply revealed and enhanced by the Coronavirus crisis. ↩, 10 A single Smithfield processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, processes 5 percent of the pork Americans eat. Sugary Drinks, Diet Drinks are Addictive and Fattening. While some sectors of agriculture are struggling during the pandemic, we can expect the corn and soybean crop to escape more or less unscathed. The juxtaposition of images in the news of farmers destroying crops and dumping milk with empty supermarket shelves or hungry Americans lining up for hours at food banks tells a story of economic efficiency gone mad. The Sickness in Our Food Supply Posted on May 28, 2020 by Kelsy Black Full Story originally published for the June 2020 issue of the New York Review of Books. For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. It would address the mistreatment of essential workers and gaping holes in the social safety net, including access to health care and sick leave—which we now understand, if we didn’t before, would be a benefit to all of us. See, for example, Daniel A. Medina, “As Amazon, Walmart, and Others Profit Amid Coronavirus Crisis, Their Essential Workers Plan Unprecedented Strike,” The Intercept, April 28, 2020. On May 8, Tyson reopened a meatpacking plant in Waterloo, Iowa, where more than a thousand workers had tested positive. These “underlying conditions” happen to be among the strongest predictors that an individual infected with Covid-19 will end up in the hospital with a severe case of the disease; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that 49 percent of the people hospitalized for Covid-19 had preexisting hypertension, 48 percent were obese, and 28 percent had diabetes.9, Why these particular conditions should worsen Covid-19 infections might be explained by the fact that all three are symptoms of chronic inflammation, which is a disorder of the body’s immune system. The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided. Also see Esther Honig and Ted Genoways, “‘The Workers Are Being Sacrificed’: As Cases Mounted, Meatpacker JBS Kept People on Crowded Factory Floors,” FERN and Mother Jones, May 1, 2020. The Threat of Antibiotic Resistance (It’s worth noting that the word “consumer” appears nowhere in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890. ↩︎ The New York Review of Books. Blame the Companies They Work For,” Civil Eats, April 30, 2020. (The Western diet is by itself inflammatory.) FDA, in collaboration with the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), created Science and Our Food Supply: Investigating Food Safety from Farm to Table, an innovative, interactive supplementary curriculum for use in middle level and high school science classes. Here are 8 ways corporations are poisoning our food supply, humans, and mother Earth. Codex standards are the international reference for national food supplies and for trade in food, so that people everywhere can be confident that the food they buy meets the agreed standards for safety and quality, no matter where it was produced. (June 2020), This history is recounted in Barry C. Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (Wiley, 2011), pp. This is why the meat-plant closures forced American farmers to euthanize millions of animals, at a time when food banks were overwhelmed by demand.6. And the costs of food-borne illnesses are significant – over US$15.6 billion yearly in the United States. ↩, 6 “Before, roughly half the food spending in The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. There will always be a tradeoff between efficiency and resilience (not to mention ethics); the food industry opted for the former, and we are now paying the price. So are the factories in which they are killed and cut into parts. An outbreak at any one of them would barely disturb the system; it certainly wouldn’t be front-page news. [SEE: RIGGED GAME] The Sickness in Our Food Supply By Michael Pollan The New York Review of Books, May 12, 2020 “Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare… Lacking benefits like sick pay, not to mention health insurance, they often have no choice but to work even when infected. In many places, farmer’s markets have quickly adjusted to pandemic conditions, instituting social-distancing rules and touchless payment systems. Under normal circumstances, the modern hog or chicken is a marvel of brutal efficiency, bred to produce protein at warp speed when given the right food and pharmaceuticals. After having declined to use it to boost the production of badly needed coronavirus test kits, he now declared meat a “scarce and critical material essential to the national defense.” The executive order took the decision to reopen or close meat plants out of local hands, forced employees back to work without any mandatory safety precautions, and offered their employers some protection from liability for their negligence. The pandemic is making the case not only for a different food system but for a radically different diet as well. The world is witnessing a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions. (The renaissance of home cooking, and baking, is one of the happier consequences of the lockdown, good news both for our health and for farmers who grow actual food, as opposed to commodities like corn and soy.) You can’t afford to keep feeding them; even if you could, the production lines are designed to accommodate pigs up to a certain size and weight, and no larger. On April 26, John Tyson, the chairman of Tyson Foods, the second-largest meatpacker in America, took out ads in The New York Times and other newspapers to declare that the food chain was “breaking,” raising the specter of imminent meat shortages as outbreaks of Covid-19 hit the industry.3 Slaughterhouses have become hot zones for contagion, with thousands of workers now out sick and dozens of them dying.4 This should come as no surprise: social distancing is virtually impossible in a modern meat plant, making it an ideal environment for a virus to spread. ↩, 5 The U.S. Department of Agriculture ... • Changes in our food production and supply, including more central processing and widespread distribution, and many imported foods. When the number of Covid-19 cases in America’s slaughterhouses exploded in late April—12,608 confirmed, with forty-nine deaths as of May 11—public health officials and governors began ordering plants to close. See Tyler Whitley, “Don’t Blame Farmers Who Have to Euthanize Their Animals. