Meatconomy

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.

There is a ton of really interesting content being generated about swine flu. Some of it is being heavily reported and commented on, while other bits are seemingly slipping through the cracks.

One piece on Bloomberg that I found really fascinating concerns Obama’s recent visit to Mexico and his encounter with Felipe Solis on April 16, a distinguished archeologist. According to Bloomberg, Solis died the following day from symptoms consistent with the flu, prompting some speculation that it may have been swine flue. An Artdaily.org obit that I came across tells a slightly different story with different dates as well. In their piece it states that Solis died on April 23rd from cardiac arrest. Other accounts indicate pneumonia…A few blog posts have popped up in the last two days and here is one.

The conspiracy theory blog, prison planet has a number of interesting links, including one describing a FEMA Interagency Influenza Pandemic Exercise held in Houston, TX on April 14-15 and a few comments discussing the links between global flu pandemics and moves towards global governance.

There is of course an irony  for me in this Mexico story in that I study pigs (as in swine) and heritage (as in archeology and anthropology). Given that some accounts of the emergence of swine flu trace it to a subsidiary of Smithfield, the issue of pig breeds and biosecurity in agricultural production is critical as are the concerns over breed standardization that are diminishing the genetic pool from which livestock pigs are constituted.

I’m currently doing some research on the history and emergence of pork bellies. Today it took a bit of an odd turn when I discovered that the Merc ran a series of ads in Playboy attempting to attract traders to their newly established pork belly pit…so far this project has taken me from BLTs to futures contracts and now quite literally to porn.

Without wagging my finger and saying I told you so, I want to draw attention to James McWilliams’ response to the firestorm of critiques that have been leveled against him. Much as I have suggested, he states that his agenda was not to debunk completely the project of sustainable agriculture, but rather to ask difficult questions about the easy orthodoxies that we fall upon when we argue for sustainable agriculture. 

Without  getting into a rant about the way in which science is getting framed in these discussions I’ll just say that I’m happy that my grad school training is paying off, at least in terms of helping me think about these issues. Maybe another time I’ll share thoughts on the applicability of science studies to pigs, meat and disease.

Ok, so this the text of a response that I posted over on Honest Meat. I think this is an important dialogue to be having right now, but as is pretty clear I have some big concerns with the tone of the debate and the particular rhetorical tactics being used.

Ok, to start off I will say that I too am dismayed at the potential conflict of interest that the NYTimes obviously didn’t consider or acknowledge in an ethical way. Also, I very much am NOT a supporter of CAFO style production. I like my pasture raised meat and am generally confident that in both the long and short run it is healthier and safer for me.

However I want to raise a few concerns both about the tone of your argument and some of slippages that I think are very problematic in terms of trying to understand what is going on.

First, it is completely unnecessary to attack the author because he is a professor at some “no name” university. To suggest that institutional affiliation is a prerequisite to be considering knowledgeable about something is not only insulting, but also completely fails to account for the complex realities both of academia and what counts for currency in the profession of being a researcher but also the reality of the author. Maybe he likes where he lives, has built a life for himself and doesn’t feel like pursing the supposed holy grail of an R1 research job or teaching post in the Ivies. It is actually possible and such ad hominem attacks just introduce an element of maliciousness into an otherwise fairly well argued post. Just as an aside, Prof. McWilliams is a fellow at the Yale Agrarian Studies programs, which is not only a very prestigious place, but also not particularly known for being beholden to big corporate interests. So perhaps we should be a bit less accusatory or suspicious and take a measured step back to think about what is going on here…

In terms of your argument I just want to point out a few points. First, McWilliams is entirely correct that concern about disease has and is a major concern for pork producers. A cursory examination of the major pork trade publications over the last 50 years attest to the incredible persistence of infectious disease within livestock production and the very significant toll both on animals and people that has resulted. Richard Horowitz does a really good job of tracing this tale in his book Hog Ties which I highly recommend. I would argue that in large part the move to confine hogs should be thought of as resulting both from the political economy of agriculture (i.e. the monetary success of the vertical integration of the chicken industry but also the very real advantages for large producers) but also as a result of the difficulties and challenges of dealing with animal disease. At least in some parts of the country (I’m thinking of Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, etc.) the high number of animals certainly led to reoccurring disease outbreaks. At the time, confinement allowed for easier treatment and containment. Of course, you are entirely right that containment has now produced an entirely different set of problems. In many ways, containment has reproduced many of the original problems, but in a form that is much more difficult (and costly) to deal with. With intensive biosecurity as one of the only reasonable approaches to managing disease we should not be surprised to see some very scary and devastating livestock disease outbreaks in the future unless we change our approach.

In terms of the actual terms of the research being discussed, you make some very good points about the reductionist way in which the “science” is being presented. Again, one of the interesting things one notices reading trade publications is how producers tout the “high-health” of their herds. In Hog Ties, Horowitz has a really good discussion of how high-health essentially means low exposure and thus high susceptibility. In other words, the animals are healthy because they haven’t been exposed to anything, but they’re health is so dependent upon medication that they have very low immunity. Seropositive status is an indicator of exposure as you point out, and in fact is generally GOOD. It means that the animal has been exposed, survived, and is thus likely to be better able to fend off future exposure. McWilliams glosses over this completely and he should be called out for it.

At the same time I’d suggest that you’re on very slippery territory critiquing McWilliams for being a historian examining agriculture and science, while at the same time privileging ecology or other types of science. To be sure, it may be the case that McWilliams has very little practical experience in agriculture which caused him to make some of these category errors in his argument. At the same time, to suggest that certain types of science, or science done at certain institutions (more prestigious than a “no-name school” like Texas State falls into a big trap. After all, so much of the “science” that is used to bolster big-ag comes out of well known and very reputable schools and the funding is very much tied to industry in those cases as well. It would be a much better argument to point out that science is always messy, that funding dollars ALWAYS play a role, and that there is always a politics involved in decision about interpreting research findings, etc. In fact, it has been largely research produced by those in the “soft” sciences, sociology, history, anthropology, geography, etc. which has put forth some of the most vehement critiques of big science. One needs to look no further than Michael Pollan’s chapter on corn people in The Omnivore’s Dilemma where he borrows (without citation I might note) so heavily from Bruno Latour’s work on science.

So where does that leave us in terms of thinking about how to respond to this article. For one, maybe there is an element of truth to it. After all, as you point out, there is a wide range of practices  being used by non-CAFO pork producers, not all of whom are as rigorous as you in taking steps to reduce or mitigate exposure. Second we do have to take seriously the issue of affordability that lies beneath the surface here. The $12/lb. issue NEEDS to be addressed and thought about. The posting a few weeks back on Ethicurian which addressed this received equally misguided ad hominem attacks suggesting that those of us active in the alternative food world perhaps need to be a little less reactionary in terms of how we deal with critique. We seem to be able to dish it out very well and our critiques have certainly moved the public consciousness a bit, but perhaps we should be more reflexive. We absolutely need to recognize that falling back on easy categories or terms which supposedly represent stable categories (local, sustainable, etc.) is not in our best interest long term. Sure we may get some converts (and zealots), but we will then be stuck trying to patrol the boundaries of our categories against debate like this. The us versus them attitudes only polarize and exclude. This exclusion is manifest not only in terms of the dogmatic and ad hominem responses to criticism, but also in to economic (and thus by proxy racial, gendered and class) exclusion. It leads to moralizing which while well meaning easily slips into authoritarian proclamation and dismissively judgmental advice. We do need “better” science about the relationship between management systems and animal/human disease and well being. Just like we need better science about what is really brewing in the CAFOs.