[SustainableTompkins] Important Michael Pollan article

[Tony Del Plato]

>The Way We Live Now
>Our Decrepit Food Factories
>By MICHAEL POLLAN
>
>The word "sustainability" has gotten such a workout lately that the
>whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of
>inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever "it" means.
>On a recent visit to a land-grant university's spanking-new
>sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school's
>faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out
>asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that
>rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice
>surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in
>agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of
>endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability?
>When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the
>term, you have to wonder if we haven't succeeded in defining
>sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if
>it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like
>"natural" or "green" or "nice."
>
>Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the
>world, we had best start with the "rectification of the names." The
>corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their
>proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the
>reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what
>about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?
>
>To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an
>objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of
>environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or
>process can't go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very
>conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used
>to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will
>lead to a breakdown.
>
>For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial
>agriculture as "unsustainable" in precisely these terms, though what
>form the "breakdown" might take or when it might happen has never
>been certain. Would the aquifers run dry? The pesticides stop
>working? The soil lose its fertility? All these breakdowns have been
>predicted and they may yet come to pass. But if a system is
>unsustainable - if its workings offend the rules of nature - the
>cracks and signs of breakdown may show up in the most unexpected
>times and places. Two stories in the news this year, stories that on
>their faces would seem to have nothing to do with each other let
>alone with agriculture, may point to an imminent breakdown in the way
>we're growing food today.
>
>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. For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been
>a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create
>resistant strains of bacteria. It's Evolution 101: the drugs kill off
>all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance
>mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught;
>these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant
>superrace. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in
>hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly
>patients. But a new and even more virulent strain - called
>"community-acquired MRSA" - 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.
>
>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. A European study found that 60 percent of pig
>farms that routinely used antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs
>(compared with 5 percent of farms that did not feed pigs
>antibiotics). This month, the Centers for Disease Control and
>Prevention published a study showing that a strain of "MRSA from an
>animal reservoir has recently entered the human population and is now
>responsible for [more than] 20 percent of all MRSA in the
>Netherlands." Is this strictly a European problem? Evidently not.
>According to a study in Veterinary Microbiology, MRSA was found on 45
>percent of the 20 pig farms sampled in Ontario, and in 20 percent of
>the pig farmers. (People can harbor the bacteria without being
>infected by it.) Thanks to Nafta, pigs move freely between Canada and
>the United States. So MRSA may be present on American pig farms; we
>just haven't looked yet.
>
>Scientists have not established that any of the strains of MRSA
>presently killing Americans originated on factory farms. But given
>the rising public alarm about MRSA and the widespread use on these
>farms of precisely the class of antibiotics to which these microbes
>have acquired resistance, you would think our public-health
>authorities would be all over it. Apparently not. When, in August,
>the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition asked the Food and Drug
>Administration what the agency was doing about the problem of MRSA in
>livestock, the agency had little to say. Earlier this month, though,
>the F.D.A. indicated that it may begin a pilot screening program with
>the C.D.C.
>
>As for independent public-health researchers, they say they can't
>study the problem without the cooperation of the livestock industry,
>which, not surprisingly, has not been forthcoming. For what if these
>researchers should find 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. This is not something that the meat and the pharmaceutical
>industries or their respective regulatory "watchdogs" - the
>Department of Agriculture and F.D.A. - are in any rush to see happen.
>
>he second story is about honeybees, which have endured their own
>mysterious epidemic this past year. Colony Collapse Disorder was
>first identified in 2006, when a Pennsylvanian beekeeper noticed that
>his bees were disappearing - going out on foraging expeditions in the
>morning never to return. Within months, beekeepers in 24 states were
>reporting losses of between 20 percent and 80 percent of their bees,
>in some cases virtually overnight. Entomologists have yet to identify
>the culprit, but suspects include a virus, agricultural pesticides
>and a parasitic mite. (Media reports that genetically modified crops
>or cellphone towers might be responsible have been discounted.) But
>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.
>
>You need look no farther than a California almond orchard to
>understand how these bees, which have become indispensable workers in
>the vast fields of industrial agriculture, could have gotten into
>such trouble. Like a great many other food crops, like an estimated
>one out of every three bites you eat, the almond depends on bees for
>pollination. No bees, no almonds. The problem is that almonds today
>are grown in such vast monocultures - 80 percent of the world's crop
>comes from a 600,000-acre swath of orchard in California's Central
>Valley - that, when the trees come into bloom for three weeks every
>February, there are simply not enough bees in the valley to pollinate
>all those flowers. For what bee would hang around an orchard where
>there's absolutely nothing to eat for the 49 weeks of the year that
>the almond trees aren't in bloom? So every February the almond
>growers must import an army of migrant honeybees to the Central
>Valley - more than a million hives housing as many as 40 billion bees
>in all.
>
>They come on the backs of tractor-trailers from as far away as New
>England. These days, more than half of all the beehives in America
>are on the move to California every February, for what has been
>called the world's greatest "pollination event." (Be there!) Bees
>that have been dormant in the depths of a Minnesota winter are woken
>up to go to work in the California spring; to get them in shape to
>travel cross-country and wade into the vast orgy of almond bloom,
>their keepers ply them with "pollen patties" - which often include
>ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and flower pollen imported
>from China. Because the pollination is so critical and the bee
>population so depleted, almond growers will pay up to $150 to rent a
>box of bees for three weeks, creating a multimillion-dollar industry
>of migrant beekeeping that barely existed a few decades ago.
>Thirty-five years ago you could rent a box of bees for $10. (Pimping
>bees is the whole of the almond business for these beekeepers since
>almond honey is so bitter as to be worthless.)
>
>In 2005 the demand for honeybees in California had so far outstripped
>supply that the U.S.D.A. approved the importation of bees from
>Australia. These bees get off a 747 at SFO and travel by truck to the
>Central Valley, where they get to work pollinating almond flowers -
>and mingling with bees arriving from every corner of America. As one
>beekeeper put it to Singeli Agnew in The San Francisco Chronicle,
>California's almond orchards have become "one big brothel" - a place
>where each February bees swap microbes and parasites from all over
>the country and the world before returning home bearing whatever
>pathogens they may have picked up. Add to this their routine exposure
>to agricultural pesticides and you have a bee population ripe for an
>epidemic national in scope. In October, the journal Science published
>a study that implicated a virus (Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus) in
>Colony Collapse Disorder - a virus that was found in some of the bees
>from Australia. (The following month, the U.S.D.A. questioned the
>study, pointing out that the virus was present in North America as
>early as 2002.)
>
>"We're placing so many demands on bees we're forgetting that they're
>a living organism and that they have a seasonal life cycle," Marla
>Spivak, a honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota, told
>The Chronicle. "We're wanting them to function as a machine. . . .
>We're expecting them to get off the truck and be fine."
>
>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.
>
>Michael Pollan is a contributing writer. His new book, "In Defense of
>Food: An Eater's Manifesto," will be published next month.

-- 
May the conscience and the common sense of the peoples be awakened, so that
we may reach a new stage in the life of nations, where people will look back
on war as an incomprehensible aberration of their forefathers!
Albert Einstein