As a special treat, we’re giving you a sneak peak at a feature from our upcoming January/February issue of the Washington Monthly magazine. The remainder of the articles should be available to you on Monday morning, and we have a lot of good stuff so stay tuned. Our policy editor Anne Kim’s piece looks at how the massive consolidation in the food industry over the last few decades has had the unfortunate side effect of greatly increasingly our vulnerability to multistate outbreaks of food-borne illnesses.
Here’s a shocking set of statistics from her article:
In 1969, according to a study by a group of CDC researchers led by Jeremy Sobel, the nation’s eggs were produced by 470,832 layer-hen farms with an average of 632 hens per farm. By 1992, the number of farms had dropped by 85 percent, while the average number of hens per farm increased by 470 percent, to nearly 3,000 hens per flock. Today, according to the American Egg Board, approximately sixty-three companies—each with flocks of one million hens or more—produce roughly 86 percent of the nation’s eggs. Seventeen of these companies, says the American Egg Board, have flocks of five million hens or more.
I looked at those stats for a long time, just trying to soak in their full meaning. I’ve rarely seen such staggering numbers related to something as familiar as going to the store and buying a dozen eggs. I was particularly amazed at the change just since 1992. We’ve gone from farms with 3,000-hen flocks (which was already a 470% increase over 1969) to farms will one million or five million-hen flocks.
Basically the same thing has happened with our pork and beef supply, and you probably don’t even want to talk about bagged lettuce.
Sick leaves: The Nunes Company, which owns the Foxy brand, voluntarily recalled 8,500 crates of its lettuce after water samples tested positive for E. coli bacteria.
Is it any wonder that we’re more susceptible to food-borne illnesses or that these flocks and herds need huge amounts of antibiotics to protect them?
You’ll definitely want to read the whole thing to find out how to protect yourself and to get some ideas on how we can do a better job of both protecting the food supply and producing the food we need.
The consequence, at the very simplest, is that any disease in one of these massive operations has a massive effect. Avian influenza, which was a serious problem in 2015 in turkeys, leads to a simple solution: the entire flock is killed. I have no idea why they simply cannot vaccinate, probably a cost deal, although I am also aware that influenza is a slippery virus and vaccination for one strain does not help with others. It is also unclear how the virus gets into the houses for these large flocks, which are increasingly using highly controlling methods for access (wearing sterile outer garments, boot covers, etc). They also employ the antibiotics, which do nothing for viruses.
This is an area where someone could really improve things by finding a solution. Should the entire flock go if the animals get influenza? Can’t some kind of isolation be used to reduce transmission?
Good points. Air can be filtered. But presently, feed and water is not sterile, which might be the virus source. One solution would be to heat/radiate the feed and incoming water. Don’t know if this is being tried.
Air can be filtered, but I doubt that it is. Influenza is often transmitted by air.
The economic consequences of avian influenza are big. It costs money to kill 100,000 turkeys, and there is the entire investment gone, plus the unrealized profit. Millions of dollars. There has got to be a better approach than killing the entire flock.
Shipping them to China?
Can’t turn back the clock. Orange groves, strawberry fields, dairy farms, and chicken/egg ranches were part of the SoCal suburban landscape through the 1960s. All gone to make way for growing more and more houses and roads. Diverse agricultural communities such as what once existed on Sonoma County have given way grapes and wineries.
Expect that soon enough, few people will even recognize a head of lettuce for what it is.
I knew a few that thought chickens were four-legged.
