Once again there is a food safety scare. A deadly strain of E coli bacterium has hit Germany, where it has so far taken the lives of 25 people and affected another 2,300. German food inspectors on the trail of the source of contamination first blamed Spanish cucumbers and are now indicting organic bean sprouts — eating healthy will soon be bad.
This is because food inspectors refuse to look where it matters. The fact is that something is seriously wrong with the way the world is producing food and even more with the way it is managing its regulations for safety. But we just don’t get it.
Let’s recap past food scares to understand the crisis and the response.
In 2005, avian influenza hit the chicken we eat. The world went on the rampage, killing chickens and wild birds to contain the deadly virus spreading across the connected world. But nobody targeted the real problem: the nature of the modern world’s poultry business, which is highly vertically integrated and globalised, and produces factory chickens, not food. In this business, companies strive for lower cost of production because agri-business requires scale and global reach.
It is widely accepted that chicken-manufacturing practices leave the birds susceptible to diseases and consumers vulnerable to mutated virus. This is an inconvenient truth.
So what did the world do? It went after the backyard poultry business. Vietnam, under pressure from international food inspectors, went as far as asking its people to convert to factory-style methods. Ironically, in the name of hygienic food, the world ended up promoting the very nature of the business that was bringing it shock and shame.
Also Read
Cut to 2009, when the next big food scare hit the world: Influenza A (H1N1) virus, formerly named swine flu. Across the developing world, pigs, important sources of food for the poor, were slaughtered. But mega hog factories, run by powerful food giants, were not indicted for their toxin-rich practices. The modern factory uses everything from antibiotics and hormones to biocides and vaccines to grow pigs in highly concentrated and unhealthy environments. The nature of the business was not questioned.
Worse, the food crisis allowed big business to further concentrate its hold over the lucrative pork. Family farms went out of business because of tightened safety regulations and cost of surveillance.
Now, in this case, instead of looking at the business of food, growing healthy food may be the target. How convenient!
The fact is that food has become a dangerous business. Just consider how a relatively controlled food scare over E coli, which is confined to the city of Hamburg, has hit farmers and shaken consumers across Europe. The reason is that food is no longer a local – or even national – business. It could be grown in one place, packed in another country, shipped to yet another nation for processing and then lifted to supermarket shelves across the globe. It is an anonymous business built to scale and is, therefore, profitable.
What’s worse, food regulations, designed for environmental safety and public health, end up promoting this fundamentally flawed and fatal model of growing food.
The focus of food regulations is on good manufacturing practices, which boil down to all that can be done to improve internal hygiene, like donning white coats and hair nets, scrubbing factory floors and using plastic in packaging. This regulation ends up driving out small producers and local food vendors. They cannot keep up with the cost of meeting tougher standards and, more importantly, the cost of inspectors, and now certification.
How, then, should it work? Cheap, mass-produced food, which forces farmers to cut corners and use intensive practices to be competitive, cannot be the way to secure our health. Securing health requires food regulators to see food as food, not business. It will mean drawing guidelines, which will incentivise food by small producers, grown naturally and locally. It also means we must be willing to pay more for food as consumers — or to subsidise farmers for growing healthy and safe food.
This recognition is growing perhaps for the first time even in the US, the mecca of the food business. In a recent article in Science, leading academics have argued that the US must transform its agriculture, which has become environmentally and socially destructive. But it can do this only by transforming policies, particularly those that reward the consolidated agro-food industry’s thrust for large volumes of low-cost food, feed, fibre and fuel. This requires going back to the drawing board to invest once again in knowledge systems for agriculture that are driven by public interest and public funds.
I write this knowing well that we in India are succumbing to the definition of food that sells us the idea of modern lifestyle, which must begin by discarding the culture of locally grown, home-cooked and seasonal food. This is not accidental; this is a deliberate strategy to seduce us to be part of the food business that compromises our health for profit.