| World Vegan News | December 29 2007 |
The Sunday New York Times Magazine this week, published December 16, includes a piece by Michael Pollan in the "The Way We Live Now" section. It is headed "Our Decrepit Food Factories." (Pg 25)
Pollan discusses the loss of meaning around the trendy word "sustainability," to the point where "pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term."
He tells us that two stories, "may point to an imminent breakdown in the way we're growing food today."
He writes:
"The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS -- 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association...."
He tells us of a new, virulent strain called 'community-acquired MRSA,' which "is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO."
He continues:
"The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least 70 percent of the antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on factory farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases. That the antibiotics speed up the animals' growth also commends their use to industrial agriculture, but the crucial fact is that without these pharmaceuticals, meat production practiced on the scale and with the intensity we practice it could not be sustained for months, let alone decades.
"Public-health experts have been warning us for years that this situation is a public-health disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later, the profligate use of these antibiotics -- in many cases the very same ones we depend on when we're sick -- would lead to the evolution of bacteria that could shake them off like a spring shower. It appears that 'sooner or later' may be now. Recent studies in Europe and Canada found that confinement pig operations have become reservoirs of MRSA."
Pollan suggests that if researchers should find definitive proof that one of the hidden costs of cheap meat is an epidemic of drug-resistant infection among young people, "There would be calls to revolutionize the way we produce meat in this country."
Pollan's second story is "about honeybees, which have endured their own mysterious epidemic this past year." It is called Colony Collapse Disorder, and it threatens a whole agricultural system that relies on pollination from bees. We read, "Entomologists have yet to identify the culprit, but suspects include a virus, agricultural pesticides and a parasitic mite." Pollan writes, "whatever turns out to be the immediate cause of colony collapse, many entomologists believe some such disaster was waiting to happen: the lifestyle of the modern honeybee leaves the insects so stressed out and their immune systems so compromised that, much like livestock on factory farms, they've become vulnerable to whatever new infectious agent happens to come along."
We read of bees being trucked all over the country, and of the stress and the parasite transfer that results.
Pollan sums up with:
"We're asking a lot of our bees. We're asking a lot of our pigs too. That seems to be a hallmark of industrial agriculture: to maximize production and keep food as cheap as possible, it pushes natural systems and organisms to their limit, asking them to function as efficiently as machines. When the inevitable problems crop up -- when bees or pigs remind us they are not machines -- the system can be ingenious in finding 'solutions,' whether in the form of antibiotics to keep pigs healthy or foreign bees to help pollinate the almonds. But this year's solutions have a way of becoming next year's problems. That is to say, they aren't 'sustainable.'
"From this perspective, the story of Colony Collapse Disorder and the story of drug-resistant staph are the same story. Both are parables about the precariousness of monocultures. Whenever we try to rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory, whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience. The question is not whether systems this brittle will break down, but when and how, and whether when they do, we'll be prepared to treat the whole idea of sustainability as something more than a nice word."
You'll find the whole article on line at New York Times.
While it clearly states that our treatment of living beings as machines is behind the crises, it tells us little about that treatment. It therefore opens the door for letters to the editor detailing the suffering on factory farms. www.FactoryFarming.com is a great source of information. The Magazine Section runs many letters each week, and they are widely read, so why not write on behalf of the animals? The Sunday New York Times Magazine takes letters at magazine@nytimes.com.
Always include your full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Remember that shorter letters are more likely to be published. And please be sure not to use any exact comments or phrases from me or from any other alerts in your letters. Editors are looking for original responses from their readers.
Yours and the animals',
Karen Dawn.
(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. You may forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts if you do so unedited -- leave DawnWatch in the title and include this parenthesized tag line. If somebody forwards DawnWatch alerts to you, which you enjoy, please help the list grow by signing up. It is free.)
