From food safety to bicycles

There is an interesting article today in the NYTimes about food safety. It is a fairly straightforward discussion of the various risks endemic to our modern food system (raw milk causing paralysis, botchulism in factory produced chilli dogs, e. coli in salad mix, etc.). What I find frustrating about the article is in particular a parenthetical stating that “Swine flu, despite its name is not contracted from food.” I actually have no problem with that statemet. It’s actually 100% true. What is troubling is the context. The authors insert the comment between discussions of processed food inspection and the data on food safety outbreaks but the effect is to suggest that “agricultural” production and “food” production are somehow different.

This is technically more true than false, at least in the US. With inspections divided between the USDA and FDA the effect is that food safety and agricultural safety are considered as seperate issues within the policy world. Solutions to food safety are couched largely in terms which reinforce many of the underlying causes. Namely, they are technological. Irradiate, surveil, track, etc. This approach fails to recognize that many of the underlying causes of un-safe food emerge from the economics of agricultural production itself. The production of poor quality ingrediants, or ingriedients produced at massive scales that not only amplify biological contamination but also preclude inspection is largely what allows for a processed food economy to exist. An agricultural system which generates incentives to maximize efficiency and generates opportunities to do so by providing a vast reserve of cheap and unprotected labor is almost logically predesposed to generating contamination. Of course technology like irradiation does work but it does so in ways that generate the most economic advantage for he very producers who generate high-risk products.

The raw milk issues is a bit different and I admit that I am neither a raw milk drinker nor someone who really knows all that much about the history of milk production (see this book for a great examination of milk). However, the comments to the article seem to fall in to two camps around milk and the article itself seems to argue that the safety of milk can be simply explained by the presence or absence of pasturization. Similarly the proponents of raw milk seem to suggest that what makes it healthy and safe is it’s “rawness.” Both of these arguments seem to ignore most of the critical issues, namely that milk has to travel through a number of hands and that health and safety are largely going to be determined by what happens along the way. So raw milk is probably not going to be very safe or healthy if it is shipped long distances, or mixed in with other batches of milk. The knowledge of the effects of pasturization actually paradoxically probably made drinking raw milk safer. Once it became clear that milk-induced sickness was caused by things (bacteria, toxins, etc.) people could begin examining how they were produced. The work of the cheese nun / microbiologist comes to mind here in terms of the synergestic effects of bacterial colonies and the seemingly paradoxicaly outcome that producing certain cheese in “clean” stainless environments actually caused outbreaks of “bad” bacteria.

In any case, the debates that are playing out in the comments section are very similar to the debates that occured following the McWilliams article on free-range pigs. People who support pasture-raised meat and the local food movement more broadly generally seem to argue that a particlar scale of production (local) or a particular technique (organic) is necessarily better. People who oppose such arguments and instead advocate for techno-industrial agriculture similarly argue that the application of advances in scientific knowledge in the form of new technology is inherrantly the best approach. Both “sides” take a problem (food safety or hunger or whatever) and explain the sollution to lie in one easily encapsulated concept. This sort of reductionism is of course an artifact of a particular information environment as well as a political climate where the soundbite dominates (although this is waaay to simple an explanaion) but the effect of such an approach is to polarize, politicize and otherwise fail to explain anything. What’s the sollution? Well, I’m not sure. The capacity and willingness of people to engaging in complex reasoning seems pretty limited. Linear, reductionist thinking is a norm embedded in a wide range of social and technical processes. My own personal approach is to engage in activities where the complexity of the world is amplified and not erased. By attempting to disrupt the categories that I hold on to I feel that I’m able to think a bit differently. I don’t know if it makes me more effective but I feel that it makes me more modest and more humble about my ability to figure the world out. Things like gardening or riding a bike in the city achieve this for me. Because biking in Chicago is generally so unpleasant I’m forced to reflect upon how the city has been put together in particular ways and how our ability to think it shaped by this. It’s funny because this is exactly what I wrote my application essay for grad school about (for my Masters in Urban Planning). It’s still true.