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02 Dec 08

The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief - Michael Pollan - NYTimes.com

Excellent overview of the whys and hows of remaking our food system

www.nytimes.com/...12policy-t.html - Preview

The Vegetable-Industrial Complex

Our highly centralized food economy is a dangerously precarious system, vulnerable to accidental--and deliberate--contamination.

michaelpollan.com/article.php - Preview

sustainable agriculture pollan

Rather than clean up the kill floor and the feedlot diet, some meat processors simply started nuking the meat--sterilizing the manure, in other words, rather than removing it from our food.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that our food supply now sickens 76 million Americans every year, putting more than 300,000 of them in the hospital, and killing 5,000. The lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for this latest outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 1982; it is believed to have evolved in the gut of feedlot cattle.
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- Industrial animal agriculture produces more than a billion tons of manure every year
- when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution--the one where crops feed animals and animals' waste feeds crops--and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot.
- Food poisoning has always been with us, but not until we started processing all our food in such a small number of "kitchens" did the potential for nationwide outbreaks exist.
- Our highly centralized food economy is a dangerously precarious system, vulnerable to accidental--and deliberate--contamination.
- When Tommy Thompson retired from the Department of Health and Human Services in 2004, he said something chilling at his farewell news conference: "For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do."
- Today 80 percent of America's beef is slaughtered by four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk by just one company.
- the gravest threat now to local food economies--to the farmer selling me my spinach, to the rancher who sells me my grass-fed beef--is, of all things, the government's own well-intentioned efforts to clean up the industrial food supply.
- The industry insists that all regulations be "scale neutral,"
- Heavy burdens of regulation always fall heaviest on the smallest operations