A lot of the local food sources we once had have been impacted by this. Small farms can’t compete anymore. Everything we eat is trucked in from hundreds or thousands of miles away.
spink
For the most part, this is a case where it is virtually impossible to un-ring the bell. And we are left to simply try and treat the symptoms as best we can, without exacerbating the inherent shortcomings and health risks which have essentially been baked into the cake of our food supply network. We have become conditioned to the ease of access, consistently lower prices (generally speaking) and the belief that we really are truly protected, which in many cases we are not. I pay close attention to the issues surrounding food. I am a long-time foodie who has striven, for years, to support our small, local farmers as much as possible. But I am fortunate, by virtue of my location and partly by my economic circumstances, to be able to mitigate, to some degree, my exposure to a lot of these mass produced foods. But probably 95% of people are not so fortunate, and are forced to obtain their sustenance from a supermarket overflowing with food grown, transported and supplied in the manner which is described in the Washington Monthly article. People don’t realize just exactly what they inherent risks are when they are buying food. And it is very difficult for anyone to find out, unless they have the luxury of time to regularly investigate it. We never really think twice about the potential risk to our health when we tear open that new package of baby spinach.
I find it an interesting dichotomy, our different responses to risks from things like our food as compared to the collective national freak-out we had over what is a virtually non-existent risk from those immigrant Syrian families. Food has such a higher potential for widespread harm, yet you don’t see or hear anyone shouting that from the rooftops or standing in the well of the House demanding that we do more to increase food safety and highlighting the inherent dangers of the mass production environment in which almost all of our food is generated.
This really is one of the most underreported stories out there. The only time it gets any air play is when there is an outbreak. And it seems like the blame is always laid at the feet of a single facility, or an oversight in a process somewhere. Or we point the finger at the fact that it was “Grown in Mexico”. And then it falls from the radar screen once everyone has recovered from their illnesses and the dead have been buried. And then we go mindlessly back into our shell of denial. We never consider the fact that the entire endeavor in this country of supplying food is inherently flawed, and that the outbreaks and illnesses are simply canaries in the coal mine; an indication of what the future might hold for the safety of our food supply.
Long-distance transport and mass-production economies of scale make food cheap (in multiple senses). What happens when transportation costs and climate change undoes the agribusiness scale enterprises?
In this area, there are local farmers markets and young couples and families who were locked out of the job market turned to supplementing their pieced-together job schedules with raising local produce for local restaurants and weekly or semi-weekly farmers markets. There are even some groceries and co-ops that buy from small local farmers on a regular enough basis.
It has also gotten some people to experiment with what they can now raise because of the threats from monoculture mass-produced crops. I expect that local asparagus and celery in season will make up for the fact that California celery has been absent from our stores for most of this year. Even the non-organic kind has had outages.
Some other people are beginning to look at what they can grow instead of fescue and ryegrass on their lawns. And local municipalities have loosened their regulations to allow for raising hens for eggs (no roosters). And there are still small abattoirs if you raise a few animals in the near-exurban countryside or on hobby farms.
The artisan beer and wine industry and its agricultural suppliers will be competing for land with produce crops. But there is more former tobacco (and cotton) land becoming available as the next generation retires and the kids don’t want to take over the farm because of their jobs. And there is a market for leasing and operating farmland on property on which the kids just want to keep the homeplace. The Great Recession sort of cooled the jets for raising housing developments as a way of monetizing the farm legacy.
The gigantic economies of scale depend entirely on fossil fuels and global transportation. This is the end of that era. A lot of folks just haven’t realized it yet. And that failure to wake up will likely make the coming shock much worse.
We already have shifted to less mass-produced and long-traveled food. Still not yet enough. It is difficult to figure out until there is base market of enough other people who are doing the same to create new local institutions.
I’m waiting for the price of lab grown meat to come down. That’ll definitely help with climate change too
Mmmmm! I LIKE Chicken Little!
Limited arable land and potable water is simply a condition that provides improved profits as we continue to burn our planet down so that some of us can have a plot of land, a television, internet, and perhaps a pool.
I mean, I could focus on the saplings of “mass-produced food”, “climate change”, “toxic air and water”, etc., but all of them are simply saplings that prevent people from seeing that the forest of “capitalism” is the main problem that produces all of these supply and demand issues. Because that’s what “mass-produced food” is. A supply/demand issue. It allows for enough of a supply to satisfy demand of 7+ billion human beings.
Striving for infinite growth on a finite planet is how the human race kills itself off.
Thank You
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