December 16, 2007

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
<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/nutrition/pesticides/overview.html?
inline=nyt-classifier>  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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics
/antibiotics/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> -resistant strain of
Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than
AIDS
<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/aids/overview.html?inline=n
yt-classifier>  - 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005,
according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/america
n_medical_association/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  Association. For years
now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics
/hospitals/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> , where the heavy use of
antibiotics can create resistant strains
<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/injury/strains/overview.html?inline
=nyt-classifier>  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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/union_o
f_concerned_scientists/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  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
<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/travelers-guide-to-avo
iding-infectious-diseases/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>  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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics
/drugspharmaceuticals/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> , 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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/centers
_for_disease_control_and_prevention/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/food_an
d_drug_administration/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  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
<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/symptoms/muscle-function-loss/overv
iew.html?inline=nyt-classifier>  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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/univers
ity_of_minnesota/index.html?inline=nyt-org> , 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.

 


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