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American food system. The study has not yet been peer-reviewed. Last spring, almonds from a farm in California infected 160 Canadians with Salmonella.) Better detection of multistate outbreaks. Most of what we grow in this country is not food exactly, but rather feed for animals and the building blocks from which fast food, snacks, soda, and all the other wonders of food processing, such as high-fructose corn syrup, are manufactured. Somewhat less obviously, the pandemic is making the case not only for a different food system but for a radically different diet as well. He argues that a favorable regulatory regime that emerged in the Reagan administration led to the growth of agricultural and commodity monopolies that have left the food supply deeply vulnerable. At the heart of this crisis is a British willingness to let a small number of corporations dominate food retailing: just eight companies control 90% of our food supply… May 12, 2020. In recent years, meatpackers have successfully lobbied regulators to increase line speeds, with the result that workers must stand shoulder to shoulder cutting and deboning animals so quickly that they can’t pause long enough to cover a cough, much less go to the bathroom, without carcasses passing them by. Workers processing pork at a Smithfield Foods plant, Milan, Missouri, April 2017. ... found in food. But the problems the novel coronavirus has revealed are not limited to the way we produce and distribute food. While some sectors of agriculture are struggling during the pandemic, we can expect the corn and soybean crop to escape more or less unscathed. Changes in the environment leading to food contamination. A new Chinese study conducted in hospitals in Wuhan found that elevated levels of C-reactive protein, a standard marker of inflammation that has been linked to poor diet, “correlated with disease severity and tended to be a good predictor of adverse outcomes.”10. More Headlines . Successive administrations allowed the industry to consolidate because the efficiencies promised to make meat cheaper for the consumer, which it did. The advantages of local food systems have never been more obvious, and their rapid growth during the past two decades has at least partly insulated many communities from the shocks to the broader food economy. Scattered job actions and wildcat strikes are beginning to pop up around the country—at Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, and some meat plants—as these workers begin to flex their muscle.8 This is probably just the beginning. The juxtaposition of images in the news of farmers destroying crops and dumping milk with empty supermarket shelves or hungry Americans lining up for hours at food banks tells a story of economic efficiency gone mad. It’s not hard to imagine a coherent and powerful new politics organized around precisely that principle. In recent years, meatpackers have successfully lobbied regulators to increase line speeds, with the result that workers must stand shoulder to shoulder cutting and deboning animals so quickly that they can’t pause long enough to cover a cough, much less go to the bathroom, without carcasses passing them by. Sugary drinks, especially soda, run rampant in the U.S., with corporations shelling out millions … Here’s a preview: Under normal circumstances, the modern hog or chicken is a marvel of brutal efficiency, bred to produce protein at warp speed when given the right food and pharmaceuticals. Changes in our food production and supply, including more central processing and widespread distribution, and many imported foods. Changes in consumer preferences and habits. It would treat public health as a matter of national security, giving it the kind of resources that threats to national security warrant. There will always be a tradeoff between efficiency and resilience (not to mention ethics); the food industry opted for the former, and we are now paying the price. “Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. It’s not hard to imagine a coherent and powerful new politics organized around precisely that principle. The law sought to protect producers—including farmers—and our politics from undue concentrations of corporate power. Some of the recent increase is due to better tracking of food in the supply … But it’s worth pointing out that there are parts of it that are adapting and doing relatively well. You can’t afford to keep feeding them; even if you could, the production lines are designed to accommodate pigs up to a certain size and weight, and no larger. His most recent book is How to Change Your Mind. Successive administrations allowed the industry to consolidate because the efficiencies promised to make meat cheaper for the consumer, which it did. The food supply remains robust ... the illnesses have the potential to ... “The Covid-19 pandemic represents a clear and present danger to our workers and our nation’s food supply… The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided. Local food systems have proved surprisingly resilient. 69, No. But the problems the novel coronavirus has revealed are not limited to the way we produce and distribute food. ... “there are 80,000 potential combinations of chemicals.” It’s impossible to keep our drinking supply safe from a gusher like that. ↩, What the Apps That Bring Food to Your Door Mean for Delivery Workers. Also see Esther Honig and Ted Genoways, “‘The Workers Are Being Sacrificed’: As Cases Mounted, Meatpacker JBS Kept People on Crowded Factory Floors,” FERN and Mother Jones, May 1, 2020. One way that Covid-19 kills is by sending the victim’s immune system into hyperdrive, igniting a “cytokine storm” that eventually destroys the lungs and other organs. A series of shocks has exposed weak links in our food chain that threaten to leave grocery shelves as patchy and unpredictable as those in the former Soviet bloc. An advisory board of experienced teachers just like you developed and tested the materials. Unexpected sources of foodborne illness, such as flour and meal replacement shake mixes. It’s far too easy for food manufacturers to add their new chemical inventions to our food and this has become a huge problem. In addition to protecting the men and women we depend on to feed us, it would also seek to reorganize our agricultural policies to promote health rather than mere production, by paying attention to the quality as well as the quantity of the calories it produces. February 5, 2021, The New York Review of Books 69, No. In addition to protecting the men and women we depend on to feed us, it would also seek to reorganize our agricultural policies to promote health rather than mere production, by paying attention to the quality as well as the quantity of the calories it produces. Producers dump milk and destroy crops, the Washington Post February 5, 2021 the. De-Industrialize our food, Water and Vaccines and emerging bacteria, toxins, and antibiotic resistance pork a! 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